October!  The month of drawing! I'm really honoured to be 'drawing big' this year at High Cross House.
It's going to be great.  Lines, marks and modernist space..... yum yum. Tell yer mates! It's free to TQ9-ers.....

I'm also bubbling over with excitement to be enrolling on a print course at the Dartington Print Workshop with Louise Scammell.  This has been an ambition for a long time to get to grips with some print techniques and take things in a slightly different direction.  I love learning new things and I feel at the moment I need to absorb and discover quietly rather than expressing out.  Keep seeing Squirrels so maybe there's some squirrel medicine at play somewhere....storing for the Winter and all that.

Last week found me giving a little help to an amazing woman called Katheryn Trenshaw and her mammoth project IN YOUR OWN SKIN  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1456356865/in-your-own-skin-project Check it out - and the Kickstarter site which has blown me away........
So here's to Autumn, enjoy!

Goodbye High Cross House

This week I cleared out the studio at High Cross.  It's been over six months and spanned three seasons since I moved in.  I saw a whole field get ploughed, planted and harvested with massive corn plants over my trips to and fro.
These two images are some of the last that came out.  They really have the essence of my experience of the residency.  I'm going to miss it tremendously.  Not least because the project I was going to has fallen through so I am without a space to work again.  But in a deep way the house has moved, inspired and motivated me.  The whole of the legacy of the Dartington Estate has affected me to realise my own potential and also to remember the power of progressive thought.
A collection of like minded, expansive thinkers has the energy to create such an amazing environment and the ripples are continuous.
I could have used the space more inventively, I thought in retrospect - some of the more experimental sculptural ideas didn't come off - but to be honest I am happy with the journey I took. The time there encouraged me to actually go inside myself and find the natural voice and let it to resonate quietly between the walls and out of the window around the amazing trees and sky and fields.
So now the challenge is to keep the momentum of this work and create some new opportunities.  I'm looking for a studio, embarking on a printmaking workshop to learn some new things (so excited!) and cooking up some little ideas for happenings to explore.  When one door closes another couple open.....

Ashes

Following a harrowing few weeks of emotional turmoil I have tentatively been putting myself back together again.  The Blog has been neglected so I thought I would begin to talk again, slowly.  It seemed my work had flatlined slightly, or my feelings about it had.  There have been immensely deep changes in my soul and it simultaneously dislodged debris from my over-academic-over-analysing-aspiring-ego.
Take time, I told myself.  Let the work flow.  Look at the work already made.  See it with fresh eyes.  So I stopped, looked and saw that my emotions are ever present in the work.  That it speaks of that space in all of us where tranquility and serenity hides.  The best thing is that the work itself shows me where to go. I don't have to THINK...... I am just feeling now.

Off the page...

Am planning an experimental collaboration with voice artist Shelley Hodgson listeningtovoices.blogpsot.co.uk
It will take place on Wednesday 11th July from 10am on Shelley's radio show on  http://soundartradio.org.uk.
More info to follow.

for some reason the link to Shelley's blog won't work but I'll get it up asap because she is well worth getting to know, I promise you!!!!

Recently began thinking about landscapes, internal and external.  I've been drawing some fairly ordinary observational sketches.  It's cool to get back to meditating on something, letting it speak for itself.  I have been holding on too tightly to ideas and theories lately but in letting them go I think they are coming back more comfortably.
Lots of pressure is not a good thing.  Sometimes it forces me to focus but at the moment it is pushing me under.  Having an open studio raises a few pressures and hurdles that I have managed to avoid in the past.  Like when to sell and what to sell and how to feel if it's not selling......  I haven't made work to sell for a long time and suddenly it has become an issue - surely I should be making a direct living out of what I do.  Two minutes into this mindset and I unravel.  When someone approaches me to buy something I kind of talk them out of it.  I can't work out why.  Inferior frames, lack of self worth, attachment to my work which is somehow part of myself.  Artists are notoriously bad business people but I am astonishingly rubbish!!!!  So I am going to work on this over the next few weeks, any tips gratefully received.....

A test version of a piece that I want to make. I want it to be about 8ft tall by 8ft diameter.  Working out the materials and fabrication is a bit frustrating...... It has to be outside but I want it to have the thinness of paper. And I need to get in and out to do the drawing as performance.

This old pianola roll fluttered in the breeze today.   To hear it making a noise after its time spent silent was beautiful.  I often wonder about the sounds it used to make.  It sits there with all the potential and expectation of movement and sound but I usually have to imagine it.  

the sound of it all

One of the experimental digital sketches exploring marking of the sound of the words collected by visitors in response to High Cross. 

and on a Friday morning we have a drink and draw (nothing stronger than coffee I'm afraid to say) and Sarah gently got us all sharing drawings........ bliss.

Lines, rhythms, marking time.

I like this blur.  It started life as very precise, intense drawing.  I'm hung up on the blogging thing.  I don't seem to be able to get down to it often enough.  And when I do I'm not sure it's my true voice anyway.  It's ironic that someone who is concerned with the visual and also with the language of the mark and expression struggles with a few words and images published on a blog.
It often feels like a diary, a reflective tool for myself, which is fine but then why would I show my diary to everyone willy nilly?!  This whole process makes me feel more vulnerable than sitting in my studio with 40 people passing through daily....  and I can pretend to be whoever I like on the blog, I can photo shop, edit, re-invent, big-up, pretend.
There is also the confusion of how far to go - I intended this to be a professional information site, yet I find myself divulging personal thoughts, feelings, ideas.  Perhaps this is because the work itself (oh yes, how could we forget the actual work itself....!)  is me.  And perhaps I am pretty blurry anyway.  Professional and personal for an artist are surely blurred yet some artists remain detached from their public presentation.  The work speaks for itself and the surrounding information merely that - information.
Which brings me to conclude that my discomfort with blogging perhaps lies in the fact that I feel less professional.  In an attempt to follow the appropriate 'professional practice' guidelines (promote, promote, promote) I have in fact become less professional.  Ha!

Production

I'm struggling.  It's been a long, hard week or two....  time is passing quickly and there's this panic in me that I'm not using my time well.  I have sense of time being marked in some of the sketches.  They come from the trees and they are made of trees.  This cycle of things keeps emerging as does the attempt to order it.  Drawing is ordered is it not?  Nature is ordered too.  One of the visitors last week mentioned Fibonacci, I hadn't thought of it for a while so it was a gift to be reminded that there is this underlying system to the apparent randomness of things.  I get many gifts in the studio; a pencil enthusiast the other day; a wordsmith who tripped me off on a whole debate in my head about language and then back again to the language of the mark; a wonderful blind lady who taught me the 'feel' of the building.  How do I make a piece with all this?  How do I mark these ideas and conversations.... 

Found this very encouraging: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/06/neuroscience-bob-dylan-genius-creativity
there's light at the end of all this tunnelling....

Grooves

the furrows driven into my brow
are deeper than yours, field
both of a similar hand
yet yours will heal
you will mend
grow new skin
from good strong stuff
will I