Drawing Tuesday at Brunei Gallery and Wellcome Collection

 Drawing Tuesday last week was back at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS. Id brought coloured pencils and pens  but was so overwhelmed by all the wonderful textiles I didn't know where to begin! So I settled for something simpler (haa!) a selection of silver bracelets rendered in graphite

After lunch at Mary Ward ( delicious vegetarian food)  I headed back to Wellcome Collection to  collect some more information for the Contemporary Drawing Sketchbook Course

 On the previous  visit I'd been intrigued by the x-ray quality  of  white ink drawings on slate by Michael Hopkins  so came armed with black paper and white pencils and crayons!

 They're beautiful when you look at them closely, the combination of hard and soft edges and diffuse overlapping shapes reminiscent of bones. On a different scale to Ian McKeevers 'Temple Paintings' but sharing some of the same qualities .

In the 'electricity' exhibition ( no photos allowed) I didn't get past the first room with the very early studies of discharge patterns . Again the black paper and white gel pen came in handy and I remembered the subtlety  of Rothko's  graphite on black  in  trying to show the 'Lichtenberg Figures' on copper plates.

Contemporary Drawing Sketchbook - Data Gathering at Wellcome Collection

On Thursday,  after lunch  in the members room and a quick look round rooms 90,91 at British Museum ( watercolours and ' where the thunderbird lives'),  I headed off to Wellcome Collection for the first session of City Lit Contemporary Drawing Sketchbook  course.

After a discussion on various ways of recording : eg different materials ; collage; continuous line; making notes; we spent an hour each on 2 different activities: drawing 2  commissioned works by contemporary artists ( lots to choose from)  looking at methods used and how they'd interpreted their them and then drawing from exhibition ' Electricity- the spark of life'             

 I first studied the glass interpretation of  the swine flu virus by   Luke Jerram, fascinated by the different qualities of the glass itself but also the shadows and reflection. I could see rings of of papercut  people in the shadows . Intentional, accidental, does it matter?

Then in the  reading room , high up ,difficult to see  easily , 'Sewing Body'  by Alice Anderson  which incorporated personal objects and a needlework figure wrapped in fine copper thread. I used 0.1 pen to work out what was going on in the lines  in contrast to the graphite I'd used for the glass. Note to self - try different materials using same subject.

On her website, found picture of wrapped lightbulb , appropriate for the electricity theme  and also some photographs of her performances. Capturing motion is the main theme that came out of my observations.

 No photos allowed in the electricity exhibition so  had to do a lot of searching for similar model of  fantastic 3d model of electricity consumption assembled from hundreds of daily record cards.

 This led to  all kinds of   wonder in Parametric 3D forms

 Then a study  of  first X-Ray  by Roentgen  and  trying to capture the motion in film on  Cineradiography articulation of limbs

 I was just thinking I could do with a book showing details of hand anatomy  and drawing instruction when  the following  day  I picked up How to Draw Hands Oliver Senior  for £1 in the Fleur Bookshop!

 I've long had a bit of a thing about hands - in Wellcome collection; double hand print ;  and look what's currently under the sewing machine for International Threads .

On Saturday  I met up with some members of CQKent at  Oast Quilters, with an interesting  talk by Mary McIntosh  and today I'm returning to Brunei  Gallery  and then back to Wellcome for some more data gathering  for this Thursday. Housework has been abandoned this week!

Knit and Stitch Olympia March 2017

Despite not arriving home from Rydal  until after 9pm on Friday, I was at Olympia for Knit and Stitch on good time , if a little weary.  I had volunteered to help out on the QGBI workshop ,  helping  visitors make log cabin  blocks for Linus Quilts . Despite having practised at home, even I got the odd piece the wrong way round! Some  lovely people: a lady who made tiny shoes; another who did embroidery and applique in Tracey Emin's studio; a young girl back for a second go so she could perfect her seams ( making a better job than I did!).

I had some time in the morning for a bit of retail therapy (12wt  threads from Barnyarns and some African strip cloth) but mainly a good look round the textile galleries. There may not be many of them  but they were all worth a visit. it was lovely to see my 'Eroding Margins' again in the CQ 'On the Edge' .  I  found the exhibits by the 62 Group and Quinary   thought provoking and inspiring  but what stole my heart  was 'What do I need To do to make it Ok?'  I literally stopped in my tracks when I saw the  Dorothy Caldwell  pieces !

I'm still hugely influenced by the class I did with Dorothy in Puglia and a lot of my  work is based on using old textiles , including 'Eroding Margins'  which is made of indigo dyed old quilts,  so this exhibit on darning and mending really resonated with me.  Her notebooks and samples on display were a delight, I love to see the process of people's thoughts and making as much as the finished work.

Rydal Hall Retreat - more sketching than stitching

My annual retreat at Rydal Hall with the NWCQ group  seemed to go faster than ever - this is our 5th time there. I  left the large piece  I'm working on at the moment at home with the intention of just responding to this environment I know so well now. I did very little stitching  apart from the postcard above and  some time each day on my daily stitching project  but went out painting every day  

 My bedroom was in a different part of the house than I've stayed before with views out the back towards the wood. There was a lot of fallen trees -  you could see how shallow the root system was on the one above,  no surprise given the rocky substrate it was growing on. There were bulbs around the trunk having to change their direction of growth !

Lots of logpiles around too although not quite so colourful as the ones last year. New sculptures to admire and older ones beginning to merge and disappear into their surroundings.

My studio space in the work room soon became covered in scraps of fabric and sketchbooks. !

I put together the start of a Journal Quilt based on the rushing water and stones ( seen  here with part of my daily stitching 'winding cloth' .)

The 'grot' overlooking Rydal Falls is a favourite if frustrating painting place - it's impossible to capture the colours and the patterns of water but I enjoy trying.  It's my first port of call every year  and at least it was shelter from the sleet.

Another day, another painting station was a bench in the 'quiet garden'  not quite as peaceful as you'd think with the fighter jets practising overhead !

I was especially lucky this time in that I had company  on sketching expeditions on 2 days . On Wednesday morning Millie, Pauline and I headed off to the art shop in Grasmere followed  by coffee before heading off up some back roads to do some painting. We found a narrow metal bench :too high for me, my legs were dangling ;Pauline had a stone for her feet but got in a tangle with the Velcro on her coat ;Millie became embedded in her tripod stool. Then the rain came and washed our paintings away. Time for another venue once we'd recovered from  laughing. I introduced them to my favourite bench at Rydal Water ( much more substantial  and the weather behaved itself a bit better).  

The  clouds lifted a bit, the wind dropped and we were treated to  spectacular mirror-like reflections

The next day it was Millie, Karen and I that headed up a path behind the house  following Rydal Beck upstream.

Still very damp, using a tree stump as a  table, it took ages for the paint to dry  but there's something magical about  painting in situ. Even when  the results are not that great, the process  and sense of place make for a memorable experience.

 As a group we had less planned than in previous years, we've got much more comfortable about a relaxed timetable ( fitting around meals and traybakes of course!).  Judy F. gave us a slide presentation showing highlights from the last 6 years . Lots of trying to work out who was who from back views on walks  and trying to remember what year we did   different activities ( blind stitching probably the most memorable)

Linda B.  set us   an interesting  design activity  on Tuesday in the hour before the bar opened.  We'd been told to bring an A3 piece of paper - painted, printed , crumpled, whatever. Linda then divided each sheet into 12 and then redistributed them to us , the challenge to use some of everything in a composition. .  

As the selection I had were so diverse, I made 2 pieces ( above)

It resulted in a wide range of responses  in scope and scale including some 3D structures. Linda asked who had  started off with a  concept and  who had responded to the papers themselves   - roughly 50:50 split . She's already written it up for CQ newsletter!

We headed back home from Friday lunchtime onwards, refreshed and reinvigorated with time spent in such a lovely location and good company .Already looking forward to same time , same place next year.