Paintings, Jewellery, Textile Work

I work in different, distinct areas – watercolour painting, textile work and jewellery – and sometimes I think of  myself as a graphic artist,  sometimes a textile artist, and sometimes a designer/maker, but really I’m all of these.  I also take photographs, and I write. There are lots of ways these different areas overlap, and the common denominator is landscape, and the seasons; rural or urban, summer and winter, in one way or another landscape gets into whatever I am doing.

This is both website and blog. There are galleries of work (see the tabs at the top of the page) and on the Home page are posts that continue here below this; either scroll down or try these links for a selection on watercolour, photography, textile work, jewellery, and landscape - or search using the Category list at the foot of the page.

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Papergirl Leeds

Papergirl Leeds 2013 is the art of giving art. It’s an original, playful idea and very simple; after the Papergirl Leeds Exhibition later this year every single piece of work submitted to the show will be rolled up and handed to members of the public by papergirls (and boys) on bicycles at the Papergirl Leeds Ride event.

I love the idea of creating and giving away. It’s a refreshing, liberating opportunity – and giving away in this wide, sweeping, public distribution makes it appealing in quite a different way to the feeling of making art for someone you know. I like the way that the work will be made available randomly, like snowfall or leaves in the wind. I wonder who will end up with the pieces I put in to the exhibition?

Does it matter that they may, perhaps, not be appreciated and end up discarded, dumped into the nearest waste paper bin? Not really. Or not to me, anyway. It’s a wonderful exercise in letting go. It’s been a good opportunity to create something in a different way and to feel that I am sending these thoughts and images out like messages in a bottle. They may sink or float – they may find an audience and possibly a home, or they may perish without a trace. As I put them in the post box they are gone, launched into the world, and they go with my best wishes and my love.

Unintentional Art

When I’m out and about, occasionally I catch sight of something that’s been made, or hung, or arranged or displayed by someone who had no conscious intention of making a work of art at the time – and yet the result is something strikingly different, something that is expressing an idea, or maybe just presenting itself to the world in a way that says, ‘Look, here I am, take notice of me’.

I don’t want to get into the whole complex business of what constitutes a work of art, or at least, not here and now – but there are times when I feel liberated by stumbling across something in the street that could have been self consciously show-cased in a gallery as an art installation, and I want to celebrate its glory and freshness and integrity. ‘Yes!’ I want to shout, ‘you’re wonderful!’ So I take pictures.

These drain covers are a case in point. They’ve all been carefully constructed so that when in place the design of the stone paving continues across them in an uninterrupted flow; all you are supposed to see when they’re in their right places are the edges of the metal frames. But as each one has been taken out from time to time and put back, they’ve been jumbled up and now they’re a far more interesting visual picture – and a framed one at that. I stood a long time looking at them and enjoying their different shapes and textures, their tonal values and their colour, and the composition as a whole. If this had been hanging on the wall of a gallery I would have stood just as long and looked as thoroughly, but I confess that finding it in the street I enjoyed it more.

Actually I often like to look at drain covers – and street furniture generally. They are things so often ignored and overlooked. I have no idea why this inspection cover has been painted red. Right in the middle of a cobbled street, and not six feet from a neighbouring one that’s a natural unpainted brownish grey, it’s saying something important, but I have no idea what it is. Street furniture has a language of its own.

I’m not sure if this last example really counts as unintentional art, but I found it so arresting when I saw it the other day that I can’t resist including it. What are we to infer from this washing line, with just one single sock? A whole multitude of possibilities ran through my mind – and more entertaining notions than the sort I usually have when looking at something calling itself Art. Long live the art of the everyday, the art of everyone, the art that’s unintentional. All we have to do is get out there and see it.

Say It in Words, or in Pictures?

I have a thing about words, there’s no denying it.

It’s always been a bit of a problem for me really, because I like writing almost as much as I like drawing or painting or working with fabrics, and to move between words and images is a complicated thing. I think it was Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right side of the Brain who describes the strange sensation she had when trying to talk to students about drawing while actually in the process of doing it, and finding herself weirdly and uncharacteristically inarticulate. Drawing and writing really are polar opposites.

Trying to put words into a piece of visual work and make the two things work together is even more complicated, and risky, because anything legible in a known alphabet tends immediately to draw attention away from everything else – but inevitably it’s something I find myself trying to do.

I’ve stitched together fabric and paper with hand written texts, and embroidered over the top. And I’ve written on paper that I’ve then stitched and painted and screwed up and torn and practically destroyed, before attempting to put it back together in a way that makes sense (not a comfortable thing to do, to make yourself deliberately tear up something that you’ve spent time carefully crafting). All this was appropriate in these pieces of work, because I was preoccupied with the way buildings – and landscape – are worn away over time, are eroded by sun and rain and wind and frost, finally collapse or disintegrate and then are rearranged into something else. During all of this, the history of the process is built into the structure itself and so in a way all kinds of stories are embedded in the material, whether it’s rock or mud or timber or brick or stone.

Then I had the idea of doing the same thing with jewellery, and this is more complicated still, because if you’re wearing something with words on it you’re making a statement. For me, the text has always needed an element of mystery about it, so that it’s a story that is possible to understand only in part, in the same way that a book with pages missing or a letter that’s damaged and illegible is more fascinating because it’s incomplete.

In the end, it’s hard to be sure whether words aren’t better left where they belong, on the page (or nowadays on the screen)…… I think for the time being anyway, I’m happy to leave it that way, but who knows?

I am What I See

Whenever I look at something with all my attention – look so that I’m soaking it in and really seeing – everything else stops. It’s why for me going out for a walk is such a good way to unwind, because I can’t go far before I see something that I want to stop and gaze at.

We have a choice about the things we look at and concentrate on. In fact we have a choice about whether we really look at all. At times it would be easy to go through a day without stopping to look (and also to listen, touch, and smell) and sometimes it can even be hard to do it at all. This is what depression is about, when it feels as if you are locked in and don’t have a choice, and then it doesn’t matter what you look at, you can’t make the connection or escape from this imprisoned state of mind.

(A quick note, though, about the picture above – I couldn’t resist using it to illustrate that last sentence, but I didn’t take the photograph while feeling depressed! Far from it, in fact. I love the wonderful richness of the texture of the wall and the wood of the shutter, the pattern and contrast of the bars and the mesh, the subtlety of the colour and the mysteriousness of what might lie inside, behind the open window….)

If you’re depressed you tend to go about not seeing at all, or worse, noticing only things that reinforce feelings of bleakness and despair, so I’ve learnt that it’s important to maintain good habits all the time. I find that going out every day to take photographs but more importantly, to look, is much more than gathering source material and hoping that I’ll stumble upon something exciting. It’s more than taking some much needed exercise. More than anything else it’s about deliberately being aware, and paying attention.

In fact recently, I’ve learnt something astonishing – that simply by paying attention to the right things and making a habit of it, over time we can – and in fact, do – actually change the way our brains are wired.

This is from an e mail newsletter that I subscribe to called Just One Thing, by Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist from California:

“Moment to moment, the flows of thoughts and feelings, sensations and desires, and conscious and unconscious processes sculpt your nervous system like water gradually carving furrows and eventually gullies on a hillside. Your brain is continually changing its structure. The only question is: is it for better or worse?

In particular, because of what’s called ‘experience-dependent neuroplasticity,’ whatever you hold in attention has a special power to change your brain. Attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: it illuminates what it rests upon and then sucks it into your brain – and your self.

Therefore, controlling your attention – becoming more able to place it where you want it and keep it there is the foundation of changing your brain, and thus your life, for the better.”

I’m still not sure exactly why, but this idea got me really excited. Possibly it’s because I like the tangible fact that something I’ve always felt to be true is actually a scientific fact. More probably it’s because I am so preoccupied with landscape and the way water erodes and changes it that I find this such a powerful metaphor, and now I can feel myself creating new channels in the landscape of my mind. If my brain is continually changing its structure, I’m determined to try to make it for the better!

Feeling the River Flow

A few days ago I walked down to the river. I hadn’t meant to go, but once I was outside I realised that as it had rained the previous day and most of the morning, the river would probably be up, and the usual sluggish flow might be something rather more exciting.

As soon as I got there I scrambled down the bank to get as close to the water as I could. You get a completely different feeling about a river if you can get right down almost to the same level as the water; suddenly you begin to realise the power of the movement, the strength of the surge, and as I crouched down to take pictures I understood how easy if would be to get swept away if you slipped and fell in.

I love rivers. There’s something about watching moving water that is so compelling; it holds your attention like nothing else and allows you to stop thinking, to let go. A couple of years ago I spent a  day at the Strid in the Yorkshire Dales, a really dramatic stretch of the river Wharfe where the stream is forced between a narrow channel in the rock and churns and boils as it thunders through, and standing there you’re even more aware of the power of water, and what it can do.

It was this day at the Strid that led me to develop the designs for jewellery that I later called the River Collection, and from that moment on I kept coming back to the idea of the river as a point of visual reference. But the idea of the river goes beyond this as a source of inspiration. As Rumi wrote:

“When you do something from your soul, you feel a river flowing in you, a joy.”

Looking Closely

I’m not the only one around here that spends time looking closely at things. After several grey days the sun broke through this morning and all of a sudden it felt like spring. I was glad to see these two figures in the distance, one of them with a camera, peering intently at the crocuses that every year cover this bank like a snowdrift.

I love the way the season, the weather and the time of day can alter everything so dramatically. I can go for the same walk on a different day or at a different time, and suddenly be stopped in my tracks by the sight of something astonishing.

Watching Paint Dry

Someone asked me the other day which medium I like using best. It’s a hard question to answer, but I think whatever I’m currently using I’d probably say that’s the one I love most, (though ask me that again when I’m immersed in jewellery making, or when all I want to do is stitch fabric, and it’ll probably be a different story). At the moment it’s watercolour, and drawing and watercolour painting are both equally important for me but for rather different reasons.

Actually watercolour has characteristics that make it easy to get obsessive about. Some of this has to do with the paint itself; it’s so enjoyable to mix and dilute and load onto a brush and to watch what it does when it get on to the paper – whether it’s a wet wash that runs and soaks in, or a dry swish of colour put on with the side of the brush, or two colours put on wet next to each other and allowed to collide and then merge and mix on the paper to create fluid explosions of new colour between them. I could do this for hours, and sometimes I do just this and nothing more – simply mix two colours in varying proportions.

I try to look closely at something every day, with complete attention, for several minutes – and though drawing inevitably means doing this, sometimes it’s more a matter of simply soaking up the experience of the moment and doing something like quietly mixing paint, thinking of absolutely nothing else. I have certain colours that are old friends – like aureolin yellow and cobalt blue which make lovely greyish greens, or cobalt blue and burnt umber, which make beautiful subtle greys – that I return to when I need consolation and some peace and stillness. After a while nothing else matters, and at the end of a day when I’ve painted like this the colours I’ve been mixing stay in my subconscious mind so that I see them when I fall asleep and sometimes they fill my dreams.

Returning to watercolour painting after not having done it for a while can be a pretty horrible experience though, because it is so unpredictable and demanding. Throw yourself into it without having mind and heart prepared and without imposing some sort of discipline on yourself, and the day is doomed. This is the side of watercolour that is not what people expect when they think they’d like to take it up, but it’s the flip side of the coin; get the practice right, and it’s the most fulfilling and rewarding form of art practice that I know, even more than drawing. I like the fact that it requires me to slow down and collect all my attention, to be in harmony with myself and to be focussed in the right way, and that if I’m not, all of that will be immediately and horribly obvious right there in front of me on paper. It’s what makes the expression art practice really mean something.

Under Winter Skies

I take photographs almost every day, and in winter when the colours in the landscape are subtle and subdued, the most exciting thing is often the sky. Even from indoors I can see plenty of sky from the windows and recently the weather has provided an amazing show of special effects, particularly in the mornings and evenings. This is one of the things that I like about winter, that the days are so short it’s quite usual to see both sunrise and sunset, and sometimes the skies are breathtakingly beautiful.

A few days ago I watched the sun rise over the moor and then from the other side of the house watched it set again in the afternoon behind the bare branches of trees. As the sun went down the sky turned from very pale gold to a colours so subtle they haven’t got names, though there was a certain amount of amber, and many different greys; there was a cloud of Paynes Grey that gently elongated itself and drifted sideways. All together I watched for about three minutes and in that time I could see that the changes in colour and light were happening so fast that every second was measurably different. It made me think that this is how things are, in nature and for us too, we just don’t think of it that way – we’re always thinking that the moment we’re looking at something, that’s the way that it is, and it’s not- in fact everything changes continually, and so do we.

This morning it rained steadily for hours under a sky that was a solid unbroken grey, but by lunchtime the rain cleared, and all afternoon we had patches of blue sky with a parade of clouds of all shapes and sizes and colours, some of them great piled up creamy white constructions with just the softest shadowing of pale grey; some big dramatic blue-grey monsters hurrying sideways, some long thin streaks of grey moving equally fast, and some hazy, nebulous stuff drifting and disappearing….

I went for a walk and on my way back found myself looking up through the branches of the beech trees at a cloud right overhead that was completely monochrome, a dark, totally neutral grey that had absolutely no colour of any kind, but at its edges the sky was a brilliant blue occupied at the horizon by a range of pink and white clouds that were so solid they looked like mountains.

The contrast between the colour in the distance and the gloom of colourless grey overhead was so extraordinary I thought something dramatic must be about to happen, and sure enough the wind picked up and hailstones started to bounce on the pavement around me, though not for long; within a minute the sky above me was clear and the sun was shining straight in my eyes as I tried to take pictures of another cloud that appeared behind the trees, grey with brilliantly glowing white edges. The wind kept catching me in gusts so strong that made it hard to hold the camera still and I couldn’t be sure I was shooting straight.

I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching clouds. I really need to be outside if only for a short while every day, whatever the weather, whenever I possibly can – not just to get air in my lungs and get my legs moving, but to get my mind and my heart still and to wake up my soul. Today I was tired when I went out, but despite the cold it was so exhilarating I could have stayed and watched until the light was completely gone.