Scary Stuff…

 

Scary thing #1

At college on Wednesday we talked about our upcoming exhibition – what to include, how to hang stuff, etc. And then the words ‘artist’s statement’ were uttered. Aaagh! We were shown an example – possibly an example of how not to write one, as it was, in the opinion of several of us, incomprehensible. And ungrammatical. [Who am I to talk? But I can get it right if I want to!]

Of course I Googled when I got home, and found 1 or 2 hits – or ‘about 1,440,000’ according to Google – and some of those were quite helpful – no, I didn’t look at quite all of them. However, this morning I stumbled across an article on the subject in an old copy of Quilting Arts, and that was the best. So the statement has been written and Wensleydale thinks it’s OK [not that he’s biased or anything].

That was the first scary thing.

Scary thing #2

We badgered Sue for the summer home work –and she gave it to us. ‘Make 100 drawings’. Double aaagh! [Possibly aaaaaagh?] Fortunately it does say that a drawing can be stitch, sketch, painting, printing, collage, photography or mixed media, and I think the word ‘computer’ was mentioned, although it’s not written down.

I calculate that to achieve 100 drawings by the start of next term I need to average more than one a day. We got the good news on Wednesday and today’s Friday. So have I made 2 or 3 drawings? Course not.

Decisions, decisions.

I decided I needed a theme, otherwise I'd be blundering around with no sense of direction. [No change there.] Given the recent knitting activity, I did think about vessels. [ I thought ‘knitted bottles’ would be a bit too restrictive.] But 100 drawings of vessels? I might like Giorgio Morandi’s work but I don’t want to be him.

I decided on ‘Summer’. It might seem a bit obvious, but it does have lots of possibilities.

Funnily enough, ever since then, my thoughts have been running on flowers – which I have never really been interested in drawing or embroidering. despite the evidence of 100s of computer manipulations of passion flowers and dahlias …

I did flirt with the idea of recycling some of those, but I decided that would be cheating. I found some new flowers to play with instead. <g>. Shortly before W, strimmed them.

The homework sheet also includes the words ‘You can create your own book or use a purchased one’. That needed a lot more thought than an overall theme. Not, of course, about whether to use a purchased one or not. No contest. No, the thought was about whether to use one of the empty books which has been biding its time and awaiting its moment, or make a new one.

I decided using an existing one would be quicker – but of course that raised another problem. Which one? It had to be big enough to hold 100 items – which meant around 100 pages – although I don’t suppose anyone will actually count them …

I narrowed the choice to this one – which has lots of pages but it quite tightly bound, so sticking stuff in would be a problem

 

 

 

 

 

or this one, which has room for expansion but only just enough pages and is smaller than A4. This is the one I chose in the end.

The cover is a left-over from my C June Barnes inspired dyeing and shrinking experiments. Not particularly summery but definitely organic!

 

 

I decided that some of my ‘drawings’ would be collages. As it has been a lovely day and we had some wallpaper paste left over from when father papered the parlour – er – I mean when W. papered the dining room – I made some paste papers.

I got a bit carried away.

 

 

 

I was especially pleased with this one. Not a conventional piece of paste paper, it uses a technique from this book by Alisa Golden.

It’s too big to go in the book, of course …

Perhaps I need two books?