There’s been a lack of updates for a while, because as usual I’ve over-estimated how many hours in the day there are and signed up to more courses!
One of which is a wonderful course with the ellusive Tansy Hargan of Palimpsest Parade, whose work I’ve admired for years – I just couldn’t let the opportunity to learn from her slip away.
Her iconic thumbnail sketches are just too delicious. Tansy is a very pragmatic and practical artist, with a relentless output of work and a distinct style: all things I want to try and achieve in my own work! Despite that, the course has been surprisingly relaxing and mindful and I’ve rediscovered the pure joy of playing with felt tips and coloured pencils and crayons.
My project is looking at our local fields, woods, and the little duck pond. I’ve been walking around there every single day for the past year, so as well as having a lot of photos to hand, I now feel very familiar with it all (we’re not supposed to be there – it’s trespassing really, derelict farmland waiting for the builders to build on it). We’ve devised our own routes and loops around the fields, sometimes going one way around the pond to spot the moorhens, other times going the other way round to look at the alder and hazel catkins. We’ve made new paths through the long grass, and it’s become part of the wallpaper for lockdown for us. I’m also back on the antihistamines, as hazel pollen is one of my allergy triggers!
These thumbnail sketches were done from these photos, taken over the last few months. Plein air is my next hurdle, working out where and when to go where other people won’t come over to see what I’m up to!
The colour comes from collaged swatches of painted paper, created after my experiments with mark making and automatic drawing above.
And not to do things by halves, I’ve signed up to a different sort of collage course with Jane Davies. A few weeks of trying different compositions in my #100dayproject, and I felt in need of a little more inspiration, or a creative kick up the pants – however you want to call it!
I’ve loved Jane’s work for years, so it’s really exciting to be doing this with her. The courses are hosted on a WordPress blog (like this one) so if you’re not familiar with WordPress it can be a bit of a learning curve just getting to the course material itself, but it does mean that everyone’s work can be featured and critiqued by Jane herself (and the other participants) in a totally private forum, and refreshingly totally away from Facebook. I haven’t started the collages yet, but I’ve painted a lot of paper!
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