I say interesting because I thought twice about sticking with today’s piece. I found the results and process very interesting and want to play around with other things in this vein but obviously don’t want to start tweeting images that might give people clues to what I am doing. So yet another thing goes into abeyance – or not!
Today was the first time for ages that I have used sealing wax and I stuck the stamp on sideways which I have not done before.
I am going away for the next week and I will be busy setting up and manning my exhibition in Ramsgate as part of the Summer Squall festival. I’ll be fine with doing the art work and getting them in the post on time, but with limited IT and no broadband added to little time, the quality or even presence of my blog entries is at risk.
Still that is in the future. Today’s piece is in a combination of media that I have not used in this project to date. In retrospect I wish I had not chosen something that took so long!
When I saw the photo above I did think of the pueblos blancos of Spain, that harsh light on whitewashed walls, but really there are no Spanish houses in St Andrew’s Road. Bridport and the sun, though warm, was not as harsh as southern Spain. It is just one of those post boxes set into the side of a whitewashed Dorset house.
I have been busy again today with planning and preparations for the show in Ramsgate, plus the added excitement of selling an ink drawing to someone in the United States this evening. So when I came to write this post I found it hard to remember what I had done for #Letter365 only 9 or 10 hours ago! Part of the reason might also be the process of creation. I went to the studio wanting to do some work on a piece in progress as well as my #Letter365. When I got there, in quite a fired-up state, I found that I had left two sketchbooks open as reminders of things I wanted to develop. One of these was the long drawing I had been planning to do in a Moleskine concertina book. Making the first mark on a pretty expensive piece of paper or book is at times a pretty scary act and I had been sort of putting it off. Today I was up for it. I was full to overflowing with what I wanted to make: it was time. But there was just a little time for one last act of procrastination, my excuse being that I had to do #Letter365. And there laying on the table was the other open sketchbook with an idea that I wanted to develop – and remember that I was all fired up – so what could be easier than using that. I set to work and soon had created something I was pretty pleased with! Now I could get on with the drawing in the Moleskine. That went really well, actually even better than I had hoped. Once dry and I could interact with it I fell in love with it. So did someone else: it was the piece I sold to the woman in America.
So then I went back to the piece I had so boldly and confidently produced for #Letter365. I realised it was missing something; it didn’t quite work. I played around with different things for quite a while before realising that what was missing was me. I had skilfully found a way to get #Letter365 out of the way so I could get on with a piece that was really important to me, a piece I was full of. I wasn’t full of the piece I had made for #Letter365 and it wasn’t full of me. It was OK and had some interesting aspects but frankly it just wasn’t good enough! It didn’t pass the “would I have it on my wall and love it” test. Bit of a lesson there then! That meant I had to start again. Well I made a new piece, but I distilled some of the good aspects of the previous idea and sat with it until I could resolve it with honesty and integrity. In the light of what went before I am a little diffident about making any qualitative statement about just how good this latter piece is but I would be happy to have it on my wall and it pleases my eye.
Today’s piece was very interesting for me and apart from being hugely enjoyable for me it gave me a huge sense of confidence; a sense that I could work in a whole range of untapped and untried ways. I still feel quite excited about it. I had prepared and taken some materials with me with a specific idea in mind following on from the work I did in Bath the other day. The idea was very different from Bath in some fundamental ways but shared some features. Specifically, I had chosen different materials. As it turned out I was inspired by some aspects of Birmingham as a cultural centre and the whole thing took shape in my mind very quickly and very differently to the plan. Fortunately it worked really well, though it took rather longer than usual to create. I did have back up materials, but wouldn’t have been able to create the original idea without buying some more stuff and putting more money in the parking machine or abandoning the idea of creating it till I got back home or the studio!
It’s all Bs! Bradpole, Bridport, Birmingham, Bath! Have I created a #Letter365 anywhere else yet? Maybe I should just do work in places starting with B?
I have removed the photograph I had posted yesterday at the request of the Postmaster. Apparently he was upset that I had taken pictures of his staff at work. I am told it is “a data protection issue for them as an organisation”. I did ask permission of the person concerned, but of course I do not wish to needlessly upset people, especially local people who are doing their best to provide services to the community, so I have complied with the request.
However it does open up questions about the whole nature of our society and how our attitudes have changed over the years towards the people who work within our communities. My guess is that this request has come from the “arse-covering” rules and regulations that have almost become a necessity because we are, as a society, becoming increasingly litigious. I don’t really have any issue with the local manager but this is a great shame as it stops us all celebrating the people we share our communities with in a free and honest way. If we can only take pictures of people at work in our community under conditions controlled by a marketing department or a legal department then sincerity soon flies out the window. When I say how attitudes have changed, I used to work in a local newspaper advertising and managed the account of The Post Office at a regional level. This was a very long time ago when BT was still a division of the Post Office! In those days the marketing and advertising people were begging us to photograph their happy and industrious employees at work. Plus ça change!
Well here is the envelope that I had hand stamped yesterday:
It never really cooled down enough to make a visit to one of our apiaries bearable – especially since the strimmer needs some spares on the head and you have to wedge a piece of wood behind the accelerator cable to get it to rev high enough. It was hot and sweaty work and the bees don’t like the vibration and were disoriented by the change in aspect. So I got stung by bees and nettles.
Of course all this has nothing to do with today’s #Letter365 artwork. In fact it is pretty much the antithesis in action and object. This piece is clean, cool and was no sweat. It was principally cerebral in the making with a small amount of skilled physical work, whereas the strimming required little brainpower and more physical effort (the sort of effort my chiropractor warns me to only do small amounts of at any one time). The art is quiet and contemplative in comparison to strimming. The artwork has a lower environmental impact than the strimming only because of its size: if scaled up I think the chemicals and materials of the artwork and it’s production and delivery, might outweigh the damage caused by the small amount of fuel used, especially since I use Aspen environmentally-friendly fuel made from trees that doesn’t smoke and is free of many of the chemicals in petroleum-based fuels.
Oh and the summertime heatwave music is slipping on to the envelope. Here’s one that is mentioned
Well for the second day running I have been out all day and unable to engage in making art until late in the day. I was beginning to get a little tense about it (partly for other reasons than just being late in the day) but took some time out to reconnect with my art before cooking dinner (plaice fillet, with new potatoes from the garden and cavallo nero). That meant that when I returned to the studio I was able to come up with the goods and get some other things done too.
And, as I remark on the back of the envelope, there is hardly a mark on the leading and trailing edges and Violet Lines is absent, though the colour still is not accurate:
I have not been involved with art at all today, we have been out looking for a new car and by the time we got back and had some food and a discussion and fed our neighbours’ cats it was late. Being totally devoid of any idea what I might do for today’s piece and refusing to panic with ony a few hours to sort it all out I cheated. Well nobody said i couldn’t cheat! It wasn’t really cheating. It’s not as if I did a Blue Peter and whipped out one I did earlier, but I did raid my sketchbooks and notebooks. O the sanity of jotting down ideas! Day saved without worry and stress and I didn’t spontaneously combust! And still time left to stress about the other things I haven’t done today!
I successfully completed the tasks required by myself in this project today without fuss or bother and even got it in the post before the collection had gone so there is nothing much else to say really.
The repetitive and in a way boring nature of a daily task is in itself one of the key aspects of this art process, the sort of process that is endlessly fascinating to me whether it is found in nature or people or the processes of society or our entertainment. This conversation with Ersi Marina Samara @atticpapers on Twitter gives a hint.
On the other had it could be just some kind of madness. This diagram posted on Twitter by @Omdenken could be how it is!
On a day when I wanted to get on with some other stuff I chose to do something complicated with multiple processes needing time between! When will I learn? Who knows when it will be ready to pop in an envelope!