Threads

The inaugural exhibition of the artists who inhabit General Office is going well, and there’s still another week to run of “Body of Work” if you want to add to our count!

The Private View was on Thursday night.

I seem to be quite successful at hiding from myself. Or hiding from my work. I think I was so chuffed to be in and working, with the prospect of exhibiting in what’s turning into a really great space, that I had forgotten that I was exhibiting new work that I hadn’t quite come to terms with.

In at the deep end then… other than studio conversations with fellow exhibiting artist Sarah Goudie, and my long time art-friend Bo Jones, I hadn’t had the opportunity to talk about this work in a gallery context. A fact I hadn’t actually realised until the pv night. FFS Elena! There were times on the night when I felt clumsy and inarticulate, waving my arms around frantically and refreshing my bright red lipstick and fluffing up my hair in an attempt to distract and confuse the audience, for whom I hadn’t rehearsed, or learned my lines.

But… if you chuck yourself in the deep end, you sink or swim… and I think I’ve probably done a bit of each.

I was asked, in disappointed tones: “Where are your textiles?” “oh… no children’s clothes?” and “I told my friend there would be bras… why haven’t you done the bras?”

“I’m currently drawing… same themes, but the drawing has allowed me to dig deeper…”

I got the impression from some that this wasn’t a good enough response.

But… I did also have some amazing conversations about how great the drawing was… both strong and sensitive: there you go… getting there… this is along the way to why I’m not currently using textiles, why my break, originally considered a very temporary cul-de-sac has turned into a major arterial route.

From a conversation this afternoon I realise that the stitching process is regular, whether by hand or machine… up~down~in~out… governed by the pressure of pedal, or speed of needle. Pencil/graphite has a brain to paper connection that can be so much more intimate and emotional. If I see a way of doing that with the textile I may well return. But my pencil marks are enriched beyond the capability of stitch, by having the capacity to be angry and aggressive and dark… to slight… almost invisible, delicate…

I have often referred to stitching as mantra…

This drawing is more like music… on some days as mad as high falutin’ opera. It can be fast and slow, deep and surface sliding… on other days a gentle hum… a chorus snatched by the wind…

Bo asked me about the themes, and I proceeded to continue talking about technique… I was temporarily wrong-footed (yep, he still does it), but I do have an innate understanding that actually, it is the same. My work is always about relationships, touch, effect and influence. What is happening with these drawings on watercolour base is exactly that Bo… it might take me three days to articulate it, but this is what it is:

When I talk about my materials and my marks, I am talking about people.

The paper is 300g Bockingford watercolour paper (expensive, donations gratefully received, haha!)

I’m using professional quality, pigment rich watercolour paint (as above, thank you…)

I’m getting through the big fat soft Faber Castell pencils as if I was eating them… (ditto)

So, when I describe my process, and talk about technique, I’m talking about how people have an effect on each other.

The watercolour paper is thick and soft, but is strong and holds its shape even if I pour water/paint on it. It can puddle nicely, and hold the puddle safely. The puddle sinks in. It is an organic process. When the paint runs in tracks along the paper it lifts it in ridges, so the surface undulates. This sculptural feeling would be lost if it was framed, so they are not framed. It is allowed to do what it does, the paper isn’t stretched. It’s left to move and adjust freely. In it’s own time. Just like people.

Sometimes though, I do use a drier to speed things up, move the paint and have an effect of it. I interfere. And sometimes I don’t. Just like people.

When the paint is dry I spend ages trying to decide which areas need to be left to their own devices, and which bits need more interference, and at this point is is possibly an experience thing… a composition thing perhaps. But once I get going with the pencils… which range from a big fat 9B graphite stick, all the way through the Bs to 6H… I am reacting, provoking, responding to the paper, the paint, texture… and this feels like a very sensual, emotional act. I could go on, but it would be freakishly, fetishistically, like art-porn. Just like people.

This is where I am then. I was stuck, I couldn’t stitch the story, I had to draw it. It’s closer to my skin, and closer to my thoughts this way.

 

 

“I wouldn’t have written this poem if it wasn’t for…..”

These are the words of my poet friend Heather Wastie in her new book “Don’t Oil the Hinges”
It’s a great way to introduce a poem as it provides the context and microclimate that allows the seed of the idea to germinate.
I am showing off here because I’m mentioned in the book as one of the causes of poetry! What an honour!
The whole book is wonderful, not just the piece that mentions my exhibition… I love Heather’s work, on the page and in reading and performance. She also provided the greenhouse called Mouth and Music that nurtured my songwriting seedlings when some of them were poems, and sketchy ideas and bundles of words, alongside the Songwriting Circle with Dan Whitehouse. To have an audience to hear your developing ideas is amazing… if you don’t have one, seek for one… hopefully one with humour and generosity of spirit!

Serendipity is the thing I’m talking about… A happened because of B and C…

I’m on the cusp of the first exhibition in our new studios. The venue now has a name: “General Office”, and Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/GOGalleryStudios/
And in the exhibition I have drawings.
I wouldn’t be drawing if it wasn’t for Mike and Sarah and a certain set of mental conditions coming together:

I had to move out of my studio and pack all my textile work up into boxes, hidden away…

I was no longer involved in a thing I had invested a lot of time and energy in, and had lost my way in my work a little because of that…

My husband became ill and I could not work on large objects like the furniture I had been working on, so I regressed and returned to the closeness and intimacy (and portability) of my sketchbook…

The critical art-friendship I have with Sarah Goudie… and her work… We had shared a studio and the presence of all that graphite seeps in… becomes a new possibility…

These things – and others no doubt – were the conditions that allowed the seedling to grow. All those years I spent drawing plants and people, all those years telling other people of the importance of drawing, all those years telling people how important it is to look, and show children how they can do it, and can make it better, and make it their own way, and use it… all those things came home to roost and I started drawing… and drawing…. and drawing…..

And here I am now, with two huge new drawings in a new exhibition space I share with five other artists! We will open the doors on Monday.

Nothing is wasted. The last 12-18 months have been spent with fear, anger, disappointment, pain, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy and despair on occasions…. but also love, friendship, support and validation and more love.

I’m a lucky woman.
I’m still here, so are the others.

And these are the drawings that brought me here.

 

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Watching the Imagine programme on Tracey Emin this week… love or hate her work… there’s no denying the power and importance of it, of her.
She has been, and still is, brave and brazen, outspoken and outrageous. I find her compelling to watch… I relate… and then I don’t. Maybe to open yourself to the world you need to have been in a position where things can’t get much worse?

I lead a comparatively comfortable and privileged life. I’m hidden in my work: scared to lose that privilege. So I’m not brazen. I’m cowardly and conceal my confession. No confessional box, no priest, no robes, no blessing, no divine forgiveness and no penance… except the self inflicted.

My combing over the thoughts in my head… like Emin, reliving, re-evaluating childhood and the life up-to-now… and again like Emin, previously on the fabric, but now… returning to drawing… we are a similar age. These things are translated into what happens on the paper. But only I know the codes. Only I know what makes these marks.

I think…

I do hope though that on some level, someone will see them as not just marks, that they say something.
To me they are more than the marks. That’s why I keep making them.

Whether I one day reveal, remains to be seen. Maybe when I’m 80 and have nothing to lose?

I’ve been writing a lot in my sketch book lately, but not necessarily the sort of writing fora public consumption. Don’t get excited… that’s mostly because it’s boring.

As part of the preparatory work for the Study Days and Course I am delivering with Sarah Goudie I am trying to get myself “match fit” if you like to call it that… I can’t think of another phrase that puts it so succinctly!

So I am exploring through my writing the whys and wherefores of drawing from my own personal perspective. I have hung the drawings up in our studio’s ever improving gallery space (keep an eye out, exhibition soon!). And then I look and try to cast my mind back to where these strange and mythical beasts have come from. I’m calling them strange and mythical beasts, but they’re really not.

These drawings have grown from me and my life as naturally as a buddleia on the roof of a derelict pub. They are the portraits of long lost interactions with long lost lives and experiences. They are as familiar to me as my children. But, like my grown up children they still have the power to surprise me (Panama? Really? When? WHEN???!!!??)

So the content of the writing is not interesting to anyone but me, and of course some of it is deeply personal, as it should be when digging deep, but the reasons for doing it are ok to put out there…here…

It is important for me when asking others to dig deep and find out about their own creativity and where it might live, to know what happens when you do that. when I do that… Sarah and I have experience of these activities, and digging deep can be exposing, it can make one feel vulnerable for a while… it can reveal things to oneself that a part of the brain has kept hidden, probably for good reason. These study days can have a profound effect sometimes. Sometimes that happens on the day, sometimes a few months later. What I have found through doing it myself is that we are never really that far from ourselves. I don’t want this to sound like some ageing hippy nonsense, because I am not that sort of person. But I am the sort of person that likes my interactions to be real… whether that is with other people, or with myself.

https://sarahgoudie.com/drawing-your-space/

This post follows on from comments here and elsewhere, about self-hijacking, and rule breaking.

Sometimes we set ourselves up to fail.

We hijack our own progress by setting limits and rules:

“I’m going to write in my blog once a day/week/month”… in my brain rules like this are always doomed to failure because they become aligned with work, duty, obligation… I’ve never had much of a work ethic. I shirk responsibility wherever possible. I write when I feel like it. Sometimes this is twice a day. Sometimes two months goes by. But if I write and post you can be assured it is not out of duty, but interest, because I want to say something.

I have looked at when I blog, and more interestingly when I don’t. I don’t blog if I’m waiting, or in some sort of limbo… in a changing state. Unless it is a brief post to say just that – a sort of “Out of Office” post?

…………..

Sometimes we set ourselves up to succeed.

I do set rules for the way I work with others. These might be professional ways of engagement rules which I have discovered I break at my peril. I have seen others around me crumble too under the weight of the unprofessional “Lets just do it, it’ll be fine/great/amazing… this time next year we will be millionaires!” Because in my experience, unless you establish professional rules of engagement, and expectation, of who is doing what, and how payment (if any) happens, it ends in resentment, unkindness, and murderous levels of sarcasm. It does not end in people working to their best. Failure happens through a failure to set up how we care for each other, and ourselves. Self defeating.

……

I set the rules for my making too. I work to them. Then I look behind me to find I have broken them and something interesting has occurred!

I’m sure I’ve laid out such rules here. I remember some of them.

The 8B pencil. The flat layout of drawing like botanical specimens. No colour. Limited colour. No colour again. The 6H pencil. Watercolour paper. Not watercolour paper… and now again the watercolour. I set the boundaries and keep going. Prolific amounts of drawing and painting.

Each material throws up a new set of qualities, and therefore a different set of boundaries and possibilities. For example, I have been working on the large roll of paper, developing a sort of narrative across it. Then I made the decision to cut the paper, limit my colour choice to alizarin crimson for one piece. It worked well. I ran out of paint, so for the next couple I used single colours. This naturally drained my stock of particular colours, so off I went to buy new. I bought a few tubes of high quality watercolour paint. I loved the Payne’s grey. And the Indian red. And then I used the yellow ochre. I was initially annoyed that it didn’t work like the others. Of course it didn’t. In a good quality paint with real pigment, the colour isn’t just about colour, it is about a material quality. I am currently in love with yellow ochre. Yellow ochre is rough, and grinds down my pencils like sandpaper when I draw over it. Payne’s grey doesn’t. When I paint Payne’s grey over the ochre it resists… oh my that is exciting. The decisions then about what I draw and where I draw become very complex indeed. And HERE…. RIGHT HERE… is why I am drawing and not stitching at the moment (will I ever go back?)

My work themes for the last ten years, (probably longer than that, but less deliberately perhaps) concern touch. How we touch each other. Physical, emotional, social, intellectual… each person touches another, a reaction happens, explosive, or slow burn, passion, hatred, or as above, murderous sarcasm.

Now I have it in the materials. Yellow ochre has no time for Payne’s grey… shrugs him off… Payne’s grey is gentle on my pencils, allows the 6H to groove across it in a ghostly fashion. The ochre is violent and aggressive… but Indian red does the bleeding… runs hurriedly across the page, making panicky changes in direction under the threat of my hairdryer. Payne’s grey dries in a beautiful naturally occurring fractal patterned manner. So there. Spiteful and sarcastic? Am I really anthropomorphising the paint?

Hell yeah.

Rules?

Who needs them!?

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