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

Pencil

Pencil power by my eldest boy Tom.  We found a hole made by teenagers and their trusty lighters.  Tom put the pencil in there.  He's good.

word soup

Today's list
Marks recording the rhythm line quietness (type of marks: line, modernist blocks of tone) The grid

Space and time response to space environment

dialogue with drawing breaking conventions

Shadow work (daily ritual/time passing...)

Rubbings of trees (daily multiple)
carbon paper

Constellations

order over chaos order over nature (seeds individually drawn)

INDEXICAL skin of the house (also conversations recorded) /archictect plans

Sound.

House home machine for living ornament as crime (take some craft back in?) drawing stitch?

Wire outside. Crotched wire... in shape of shadow. Stitched paper sculptures, inside of window reproduced etc.

Use something specific in the house to work from - stitch wise

Language of mark (calligraphic enquiry) mark verses calligraphic code

Sound shapes.  Wind in trees movement animation and car slicing through

Multiples

Sylvia journal (is a blog in any other sense) Honesty, no secrets or editing

Feet walking enquiry into walking maps footprints sketches of feet walking in time marching pace rhythm collecting marks of footfall.

And trim with a sharpened pencil the branches
that serve no purpose

head full of stuff

In the (National) Trust we trust....

A simple, serene space defined by lines and light. For a few days I responded to this. I found the dead bird on the terrace. I drew some preliminary sketches. I pondered the language of the mark. I imagined the 'text' as a mark representative of function, code and order as is High Cross House; and then I considered the gestural mark, or the trace, as the outside space - unfettered, unpredictable and natural.

I met a fantastic, wonderful, genius, artist the other day who works as a performance writer. Excitedly listened to her describe any mark, including text, as drawing... whole world of dialogue around this opening up to me and low and behold it was born in Dartington..... Serendipity or what? Probably more about this another time.....for now I have to focus.

Something will happen on this terrace. Something will happen that involves the visitors. They come in droves and they are amazing. Full of knowledge and opinion and interest and STORIES. They tell me their stories. National Trust folk - wonderful folk. So I need to respond to them as much as the building.

For now though there is little opportunity to actually draw (because of all the story telling..)

Even less time for quality blogging. So apologies for the unedited random rambling....

Haven't uploaded any new drawings yet.... crazy busy and the universe seems to think now is a good time to pile on the challenges (ie HUGE LIFE PROBLEMS).

This amused me though and I can't seem to post without an image - it seems too naked - so I just tucked it in bad as it is. I did my crossword on the dining table and it accidentally printed out! I have been messing with text and carbon paper.... so this was a delicious discovery. It spoke of grids and random words and language and incidental marks.....

I am at the studio right now. First time I have been here before midday. The sun is beaming right through and it feels completely different to the afternoon light. Need to document the daily shift I think so I'm going to start playing with the shadows in a minute. Also the sounds are strange. The window is sealed really well so not much noise gets through but this quiet sound movement animates somehow. The pulse slow and flowing and then the occasional car slices through down the lane. Trying to respond with marks but I keep reaching for words.....

Quite tempted to play with the digital sound drawing thing again. I really want the response to come from my hand, for it to be my mark but the beauty of employing technology is that you can circumvent the conscious ramblings of the mind and intellect.... they get in the way of a natural response.

Rambling now.... must go and attempt some unconscious mark making...