Busy busy busy

Well, busy for a retired person!

Wednesday was college, as usual. This week it was screen printing, which I had done before. Once. Despite having a screen of my own.

As might have been expected by those who know the two tutors involved, this was a rather more experimental session than my last experience. Precisely cut stencils under the screens? No. Careful registration of the screens? No. Washing them out between colours?  Don’t be silly. I did end up feeling that I really need some thermofax screens, though.

Unfortunately I only took one photo of my work, and the rest of it is drying, so unphotographable. And these ladies gained a bit more colour later, when we all went into a scraping the dye on with old credit cards phase.  These were done with a freezer paper stencil.

Even more unfortunately, the colour seems to have faded on some of my pieces – the result, I suspect. of old dyes. But they are, after all, ‘only samples’ …

Yesterday was busy in a different way. First we went to an exhibition at the Discovery Centre by Louise Cattrell. Wonderfully atmospheric pieces, which at first glance look like Turner skies – until you begin to look deeper into them. If anyone would like to buy me ‘Strand’ for my birthday? It is one of the smaller ones …

After a nice lunch just next door to the Discovery Centre , we went back for a talk on Van Gogh. Very good – apart from a woman in the row in front of us who tutted at any and every thing. My fellow student L. moved along the row behind her to sit next to us - ‘Tut’. Someone else moved along the row in front of her to sit with their friends - ‘Tut’. And that was before it had started! I wasn’t surprised she was on her own.

She told Wensleydale during the interval [L. and I had sloped off to look at the Alice Kettle] that the talk wasn’t very good because the speaker was either saying what she already knew, or going into too much detail. Couldn’t win, really, could he? Fortunately she then left, and three rows relaxed …

We are obviously ignorant because we learned lots of new things, and we liked the details he gave on Van Gogh's painting techniques, influences and use of colour theory – which is what I think she meant by ‘too much detail’.

After all this gadding about, it’s been good to spend today at home. I splashed some Brusho about  – a bit of Pollocking and lots of paper [brown and cartridge], painted using a technique suggested in Frances Pickering’s book ‘Page after Page’. Lovely book, very inspirational, strongly recommended if you are an embroiderer who likes to make books – or possibly a book maker who doesn’t mind sewing.

The papers ended up pretty good too, although the colour choice was governed by ‘What have I already got mixed that needs using up?’

That is corrugated card top right. Why paint it? No idea - it seemed like a good idea at the time, and is what the book was wrapped in. Pickering encourages you to try different materials for your books - the brown paper is also recycled packaging.