Threads

On the outside it looks like I’ve changed tack. Someone asked me how I frame the art and music within my practice the other day.
These days I’m more comfortable talking about this because I do actually have it “framed” in a way.

After weeks and weeks and weeks of painstaking drawing and colouring I’m now in a music studio. I’m reviewing a selection of songs, consisting of a bundle of lyrics, a few basic recordings and half-baked ideas. A sketch book if you will. Dan is helping me look at them objectively. This is a crit. Which elements “fit” the philosophy, which are worth pursuing, which are ripe and which need to stay on the tree for further thought and development.
My art background has helped me here. Decades of self, peer and group crits become professional habit. My beloved songs can take it on the chin. If the chorus isn’t good enough then it gets picked at until it is.

As I listened to yesterday’s recordings at the table, I catch sight of those labels. It is equally valid that I can attach them to the songs. It works. It’s interesting.

The songs I’m working on are for me. They’re not attached to the drawn and stitched this time… Or not at the moment at least. These ideas are not band songs. Either lyrically, musically or conceptually they are too heavy on the Elena to pitch to the band. This is another first. At the moment I don’t know what will become of them. Dan asked if they would be an album, or at least an EP… They might. I’m unsure of the shape of them yet. This weekend we examine them, shore them up where/if they need it. After yesterday they’re more real already. I have divided them into piles now, and know which three or four we are ready to push towards a basic recording. Those we will look at again today. The discarded three will go back in the pot for another day, and there are three or four more that need a little extra something that I shall work on before the next session.

So I use a different media. So what? My themes are the same, my philosophy remains the same… Occasionally poked at by Dan to check. My working methods actually are remarkably similar in the way I collect and manipulate material… Gather, compare…. Then select…. Then work into some more. I could just as easily be stitching or drawing.

This part of the work was (comparatively) easy to find a parity. And now I’m comfortable with it. I’m comfortable with how a recording fits with the rest of my output. What is not so easy for me to articulate still is performance. But that is getting closer. And I care less that I’m unable to accurately state why performance is important. It just is, and I love it… So it obviously should be there in the mix.

To be honest I’m the only one that’s bothered. And that I think is just part of the artist I am. I’m far more methodical than I like to admit. I’m not messy in the making and I don’t like to be messy in the thinking. I like my thoughts to be clear. Especially as I like the work (in whatever format) to be ambiguous. I still enjoy that point of balance… The point at which people have been drawn in by the outward pleasantness, the comfort of beautiful embroidery, or a well crafted song, with interesting chords and decent harmonies… The point at which its too late…. They suddenly see the ugliness when it’s too late. They suddenly hear the lyric and understand that the song is about rage and jealousy, couched in metaphor and gold thread. That’s where the good stuff is.

And I think that point is where the performance lies… I’m capitalising on what I am… How I look, at last, is useful. I am a grey haired, overweight woman in a marks and spencer cardigan…. I’m singing about anger and death and infidelity with a sweet mellow voice to the rhythm of a bossanova or a delicately plucked waltz.

It’s all the same stuff really.

After the previous post, playing with labels, the labels have remained in the little basket on the table. Considering the amount of time it took me to make them just for that small amount of shuffling, I wondered if it was worth it. But even as I write I know that it was.

There are times when actually doing it “works” better than abstract thought. Writing the list, stamping them out (however untidily) and getting my old-fashioned school guillotine out slowed and speeded the process. Slowed because the act of making prevented me from drawing the conclusion too soon before a thorough thought process. Speeded because once I had them in my hands and on the drawings, my conclusions were much clearer. I could feel a certain rightness about it. Then, having done so, I no longer need them.

And I do feel that something has changed about the drawings. I’m not completely sure that’s visible to others. When the light is better I’ll take a few photos and have a think.
I think my lines are not so smooth. The shapes not so rounded and ripe. The decay is more visible too. New elements have crept in… And a shifting of the colour palette…?
I do feel though that these are microscope slides … Snapshots…. it is not possible to see the enormity of the process yet. I hold back… Still… Physical space is still my issue… I want to grow it in the laboratory conditions of my new studio. I’m itching to get at it…

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Here I have a selection of labels, the words on them are taken at random from my sketchbook and other conversations…

Stamped and cut then jumbled, pick a card, any card… I keep my eyes closed so not to cheat!

Then arranged, here on the same drawing, wherever I think they are appropriate at the time.

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Now I like this… I am not yet able to articulate why though… something about the movable, temporary nature of things and the interconnectedness again, and the fact that one person’s greed is another person’s prudence…

Answers on a postcard please…

I’ve ummed and aahed about posting this piece of work as I can’t decide if it is an instructional sketch book piece purely for myself, or whether I might do more. I’m currently on the side of just for me… But it’s open for discussion. It’s a thought piece. It isn’t a necessary key to look at the other pieces, but I decided it might be useful to log it in the blog… Because that is what the blog is for, right? I also think that in order to put them out into the world I would have to do hundreds in order for them to be rendered nonsensical. Having one makes it too important somehow, and makes the labels immovable. But actually they are not… to me….

The labels are mere suggestions about relationships between phenomena. They could be different. Or in different places. I drew this because I wanted to get it organised in my own thoughts. I know that all labels are movable/transient. If I did more for other people to see then there would need to be instructions and a legend. And possibly a scale strip along the bottom.
Yes… you see now you’re talking! I wouldn’t have come to that if I hadn’t been writing!
My son (a scientist, mathematician and philosopher) says that geography is just colouring in. This is a joke (I think), but it has always struck me as a “thing” because in school I only did well in humanities and science subjects that allowed the elaborate drawing of diagrams with neat labels. I definitely only got a top grade in biology O level due to my extravagant diagram drawing!
So it comes to this then? I’m regressing? I have always said to my children (and students and anyone else that asks for advice) that you should just pick whatever is the next interesting thing in front of you. The Five Year Plan is all very well but if the getting there is boring then it’s wrong. The getting there bit IS THE THING…. Because what happens if you die in year three? You could have had three years doing interesting things instead!
The places you get to on the way all feed in then, they all become relevant. My love of intricate diagrams at the age of 14 feeds into my current art work. I continue to do the next interesting thing in front of me… Keeping an eye out for interesting detours of course…

So I colour in nonsensical diagrams that to me illustrate and demonstrate the state of human nature and the connectedness of everything.
At the moment I continue until the next interesting thing distracts me…

I might have to make some detachable labels today….

A wibbly wobbly amorphous Venn diagram encompasses my thoughts… It’s animated, so the overlapping portion(s) expand and contract. I often think about the whole of it, the drawing, the stitching, the songs… but it is difficult to do this in writing, so end up having a post that enters the “Now for something completely different…” arena.

Now for something completely different:
Sound and music and songs…
I am about to embark on something solo (ish)… This may eventually include solo performance. Initially though I need to research and collect more ingredients.
When it comes to drawing or textiles I’m pretty much set up. I have a wide variety of materials and equipment to choose from. When it comes to sound I do not. I don’t have enough to play with here. I can’t reach up onto the shelf and select the sound equivalent of silk and gingham, or watercolour and charcoal…

I have on a data stick (unsatisfactorily unvisual) a collection which includes song ideas, lyric sheets, writing and odd bits of recordings. They have an underlying vague theme that (I think) is a working title…
But there aren’t enough ingredients yet to draw them together into something that represents what I want to hear. The library shelves are empty, the shop needs stocking…
My intention over the next couple of months is to NOT write a “song” but to sketch. I will of course note down ideas as they come, but I’m going to delay gratification purposefully until I have amassed the bits and pieces that will enable me to say what I want in the way I want it. I’m also delaying playing and sharing these bits and pieces until I know what I want them to be. The solo thing here is important to me: I know I have people around me that can make these things into perfectly respectable songs right now… But it would be like putting a raw salad into a bowl, when actually what I want is something slow-cooked and developed by me, at least up to the point where I know what I’d like other people to contribute.

I want this to fester a while within me before it bursts out onto the page and/or the recording and onto anyone else…

So I plan to venture out with my iPad and record the world… Well, at least the small world I inhabit… I want to fill the shelves with interesting materials, so I can do plenty of experimental play before pinning anything down into the structure of a something like a song…