May 2006

May 1st and Beltane

It's Beltane, one of the old Celtic Festivals. It's also a Cross-quarter day. This means it is midpoint in the Sun's progress between the Vernal Equinox and Summer Solstice. Astronomically this occurs around 5th May. Ancient tradition sets 1st May as the first day of summer. In case you think my knowledge is impressive, I looked it all up here a few minutes ago.

I'm a bit long in the tooth to be up before dawn and washing my face in the morning dew - but that's one of our ancient English traditions and is perhaps why we all have such wonderful skin - or maybe why we used to, because these days morning dew is hard to come by with your garden wall-to-wall in concrete or wooden decking.

Down the road in Padstow early this morning, you could have taken part in the 'Obby Oss Celebration, which is incredibly old. For a rendition of the famous Maysong, click here. Those with acute hearing can pick up the Cornish accent in the singing. The website is fun and I particularly enjoyed this line for its not very carefully concealed agenda:

After the Oss's are stabled until the following year, the musicians and dancers attend some of the inns.

I have not attended any inns recently and thus have been sufficiently upright to do more clamping work, as I have no more stock.

Looks rather like a wartime line-up on an airfield but actually it's my set of clamped scarves before dye-off. The ones in the metal G Cramps are square-folded with a horizontal clamp; the others in plastic pincers have a triangular fold and horizontal clamp. The odd-one-out is concertina-folded and dental-tape bound because I ran out of blocks and clamps. On the right is one of the square-folded pieces being carefully unwrapped.

Happy Beltane all.

May 2nd - 4th

25 twisted scarves dyed and steamed; 12 clamped scarves similar. Lettuces planted, slug-destruct ordnance in place; parsley germinated despite feline toilet habits (yay - I'll polish up the old broomstick). More anon.

May 5th

Some thoughts on information which probably start with this April entry.

I have missed ever seeing Taxi Driver, probably because I have always hated cinemas and cigarette smoke and when it came out in 1976 one could still smoke in cinemas here. As I was busy working and also having a baby in a major European heatwave, 30 years didn't seem such a long time to wait to see a violent film about under-age prostitution.

To rectify this omission we watched it at home the other night and I found it an extraordinarily powerful film. But I was aware that on the small screen I missed reading / understanding some important information, such as the wording on the letter and the envelope Travis fills with money. I had no idea what he was doing - that it was for Iris - without reading what I couldn't see. So I searched the net and found this site. I found the explanation I had been looking for and a whole lot more besides, such as what and who had influenced the making of the film. I also came across snippets of reviewer commentary and wondered whether it was personal speculation, interpretation, or actually based on the original screenplay. For instance, when Travis shoots Sport, there is a bracketed remark that Travis' act of violent insanity is symbolic of the Vietnam War. It may well be, but this was not articulated in dialogue.

We happened to have a copy of The Searchers, a 1956 film that influenced the making of Taxi Driver. Again, I wanted to clarify some scenes after watching it and found this site. Very useful for a fuller understanding, and including some statements of what this or that signified, but not directly backed up by scenes or dialogue. I am intrigued by the way in which facts and interpretations can enhance, alter or even detract from what one experiences via a piece of creative art.

Yesterday I put on Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones while I was working in the studio. A song from this album, called René and Georgette Magritte with their Dog after the War has always puzzled me. Strange words, surreal (!) feel and imagery but a sense that there is real solidity behind the words. I have listened to it countless times in the past 20 years. I had a shape in my head for the song and its lyrics, almost an internal film of images and imagery which ran as I listened.

Nevertheless Tireless Google was consulted and came up with this Bill Flanagan interview with Paul Simon, in which the song lyrics are taken apart and analysed (scroll to the end of the article for this part). At the end of the interview Paul Simon does say that this song developed a life and energy of its own which could mean different things to different people. My point in this preamble is that since reading the interview, I have altered the song for myself. The mental film won't play the same way. So is it the same song? Of course it is. But again, no it isn't. So where does it exist?

I suppose, in the heads of anyone that listens.

May 6th -8th

May is always an amazing month in the English countryside but this year seems more intensely beautiful. Or, I wonder, do we notice and appreciate it more as we grow older, because that's one less we'll see? Nothing if not cheerful, me! This year a late Spring arrived with a great burst of energy a fortnight or so ago, and we now have a million shades of green, birdsong at its peak; wildflowers on the lanes, lambs in the fields, swallows nesting etc. And a wonderful light, sometimes offering misty layers of receding pale landscape like a theatre set - and at others the intense, sharp, damp-air clarity of a Stanley Spencer pot-boiler painting•. If you don't live in Devon, I feel quite sorry for you.

View from Torrington, May 9th

But I am also watching the days tick by. I have some end-of-May teaching, and June / July exhibiting events creeping up on me, and must get on with some more of the core work as I am not a last-minute person when it comes to more innovative work. I need time to make a big mess and start again without recourse to a large chainsaw and a bottle of absinthe. So today marks the start of the next phase and I am going to do one or two larger freer scarf shapes for fun but using some of the new ideas I had in Malta last month looking at cornfields. I want to see what the shapes and textures do.

These ears of grass came from the roadside in Malta. I'm not sure what they are.

May 9th

Back to Life Class on Monday night and the four week break I've had without life drawing was immediately apparent to me, not helped by the fact that I couldn't find charcoal before I went, and that I also need new glasses. My sight is deteriorating and although I can see the model without glasses, I need them to see the paper. I have a pairof half glasses that I peer over for the model, and then through for the drawing. Sometimes, recently, it hasn't felt a comfortable experience and makes me feel oddly detached from what I am doing. I wonder how it affects my drawing - perhaps the new specs will help. They are ready to be collected. When considering what they cost, which is a lot (to pay for my new glasses I'd need to work for about three days) I remembered a talk I went to recently. The speaker regularly visits villages in Rajasthan where the women do very fine embroidery. Imaginatively, she takes pairs of simple magnifying specs bought at Boots (a major UK chemists' chain) because as they get older the women's sight deteriorates. She gives these to the villagers so they can continue to work. It isn't a big deal for her, but a hugely important gift for the women whose livelihood depends on their selling their work.

May 10th

I've done nearly three pieces on the wheatfield theme. It's getting there, wherever there is: I first need to balance the amount of white lines (horizontal in this image) with the other marks and achieve better-shaped marks as some of them are a bit sloppy, because the wax could be too hot. I turned up the heat because I have just lost a set of three scarves to The Fuzz: bleeding of dye into the edges of the wax shapes when it's basically too cold.

Here's a detail of one of the Wheatfields, which is still full of wax so the colour looks dull.

I saw a slow worm on my dog-walk today. I thought it was a grass snake, but I've just googled it and it definitely wasn't because the description mentions blue spots on the body. You can just see them here. Apparently slow worms also have eyelids (snakes don't) but I didn't get to see it blink. It's the second I've seen in a week, but I haven't seen one for many years before this. They are not venomous. We only have one poisonous snake in the UK - the adder.

May 11th

Crisis week for trousers. In one and the same week my denim jeans died and my favourite batik trousers went into steep decline with a tear appearing down the front leg crease. They are at least 14 years old so I can't complain. I bought them on Skye at Skye Batiks. This remarkable and unusual business venture was operating from Armadale when I lived on Skye but has since expanded to Portree and the mainland and you can now buy their products online. Read a press release here if you want to know more and can cope with their spelling Skye as Sky. And I think they mean a dyeing process, not a dying process. Sigh.

Read here for an interesting story of the tsunami and boats donated by the people of Skye.

The Escher-like Lizard design I bought (below) isn't made the same way now, probably because it wasted too much fabric. A version of it is still available, but the pattern is smaller, can be repeated more often, and so doesn't need to match up in the same way. What I love about my deteriorating trousers is the way the pattern has been matched at the seams producing the symmetrical effect. The new version just doesn't do it for me....

If you look carefully at the leg on the left at the knee you'll see a small black patch which I sewed on Bali in 1994 because the young son of our hosts (are you out there Tzou?? - yes, it was you and I still remember...) had been having fun with his new penknife chopping away at the underside of a table, leaving a massive and destructive splinter. It left a hole in my leg and in my trousers and on the whole I cared more about the trousers. I took the patch fabric from the pocket facing. Now, because the tear is serious, all I am left with is the possibility of sewing a pocket down and taking fabric from the trouser leg behind the pocket. This obsessive trouser chat will not seem over the top to anyone who loves a garment dearly and cannot replace it, ever. These were and still are major lifestyle-statement-attitude-filled iconic trousers...

May 12th - 15th

The weather has turned cooler but it hasn't stopped the hedgerows growing.

May 16th - 17th

In possession of my new glasses and my relocated charcoal I went off to Life Class again on Monday. One result is below. There's something not quite right about the way the head works; the arms / hands don't relate properly where they cross and the elbows don't engage heavily onto the knee. The black background was an impulsive last-minute thing and is why I quite like this drawing despite all that's definitely amiss with it. Perhaps because it echoes the slightly tense/ intense pose.

I think my new glasses are making life better. I still have to collect the new pair to use with the computer and so am in the interregnum period using whatever old pair happens to be around. This is not doing me any good at all and I have a lot of headaches.

Twenty-minute study. Charcoal on paper

A sympathetic friend read my post about the trousers (last entry) and sent commiserations and a link to a website selling clothes she thought I'd like. She's right, I do. Thank you Fiona. Today I must start thinking about the course I am teaching at Denman College on Monday. Preparation always takes a long time and is best done without rushing. I am also working on some new things - moving on and around the Wheatfields pieces I did last week. I have a lot of waxed and de-waxed work ready to steam and then dry-clean but I will now wait until after Denman so that the dry-clean can be a big shared one including students' work.

May 18th

The morning involved two hassly conversations. Conversation A took place with The Bank. Banks, as we know, are very hot on security issues these days and one would therefore assume that they might read letters properly. Not. Their serious misreading of my latest letter has so far scored several phone calls (including three international ones), four letters and an upset elderly relative.

Conversation B was conducted in Admin downstairs where the Finance Director (who had taken the morning off from his Head Gardener position, due to torrential rain) was involved in tracing an important item that should have arrived over ten days ago. It was to replace something the shop had themselves broken and was one of those situations that sometimes occurs in politics, where the truth has to be prised out in tiny gobbets on the end of a winkle picker and you are never sure if the winkle is empty. The word "sorry" might have been appropriate in the circumstances, but appears to be missing from the modern lexicon.

So I am delighted to say that I have a good story too. Yesterday I discovered that I was short of a certain shape of scarf for my course next week. Because it represented a small shortfall in numbers I couldn't order from my wholesale supplier as I need a minimum quantity, and it also takes a while to arrive. So I called Rainbow Silks who had to look around their showroom, phone me back, pack the items straight away and send them out in the post yesterday afternoon. They have just arrived. I just love it when people do what they say they are going to, and then go a little bit further. So thank you Rainbow Silks. They will be at Art in Action, by the way, in the Suppliers Section.

May 19th - 21st

"Why have the drums stopped?" I think this must be an apocryphal line from an imaginary film because I can find no web reference to it except woeful jokes about percussionists and viola players.Why am I thinking about this? Well, in the imaginary film, a group of intrepid and artfully sweaty explorers pioneer their way through studio-lit potted palms to the sound of insistent drums beaten by unseen native hands. The gist is that the unseen native hands also have a cooking pot at the ready together with onions, carrots and a dash of MSG. When the drums stop it usually means that the pot has come to the boil, band practise is over and it's time to collect dinner.

Back in Houseplants the newly spooky silence is broken."Why have the drums stopped?" Anguished glances are exchanged, in close up. The token blonde exploretta screams and buries her head in someone's khaki-clad shoulder.

And that's how my studio feels at the moment. Quiet, empty, eerily tidy. Everything is packed up for teaching and I've tidied myself to a standstill. Things are definitely about to happen, although I trust this won't involve Eating Tutor at Denman College.

Instead of waiting around idly I planted some lettuces and made more bird and cat proof fences in the veg patch today, dodging the practise runs of a new Celestial Shower System that the Overlords are trying to sell to we underlings. It seems one of their number has lost the "off" button because it hasn't stopped raining since Wednesday. Despite this, half the country is under a hosepipe ban and water companies are enjoying profits with so many noughts I've lost the plot. I shall be back later this week-unless I have become Professeur en Casserole.

May 22nd - 25th

I drove up to Denman College on Monday to run a two-night / one whole day course for a group from Surrey. The students have all agreed that I can add picures of them here and also show their work. In the picture below they are wearing the twist-dyed scarves they made. It's the first time I have taken the steamer with me to Denman (just the base part, not the tall chamber - see here for more info on steaming) so that they could take these particular pieces of work home with them. I have their other scarves at home now to steam, dry clean and return by post.

Several of the students were beginners and they wanted to learn the basics of silk painting, to use gutta and dyes, and also to make a finished scarf on crêpe de Chine. So I started them off with an 18 x 24" habotai sampler, where they divide the silk into sections and practice different marks, textures and patterns using spirit-based gutta through an applicator. They can then use dyes on their line work and assess how well they have done in ensuring the gutta line is secure, not allowing dye to bleed through. On a larger area of the sampler I encouraged them to go mad with just dyes, trying blends, wet-on-dry, and so forth.

Samplers, and a cushion cover (top left)

For more text and images of the course and students, click here.

May 26th - 30th

All work for Denman students has now been steamed. Today I took it all to the dry-cleaners and it should be ready on Friday. This means I won't post it until Monday if you are checking in here to find out!

Life class was last night and we drew a male model. It seems a statement of the pathetically obvious to say that drawing a man is different from drawing a woman, and maybe that flimsy observation relates to the dynamics of his particular body. But I found I was making harder and more angular marks and I broke more bits of charcoal than usual. A very good model, posed like a rock, no talking in class, hard work.