Having realised that light and shadow could play such an important part in these drawings, I thought some more about ways of playing with shadows. The newspaper cut-outs cast their own shadows, whether delicate or energetic, and I wondered if I could use another material, this time translucent which would cast a shadow if marked. I decided on clear acetate, drawing the motif on with a marker which can mark plastics; then went further and got some red acetate which casts a red light.
It was a challenge to work out how to hold the acetate at the right angle from the wall to cast the desired light; in the end , twisting it gave the added bonus of an odd, upward, angelic small reflection.
The drawing at present looks like this. It harks back to its very solid sources such as the edge of the baroque memorial greatly elaborated, the arrows from the recycling symbol on the bins in the civic car park outside the church, the arrows indicating higher or lower temperatures on the church’s digital central heating system control panel – all translated into motifs which I wanted to be akin to music in which different sounds which seem to come from different times are lilting, humming, clicking, clashing, thudding, whispering, all together, but each in its different way.
These are large drawings, several feet across. One more effort, perhaps to get them beyond the wall and down on to the floor and up and out of the windows… if possible…
It’s been too long since I last posted on the blog – the lively workshops which have been going on in the church have kept me busy, but so also has the experimentation with drawing which I have been undertaking. This has been affected by the thought that so much music has sounded here in the past and still now from time to time fills the church.
In my last post I wrote about the choices of materials and showed some images of the cut-outs I had begun to produce. This lace-like piece (1) at once introduced another element which excited me: shadow. (2,3) This seems very apt for the work I’m hoping to produce with its layering of time, of past and present, in a place which enfolds and holds them together in its sifting lights and shades.
But something delicate in drawing as in music is often enhanced by contrast. The next thing was to try how this delicate object would be changed by translation into another material, another scale. Completely different things happened, I could not have predicted the shift in mood. Discovery really does come through drawing, through making.
I also made the simplest possible drawing of a tiny button (4) on the control panel of the church’s digital central heating system, and began to play with it, cutting it out of a shiny black card. (5)
The small arrow grew and multiplied, the small delicate piece I started with changed, and after much trying this and that I found myself working on 3 separate wall-drawings, playing with possibilities, trying to to orchestrate colour, weights, speeds, shadows. This is what had happened by last week. (6,)
