MA Week 70 - Professional Development, Printing and Conference paper

Reflection on the past week, 30th May 2017

I broke up from work for about 10 days on Wednesday 24^th May – this was partly to do with my working days, with bank holidays, plus a couple of days off for the “Troubling Time” conference. My intention was to focus as much as I could on my practice in all its different aspects. I started even before I broke up – on Tuesday I sketched one of the photos from the mini-derive, which was made all the easier by my sketching the subject directly the previous day (see this week 69 blogpost) and etched it into a plate prepared with hard ground. I didn’t put too much detail into it as I didn’t want to waste time if it didn’t work – I was still wondering about my technique after the soft ground issues of the last couple of weeks. I zipped into the print room to etch it on Wednesday dinnertime and it seemed to etch OK, which was a relief.

Professional Development

I was straight back into college after work on Wednesday for an event about “Exhibiting your work”, led by Bryony Bond, the Creative Director of The Tetley in Leeds. Bryony gave a 10-point plan to holding a good exhibition. It was good to have the information presented in this way, and pleasing to realise that I probably would have thought of most of it anyway eventually, after years of working in business and organising events. As always, though, there were a few really good points to think about. One was Bryony’s assertion that you shouldn’t be afraid to invite big names from the local art scene (or indeed, the art scene further afield). Curators always want to see new, interesting art. Another was to go to every opening you can, get yourself known, and make as many connections as possible. Also – put on shows yourself and make them events, with artists’ talks and the like.

Another professional development event followed on Thursday morning, “The Art of Communicating”, an event by the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds. This was led by Kerry Harker, the founder of the Tetley, now a freelance curator. I found Kerry’s style both engaging and accessible. As with the previous evening, I’d already discovered quite a lot of what Kerry talked about in dribs and drabs, but it was good to hear it presented consistently and with a strong message. And again, as with the previous evening, there were a few really important points. A particularly good one was to own, drive and manage your own practice and not compare it to the practice of others. As Kerry pointed out, you might wish you had another’s practice, but you don’t. So take your own practice seriously and move it forward.

There were also two other speakers who had graduated fairly recently and who talked about setting up collectives and starting to make art happen in the city. They gave some tips for getting funding and an insight into difficulties they’d faced. I’d already heard of some of the work of both of them and it was interesting to hear their side of things and also that they spoke honestly.

As always, I have quite detailed handwritten notes from both these events, and blogging about them makes me realise I should go back and undertake some of the actions that I promised myself I’d do immediately.

Printing

The thankless task of stopping out

After the morning’s event, I was straight over into the Print Room to start working into my latest etching. After taking a few prints, Mike helped me to spray a mixture on it that would allow it to aquatint, and I set to work with the endless task of stopping it out and biting it, which is still in progress.

I also had another go with the soft ground conundrum. I stripped back one of the plates that hadn’t worked last week and applied another soft ground, then drew onto it through greaseproof paper. I etched it for much less time than previously and I actually got something out of it – by no means perfect, but enough to give me more to go on.

Small steps forward, or going round in circles?

The plate hadn’t bitten deeply enough to give a proper print, but it did yield a couple of clues. There was a lot of foul bite on the surface, which I took to be where I had rested the circle stencil and my ruler onto the paper on top of the plate. The ground was also starting to come off in one corner of the plate, akin to what had happened the last couple of weeks. When I looked more closely, I realised this was where I’d handled it (even though I’d been really careful). So I concluded that the ground is much more fragile than I’d realised. Again, more experimentation needed, but a step forward.

Today, along with the endless stopping out, I’ve been pulling prints of the gentrified office building to put in the “Art Market” at the end of year show towards the end of next week. The idea is to do a variable edition of 10 and put 5 into the market.

Troubling Time Paper

The other main activity has been firming up the paper for the “Troubling Time” conference in Manchester, which is slowly taking shape. I was really struggling with getting it together earlier today and I knew that I needed to go for a walk, so I took half an hour and walked mindfully. This helped free up my thoughts considerably. I’ve always found a half-hour walk from work at lunchtime really beneficial for, quite literally, clearing my thoughts. I’d never realised it was so integral to my wellbeing, despite a lot of my art practice being walking-based.

Bank holiday weekend work!

Also for the conference, I have used some of my old monoprints to make postcard-sized business cards to hand out to other participants, particularly those who will (hopefully) create the visual work with me in my session. The cards look quite good cut up and in a pile on the table!

 

MA Week 69 - Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Reflection on the past week, 23rd May 2017

Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Developing the drypoint

I’ve developed my drypoint following the circles I etched with the dividers last week. As well as the dividers, I'd bought a circle stencil which proved ideal for drawing the circular shapes both on paper and ultimately on the plate. I sketched out a series of shapes from the mini-dérive, working to relate the shapes to each other and to balance the sketch with a variety of shapes and sizes. I also experimented with textures and shading, and was quite pleased with the result. I then flip-photocopied it and drypoint etched it into Perspex.  As always I found curved shapes difficult to draw - seems the trick is to move the plate rather than the needle.  The idea of this is to form an underneath layer of a two or three layer drypoint of the walk. It gave a reasonable result but I will probably work further into it to try to get a bit more variation in depth, following on from last week’s results. I printed it in blue (process cyan) as I wanted to take one of the colours of the walk, namely that of the railings outside the former Burley Library.

 

The shapes of the overlooked urban environment

Yesterday I went out at lunchtime and did a couple of very quick sketches which might act as a “top layer” to this plate. I’d drawn outdoors previously but taken quite a bit of time over each sketch. These were done quickly, and I was amazed at the amount of visual information you can get down within 5 minutes.

 

Houses; visual note
 

More soft ground troubles.

Following on from last week's experiment, I tried again with pressing plant materials into a soft ground. Last week I used an old plate that I'd acquired and stripped back. This week I used a similar plate plus a brand new one. I sanded them both back equally and cleaned them to within an inch of their life following my hunch of last week. However... still no joy. The ground still came away. So it isn't the plate, given I’d used an old and a new one, and it can’t be the cleaning either. It must be something to do with the preparation and/or the etching. More investigations needed.

 

“Troubling Time” conference paper

I've started to write the paper for the "Troubling Time" conference in Manchester on 1st June. I am going to introduce my research and my practice, then invite the participants to produce a visual work which "troubles time". This is based on the organisers' encouragement of contributions which “engage practically with their duration, with the aim of fostering methodological diversity”. I don’t know if people will engage with it, and it’s already pushing me out of my comfort zone, but that’s probably a good thing.

On a related note, I've just heard that the walking event scheduled for 1st June has been postponed for a couple of reasons. This is a shame but it does mean that I will be able to attend the whole day at the conference which will be good.

Frances Morris talk

Finally I went to an excellent talk by Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, last night. She is a very engaging, interesting speaker and I learnt a lot about "behind the scenes at museums" from her Talk. I've summarised the points most salient to my own practice in this blogpage.

 

 

MA Week 67 - Two weeks for the price of one

Reflection on the past fortnight, 8^th May 2017

 

I’ve just realised that I’ve lost count of the weeks somewhere, and that I was going to end up having 81 weeks in an 80 week course, so I’ve combined the past two weeks. I’ve done quite a lot, too.

 

Sketching and etching

I did a final sketch of St Paul’s (see also this week 65 blogpost) which still wasn’t brilliant, but allowed me a further chance to play with perspective. I don’t know why I found it so difficult; possibly it was because I was trying to alter the perspective from the photo I was using. Next day I transposed it to one of the little copper plates and worked on this for a couple of days. It still wasn’t a brilliant drawing, but the etching worked and I got some prints out of it. I used the needle with the slanted edge (I think it’s called an echoppe) which worked well when making curved shapes. I also used a roulette wheel to give some texture to the blossoms and leaves and I was surprised by how deeply it bit. It took so deeply in relation to the etched lines that I didn’t think they had bitten. I imagine I probably dug too far in with the wheel.

One result of this was that the blossoms were obscured. I thought about drypointing them in, but Mike suggested regrounding, re-etching and re-biting the plate. This seemed like a good way to learn about multiple grounding. I used liquid hard ground again and the resulting re-work certainly gave more definition. However there was a lot of “foul bite”, with dots here and there. I then realised I’d not cleaned the plate before re-grounding, so presumably there were dots of grease that resisted the ground. Possibly not ideal, but a lesson learnt. Also the dots gave some texture, so possibly a slightly happy accident.

 

Springtime St Paul's

 

I had intended to grind this off the plate and do a completely different design, but I’d learnt so much from this little plate that I’ve kept it, for now at least.

 

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the “Etching Weekend” at the West Yorkshire Print workshop in Mirfield. It was excellent. I worked with two images; a photo of Assisi I’d taken on holiday a few years ago, which I knew would work up into different areas of tone, and an image of some tulips from my mini-dérive with Michelle.  

On the Saturday we prepared and etched a hard ground plate, for which I used the Siena image. I’d already practised a lot of this technique but I learnt a lot of hints and tips. We also prepared a soft ground plate. It was really interesting to see the nuances of different workshops. 

On Sunday we started with the soft ground plate, into which I pressed some plant materials that were just growing outside the window. I then traced the photo of some tulips into the ground. I was surprised how dark and crayony the marks bit; the soft ground is very fragile compared to the liquid hard ground I’ve been using in college.

 

Assisi aquatint

 

The next stage was aquatint, and I decided to aquatint both plates. Our technician, Kate, applied the actual rosin powder but I would like to learn how to do this. I’d worked out the tones I wanted for the Assisi print and it was a bit tedious applying the stop out varnish to achieve this, not really knowing what the outcome would be. I was very pleased with the result considering it is a first effort. It printed rather too dark but Kate showed us how to adjust the transparency of the ink to allow lighter-toned printing.

 

Sepia tint tulips

The plant material images and the heavy drawing marks of the tulips don’t necessarily belong on the same plate, but they don’t look too bad together and this serves as a really good test/ideas plate for future soft ground use. Kate helped me to print it in colour. I would have liked to have picked her brains further on that point, but time didn’t permit. All in all an excellent weekend.
 

 A moan retracted
 

I mentioned in this week 63 blogpost that I’d submitted a conference abstract and heard nothing. It transpires that an email must have got lost somewhere in the ether as it had been accepted! This caused a panic as the conference had been extended to two days and my panel clashed with the walking event with Zoë and Lynne. Fortunately the organisers were mighty accommodating and have moved my panel to the morning so I can do both events. So that’s a paper to write added into the plan then!
 

Otherwise…
 

I was away over the weekend, which was great, so other than that I’m desperately trying to catch up with my creative journal. It’s good reflecting back with the benefit of hindsight but I really wish it was a bit more up-to-date!

 

 

 

 

 

 

MA Week 65 - Mini-dérive with Michelle

Reflection on the past week, 17^th April 2017

 

Dériving in Burley

My arty friend Michelle and I had been pondering a possible collaboration and we decided to go for a wander, a mini-dérive as it turned out. We set off from the University when I broke up for Easter on Maundy Thursday, and wandered. So even though we had a definite starting point, we weren’t sure where we’d end up. 

Grate stuff

I mentioned to Michelle, Tina Richardson’s advice to “see the familiar anew” and even though we started out on the University campus, that’s what I did. Walking with someone else, who perceived the surroundings differently to me, meant that I saw things that she picked out that I would have overlooked. A good example was the many different grates and manhole covers on campus, all with their own design. I even found a grimy corner of campus that I’d never seen before, and a bit of Woodhouse Moor I’d never walked on.  

A quiet corner of campus

 

Leaving Woodhouse Moor, we drifted down towards Cardigan Road. We chatted as we drifted, commenting on the surroundings, where might we go next, what did this used to be. I also felt much less obvious and self-conscious than when wandering alone. I enjoyed being in this old part of the city, now mainly a student area, but with lots of lovely Northernness still to enjoy. My favourite part came last; the abandoned Burley Library, painted a lovely blue that was peeling back to reveal red. So many layers and shapes.

 

Burley Library, detail

Developing some ideas

Initial ideas I jotted into my phone after the walk:

• Something with the shapes and that blue from Burley Library
• Drypoint of the wander - do a sketch first of interesting shapes, views, vignettes & combine
• Shapes from grates as a "peephole" into something else? Layer up? Acetates?

The following day, I did a sketchbook page with sketches of the most interesting shapes and scenes. I’d taken over 100 photographs (!), providing a lot of interesting source material, and the issue now is how to combine these. Then I started combining these into abstract shapes. There was a tree shape that I thought would give a centrepiece for a possible abstract. I decided it would be interesting to put this as a negative space but as I drew it it using a graphite stick and putty rubber I could see that it was turning into the map from the Mabgate abstract paintings I did for the MMU conference. Pressing on, I added a coal chute and some bricks but I wasn’t sure what to do next, so left this to try something else. The coal chute is calling to me, though. 

Ideally I would have liked to be able to photocopy the sketchbook pages onto acetate, cut them up and play around with them. It being the Easter weekend, College is closed so I decided to simply draw layers of shapes on top of one another. Again,  I expected that the tree would form a kind of natural dividing line within the page I was working up, but I’m beginning to get the sense that the tree is not really what I'm looking for. What seems to work are the geometric shapes. These are mainly circles and this presents a problem. It's difficult to etch a circle. I don’t have any dividers and a quick experiment with using a compass with an etching needle in the place of the pencil didn’t work. At the moment I don't have a solution to this but I will see if I can acquire or borrow some dividers.

 

Other sketches

I did think I’d do some painting today, but I wasn’t in a painting mood so I’ve been fighting my laptop and am now on my third blogpost of the day. I’ve also been working on a sketch of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’m trying to improve my drawing and my understanding of perspective, through action research i.e. drawing practice. I’m quite pleased with today’s effort (St Paul's 2) although it’s not perfect. I want to turn this into a mini etch at some point.











St Paul's 1

St Paul's 2











 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MA Week 62 - Etching, processes, crit… and London

Reflection on the past week, 27^th March 2017

 

Printing and processes

Following on from last week’s blogpost, I updated my overall plan but decided I needed more tactical, day by day plans, to allow me to focus and get something done. I decided that I should work around being able to get into the Print Room on Friday. I wanted to restart etching but felt unsure about how to do so.

It’s amazing what a bit of thinking time can do. A few strands came together, somehow. A couple of weeks back I had a discussion with one of my fellow students about how my health difficulties impact on my ability to produce work. I seem to have intense phases of activity followed by days or weeks of inability to do anything, even blog. She said, “that’s your practice. Work with it”. This quite obvious piece of information came as both a revelation and a relief. Within creative practice there always seems to be a driver to do work on a grand scale. Realising that smaller pieces of work can also be valid suddenly opened up new ways of working.

Allied with this, I’d been reading and pondering upon a newspaper that I’d received at the MMU conference. The illustrated paper is by Howard Read, whom I’d met and talked with briefly, and it describes his visual and academic research into the gentrification of Elephant and Castle in London. The subject material was of obvious interest to me. Alongside considerations of the removal of social housing and the creeping gentrification, Howard had discussed in detail the purpose of sketching and drawing. Again, a real insight: not all drawings have to be finalised. Indeed many drawings should not be finalised as they are a contribution to a future, finalised piece. A sketch can be just that – a visual note, so to speak.

Original photo....

These two strands manifested themselves in a realisation that I didn’t need to rush anything; I could work on a smaller scale with a more robust process. I therefore got an A5 sketchbook and did a (reversed) sketch of one of the Mabgate photos. It isn’t perfect, but it is allowed to be like that. I also moved some things around in the composition to suit my purpose. I let myself enjoy the sketching rather than pressurising myself and it worked so much better. The following evening, I found the little copper plates that hadn’t worked in the Summer, and found I’d re-ground them. I freehand-etched the same image into one of them.

 

Etching based on photo

I hadn’t been in the print room for so long that I felt slightly nervous returning. By happy coincidence, Mike (the technician) had been doing some etching so had up-to-date experience of how long to bite the plates. I bit it for 29 minutes, inked it, printed it and… it worked! 7 x 4.5cm of wonderful scratchy black marks. I spent the rest of the session working with different papers (Canaletto and Zerkel) and different levels of polishing, to get used to using the copper. The plate’s previous biting (from the Summer) has left it pitted and this gives an interesting undertone, so this is possibly something to do more deliberately as I move on. I also sanded and inked another of the little plates from the Summer ready for the next piece.

 

Crit

The same day, five of us got together for a crit. I’d brought in the paintings I did for the MMU conference plus the Mabgate office print (see this week 51 blogpost) , but by this time I’d printed the little plate and had become quite immersed in that. Ignoring this, my classmates gave me plenty of input!

Details of "tiles" from work for MMU conference

 

Again, as at the conference, there was interest in the “tiles”. There was a suggestion to introduce colour into the tiles, or to try strips. They suggested using photocopies and copies onto acetate to help composition. Another wake-up call around process. I know this – so why haven’t I been doing it? It’s been the time pressure that I’ve put myself under, of course. There was a feeling that the map elements might be too literal an interpretation of the journey, and it was suggested I consider cropping some of the work – effectively using a little square viewfinder to find points of interest. This tied in with ideas I’d had to do a few smaller pieces – paintings, prints, drawings, photos –based on the Mabgate photographs. A really interesting idea was to take a “slice” of work – why does everything have to be square, or rectangular.  

I particularly like the idea of basing something on the “tiles” but using colour and using strips so this is a probable area for experimentation.

London

The next day, the same five of us went to London. I’ve written reflections about the galleries we visited in this London Galleries page. However, there is something more to relate. We were all feeling pretty tired at about 4.30pm outside our last gallery, the Drawing Room, and after some discussion set off to walk to Elephant & Castle tube station to get the tube back to King’s Cross. We hadn’t go far when by chance we saw a bus going to King’s Cross so we boarded. This meant a top-deck view of Elephant & Castle, including the very development that Howard Read had been recording. I’ve never been to Elephant & Castle before in my life. It was such a heavy coincidence that it intuitively confirmed to me that my approach of the past week was the correct direction at this point.

 

Visiting galleries is thirsty work

MA Week 28 - Pylon Abstracts and Salford Symposium

Reflection on the past week – 23rd May 2016

 

Some interesting experiences and work this week. I haven’t been back into the print room, unfortunately, because I was ill on my afternoon off. Shame as I had written a list of things to try out. However, I have been making some progress with some little acrylic pieces. 

I pursued the idea of working up the repurposed pylon monoprint from my Week 26 post into four pieces. As time is of the essence, I decided to work straight into acrylics rather than work with pastels or cut paper as I might normally do when planning and developing  a piece. I wanted to see how the colours and paint would work.

 

Pylon 1 : spot the constructivist influence

This is one of the results at the first sketch stage. There are two or three layers of paint and I’ve used some masking tape too. It’s fairly faithful to the original monoprint but it’s clear that there is too much going on at the top left and not so much at the bottom right. I’m therefore working on a second sketch which is looking much more balanced and which I hope will be OK to reproduce on board for the End of Year show.  

It’s interesting how the marks translate, or not. The “grubby” marks of the monoprint, which give a nice industrial feel, don’t work so well in the acrylic. The inclusion of marks of different thicknesses in the acrylic version gives the work energy and movement. Not that they lack in the original; I have just had to think differently about how to represent them and how to rework the lines of the original to get the piece more balanced.

 

Crit in transit

The original four sketches were the subject of a three-phase crit at the end of last week! I put a couple of them onto whatsapp and there were suggestions they would work up as linocuts – I’m not overly experienced in linocutting but I might give that a go later on in the year. Then I had a crit with two classmates on our way to Salford (of which more later), now known as the “crit in transit”. This revealed some ideas of day and night, of lights beaming out of the darkness, and a very challenging question of whether this represents what’s going on in my head (who knows?). Later, when I finally got to Salford, another two classmates kindly had a look. There were further suggestions of taking the pieces back into print, perhaps by monoprinting from or into them, of further layering, and also the question of trying to get them up off the page more. They do look 2D, but perhaps that’s how they’re supposed to look. I’m not going to be able to try all these things before the end of year show, but I am definitely up for trying a bit more layering and I’ll do that when I go back to working on them tomorrow. 

The Salford jaunt was interesting. We met with MA students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford in a place called Atelier Artworks, an old light bulb factory. It was a strange space; industrial, dirty, under-used, disused almost, yet alive with the studios of a number of artists. Because of being ill I hadn’t really had much chance to prepare, so my responses were very much that – immediate.

 

Salford Piece 1

 

 

I concentrated on shapes and colour and produced two compressed charcoal and pastel pieces. On both the bottom layer was a rubbing of the metal stairs. There was a lot of improvement that I could immediately see; if I’d thought a bit more about it beforehand, I would have positioned my various images on piece 1 differently. As it was they overlapped too much. A lesson to learn. Don’t get overwhelmed by the situation and jump straight in. On piece 2 I think the red is a bit too intense. I liked the colour of the two doors, bright red and bright emerald green (these were their colours in real life), but I wish I’d left it as a black pencil drawing on the red rubbing.

Salford Piece 2

On the other hand, producing these as immediate responses means there is a lot to develop – there are no filtered or refined ideas in there. The shapes and colours can be used in different ways in future pieces. I really wish I’d taken more photographs and made more rubbings of the stairs to use now I’ve got back. Another lesson to learn. Part of the immediate response also means that these pieces bear the imprint of the site; not only the stair-rubbings, but the fact that I sat on the uneven, cracked concrete floor to do them. This means the lines are not straight because the floor was so uneven; something that I couldn’t filter out as I actually did the work.  I am beginning to understand, and to like, a little bit more about responding to place through these experiences (the Armley walk, the pylon photos, the Salford Symposium). 

We had a crit in groups of three and one of the comments on piece 2 was that it was like looking through a window when there was a dangerous chemical incident going on. It made me see the piece in a different way and I liked it a bit more then. I think the first stage in developing something from this would be to take the stair pattern from piece 1 and work with it; this was the first thing that captured my attention as walked up to the space where we’d be working. 

There wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked to interact with the students from other institutions. I think most of the others probably felt the same as I did – slightly nervous, happier to stick with our own classmates. It would have been nice to have had an ice-breaker to get to know people and perhaps more time to view each other’s work. Having had the experience, I wish I could go back and do it again and get more out of it.