Monday 7 March 2022
mother of crows .....
Sunday 30 January 2022
telling or creating a story .....
Friday 7 January 2022
a very welcome new year .....
I love that time of year when a new year turns the page and all the weariness of the end of the last year fades away, or begins to fade away as the new year strides along. We are already one week into 2022 and I have been giving the studio a big clean and sort in readiness for some teaching to start here in February. Exciting. It is always such a joy to teach artists the joy of making books and sharing my books to show that there is an abundance of opportunity to turn their work into something quite unique.
I have not worked in book form for a while - though skipping back through my posts and not looking at the dates you would wonder if that were true. When I was working on my self imposed 'book a week' project I stopped after 26 books as the discipline had done what was required - it got me into the studio and anxious to work. I became absorbed in drawings rather than books and though there is little shown on my blog about these drawings, they do exist and I may pull one out everyone and then for show and tell.
Now that I am back posting to this blog, I am reminded of my reason for starting trademarks in the first place. It was to record my studio activity and keep a digital visual diary of what I was doing - rather than the effort of keeping up a 'drawing a day' which was another way I recorded visually for some years.
Well I for one am excited - and busy practising stitches, or variations thereof, which I haven't used for ages. I am out of practice taking photos while I work but I have just completed a small coptic binding with a header stitch which I undid three times before I was happy that I remembered it well enough to teach. I kept looking at a wonderful postcard Fiona Dempster made which reads ...
Tuesday 4 January 2022
2021 tick .....
This drawing below is called 'hope' which is apt I think. So many of my musings have begun with I hope this or I hope that. This was not the only inspiration for this work. I drew upon Emily Dickinson's poem
'Hope' is a thing with feathers -
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops - at all.
This series of five drawings are all done on architectural drafting paper which gives them a luminesecence which you cannot tell with the photographs. And they are quite large - 900mm x 700mm. It is one of those bodies of work that comes from that place where you let go and something else takes over. I do not often work with this kind of emotive work, never comfortable with wearing my heart on my sleeve, and it is a deviation from the work I had been doing largely last year.
Thursday 7 October 2021
the red thread ...
A showing of recent works by
Susan Bowers, Fiona Dempster, Stephanie McLennan and Tory Richards.
A collection of prints, mixed media drawings and artists' books
The theme 'The Red Thread' has given us all the opportunity to explore in our own way what it means to have threads holding and connecting us to each other and the world especially at a time when the world has seemed very strange indeed.
Sometimes it takes an exhibition or in this case a 'showing' of work to motivate you back into the studio, and back into the blogging world where I am quite shocked to realise it has been years since I last posted to tracemarks. I have missed it. Now that I am here over three years later, not only has the format for blogging changed by I think my work has too. Certainly I have been exploring concepts that have seen me wearing my heart on my sleeves a little and I will be posting more on that, and on the works that I am submitting for show, at a later stage.
I am including below one of the images of a series of five large drawings - 900mm x 700mm - which have been done with the idea of spiritual connections. The intangible forces that surround us and hold us. As is often the case in a small version of a large work the detail is lost. As you may have read in previous posts of mine that I have not been able to work with intaglio etching and since then have been searching for a way to reproduce the plate tone I so loved with copper plate printing. This is the closest I have come to realising that effect with drawing.