Designing with Scissors

Recently I attended a 5 day retreat at Committed to Cloth led by Leslie Morgan.  It's a time to spend on your own work with input from Leslie whenever you need it.  She is very good at asking leading questions and helping to move your work in a totally different direction!

My theme for the retreat was taste and I had got the nursery rhyme oranges and lemons stuck in my head.  The starting point on the first day was mark making and so while I was thinking about oranges I printed with various different round objects.  These first two are on large sheets of brown paper.

I also liked using white acrylic paint on black paper.

Designing with Scissors
I started cutting circles out of one of the brown sheets and cutting those into segments.  There were some interesting shapes left over which I tried on top of the printing.  I worked on the black A3 paper in landscape format.

I printed some orange circles.

I tried turning the paper to portrait and added some more segments.

Leslie suggested I used some L shapes to test tightening up the composition.

I cut the sheet of black down to this.

The photos above and below show the design process which took place over two or three days with other design ideas going on at the same time.  It was so great to have a wallboard where I could pin things up and think about the pieces.  Sadly I don't have room at home for one.

In this series I had the piece of A3 black paper and was auditioning a diagonal line.   First I tried with some white ribbon.

Then I tried an orange line.

Then I looked at the composition with the L shapes again.

 

I cut the sheet down and made a triptych.  I auditioned the pieces in different places and different ways up until I was satisfied with the design.

This last version won!

I really enjoyed designing with scissors.  And a craft knife and ruler!   Whether anything I made ever gets to be a textile is open to question.

If you're interested there's a post about this retreat on my personal blog: Newly Creative.

Bernice

Workshop works in progress 2 - Rusty & Gnarly

I'm one of those people who need deadlines; I can make anything stretch out forever unless I have an end in sight. When I wrote the previous blog post, tying up loose ends from 2018, I set myself an arbitrary deadline of the end of January for Part 2. It is creeping up on me now (it's today!) and so I will set to it and tell you about the workshop I did last year with Alysn Midgelow-Marsden, called 'Rusty and Gnarly'.

After a quick chat, meeting up with old friends and new, there was a brief introduction from Alysn, explaining her way of tutoring, which is very much about encouraging us to play with the techniques and skills she gives us and seeing where it takes us, based loosely on our inspiration for the workshop.

Some of my rusty inspiration images, taken in St Ives when I went to see the Patrick Heron exhibition (see previous blog here).

Setting up the rusting process:

We layered a wide variety of fabrics and papers with a myriad of rusty objects, dampening the layers and spraying liberally with vinegar as we went along. Some suitable objects were also wrapped and tied tightly, sometimes with extra inclusions. Finally, weighed down to ensure good contact with the 'rusty stuff', they were placed in a separate room and left until the next day. I did spot Alysn spraying everything again a few times to make sure they stayed damp, while we were working. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of this.

We moved on to looking at our inspiration and the images we had brought with us, thinking about why we chose them and the specific things about them that we wanted to focus on - descriptive words and feelings.

Along with the above St Ives rust images, I also took this photo of an amazing tractor wheel - a lucky find on the slipway at Stein last Summer. Several people have said that I should have brought it home with me as it was obviously abandoned but no room unfortunately (and very heavy!).

We then spent the rest of the day exploring our choice of many different ways of making marks on a variety of dry and wet surfaces, fabrics and papers, printing, painting, playing with colour, dripping and dabbing, remembering our earlier discussions about the key elements of our inspirational images, before Alysn told us to put them away and not look at them again.


These photos of my mark-making, peeling paint explorations show them after they have been painted over with dilute procion dye or acrylic inks, which I actually did the following day but unfortunately  I have no  photos of them before I did that.

I used a drop cloth underneath while I was painting over them, as I often love them just as much as the work!

The following morning began with the great unwrapping of our rust dyeing. I must admit to an element of disappointment with some of my results. Although I had some interesting marks, there were other examples being revealed around the room which were definitely more spectacular. I think maybe my 'rusty stuff' wasn't rusty enough or I didn't use enough of it.

I was hoping for more of the turquoise from this wrapped copper but the small safety pins produced some interesting marks ...

and again on this wrap, which was slightly more successful.

Some interesting marks here ...

The fabrics were neutralised to prevent them from rusting any further, which can cause them to disintegrate over time. I couldn't help thinking that a bit more rusting might not be a bad idea for some of mine!

We spent the rest of the day in various activities - over painting with procion dye, acrylic ink, adding more colour if necessary. Many of the group worked on metal heat patination and embossing to make small metal samples to include in their work. I had brought some patinated metal pieces from previous workshops with me so I concentrated on getting more colour into my fabric and paper samples.

I had some success and by the end of the day my table looked like this!

The final day was a 'bringing it together' day and I had rather a lot to choose from! We went back to our focus words and feelings and began to play around with placing different fabrics together, tearing and layering as we went. This part of any work is always an incredibly slow process for me. I've worked with Alysn many times - she knows me well and just leaves me to it, with just a helpful word here and there. I sometimes wonder if I'm over-thinking things but I've tried different ways and still end up placing and re-placing the different elements of a piece many times over until it feels right.

These are some of my trial compositions, layering up my papers and fabrics and I like some more than others.

The one on the left above looks a bit too symmetrical but the other has possibilities. I actually started stitching the following composition ...

... but now I'm not so sure about the cruciform arrangement so I'll probably unpick that and change it. I remember reading somewhere that Julia Caprara, whose work I absolutely love, believed that you should never unpick any stitches - just add more! I wonder if I'll ever be able to be like that.

I would like to find a way to get more texture into them - they feel a bit flat to me at the moment. I think this will be one I will take further as it is not quite so flat. The paper plate will be cut into several smaller circles.

I'm not sure when that will happen, though as there are other deadlines looming, the most important being our first exhibition of 2019, which will be 'Revealed' at The Quilt and Stitch Village at Uttoxeter in April. Co-incidentally, I've just re-worked and finished a reverse applique copper and fabric piece for that exhibition - here's a sneak peek.

Remembering what I said about needing deadlines - that was also started on a workshop with Alysn and was the first time I'd ever stitched into metal ... six years ago!

Cath

Looking

Looking at something – anything – is more interesting than doing anything else, ever…

                                                                                                                   Patrick Heron

I wasn’t sure about this quote when I first read it last week at Tate St Ives – my love of music means listening is also very interesting for me – but, in relation to my textile art, many of Patrick Heron's  words aptly describe my own impetus and inspiration. His approach to painting came from direct visual responses to the world and his belief that all painting is abstract to some extent also resonates with my own inclinations. I love the way he manipulated flatness, space, colour and line when depicting what he saw when ‘looking at something’.

(N.B. - all images are my own photographs from the exhibition, as photography was allowed. However, some are not quite straight due to external factors. All italics are Patrick Heron's words)

Window for Tate Gallery St Ives : 1992-93 – one of the largest unleaded coloured glass windows in the world

The picture is not the vehicle of meaning: the picture is the meaning …

For someone who struggles sometimes with the concept-based approach to art, trying desperately to decide what my work ‘means’ (if anything) I loved this quote. I could really relate to his belief that the impact of the work on the viewer does not depend on it describing the world outside and that any meaning comes from the balance between the different forms, shapes, light and colour within it. 

And what colour there was - everywhere - I revelled in it!

… the reason why the stripes sufficed as the formal vehicle of the colour, was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes … With stripes one was free to deal only with the interaction between varying quantities of varied colours…

                                                                                                                

Green and Mauve Horizontals : 1958

The organisation of the exhibition highlighted several recurring features of composition in Patrick Heron's work. I found the following few most interesting:

Each colour-shape or area, however large or small, is as important as any other.

Orange and Lemon with Small Violet : 1977

Balance is often created by bunching forms along an edge and by the inter-relation of different sized shapes.

Square Green with Orange, Violet and Lemon : 1969

I was fascinated by the significance given to the edges in a painting and the way he managed to achieve a sense of balance through asymmetry.

Dark Purple and Ceruleum : 1965

Painting should resolve asymmetric, unequal, disparate formal ingredients into a state of architectonic harmony which, while remaining asymmetrical, nevertheless constitutes a perfect state of balance or equilibrium …

                                                                                                 

Big Complex Diagonal with Emerald and Reds : March 1972 - September 1974

I noticed that the painting above took him over two years to complete and then was amazed to read this quote beside the following huge, glorious canvas and I understood why …

My fifteen-foot canvases, involving sixty or more square feet of a single colour, were painted (in oil paint) from end to end with small Japanese water-colour brushes. But one doesn’t hand-paint for the sake of the ‘hand-done’; one merely knows that the surfaces worked in this way can – in fact they must – register a different nuance of spatial evocation and movement in every single square millimetre.

Cadmium with Violet. Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian : 1969

Patrick Heron's work is much more varied than it appears here but I’ve concentrated particularly on these large colour canvases as they are the works which speak with the most power to me - colour is certainly the most significant feature for me in my own work. However, the various composition features identified above also gave me much thought – and continue to do so now we’ve returned home and I begin to think of my own work again.

I did find myself looking a little more carefully as we wandered around St Ives later – specifically at rust in all its glory. I needed some photos as inspiration for a workshop later this year – more on that later.

Watch this space and keep looking ...

Cath