Naive bookplates

Testing, testing....

Just tweaking and trying different papers and messing about with ink. 

This last being something one of my cats was apparently doing overnight, as I woke up to find black paw marks all through the house.

Keats House in Spring

Well, it was certainly the most fiddly of the four but I stuck down the very last leaves this morning:

For some technical reason I have not yet (if I ever will) fathomed there is a distinct distortion on vertical images. To be rectified when I finally persuade my daughter to get out her Canon this week and take a swatch of proper photographs.

Two awkward nuns and two bouncing dogs

= two recent bits and bobs.

The nun painting, the sketchbook idea of which I posted earlier, is finished.

 

They are two of a group who all looked really seriously out of place among the desporting semi-naked bodies on the beach at the Witterings on a bank holiday a few summers ago.

The bouncing dogs emerged from something rather more problematic.

It's a fragment of a painting I sat up late into the night doing. My only excuse for this aberration is that I must have been hallucinating. The next day, thinking better of the rubbishy result I chopped it up in disgust and cut out the only bit I was even vaguely happy with. That'll teach me. Too much detail. So I've stripped what was a complicated image of the local port back to a couple of bouncing dogs on the sea wall. And will put it behind my ear for reference for a future minimalist painting.

Wild Weather Blowing In

is the name of the picture I finished over the weekend.

I had had an idea for doing some local fishing port scenes for a while and have many sketchbook squiggles and snapshots to prove it but meeting up with a fellow naive (wave wave to Judy Joel) down there last week was the push I needed to put brush to canvas.

It's a start. The next one will include the harbourside dogs and pebbly beach. And there is also the old customs house, but that may be for another angle.
First I need a now for something completely different moment to release an idea that's been nagging at the back of my mind for a while: linocuts.

Haven't done any for a while and my fingers are itching after finding an odd piece of lino and inks and being still well an truly immersed in the 18th century thanks to Andrew Motion and my visit to Keats House just before Christmas.

I came across this old print while decluttering the studio (the task that never finishes).

As you see I err on the side of the simple rather than complicated multi-pieced prints. My "naivity" has always been more naturally attracted to ye olde Englishe broadsheet style rather than the slick art deco one. Which is a very happy coincidence given that the technicalities of the latter would be well outside my comfort, skills and, um, patience zone.

Bits, pieces and sticky tape

This is a bit of a mess, I know. 

I painted this picture, see, and after spending about a couple of hours tore it up in disgust and binned it. 

The next day I could be seen picking through the rubbish to retrieve it, cut out the re-usable bits, stick them together mosaic fashion and add bits, subtract bits, until I got an idea of what I wanted.

It is now pinned up for use as a working sketch.

Reality re-ordered

Sometimes, just stumbling around from site to site on the Wonderful World of Internet apart from wasting precious time, you come across somewhere really exciting and thought provoking that sets you off on another series of stepping stones. In the end you forget where you were, which in the case of the interesting blog I came across this morning I have. I shall try hard to retrace my footsteps later on.

But I did note down a quotation that popped up on the first page:
"Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic re-ordering of reality."
I love that. I have inscribed it into my sketchbook
Camille Paglia came up with that gem. I had never heard of her before but will now make it a mission to find out more about her.

In the meantime here is one of my re-orderings of reality, a largish (for me!) (21x26 cms) mixed media on paper which was a take on a tiny (7x10) fragment of another.