Home again in style! I haven’t got the energy to review and amend all the previous posts I couldn’t put an image up for: I have barely got the energy to put this one up! Just the few seconds taken to get a photograph has played havoc with the print on this one. I am still using Sally’s printer as mine is still not printing properly. I am trying to fix it this evening but to test it I need to buy some more cartridges! Ouch, expensive if I still can’t fix it. Anyway it looks as if HP pigment inks are less waterproof than Canon dye inks.
Last day of my show in Ramsgate and I hadn’t done my piece this morning so it didn’t get done till this evening. It’s been raining all day, but it’s even heavier tonight do the envelope did get a little spattered. I’ll add a picture when I’m back home.
I nearly didn’t make it tonight! I posted No152 with just 12 minutes to spare and only posted a holding page here at 23:58! To be frank I have struggled all day, mostly because I was struggling with designs and words for invites for the Ramsgate show – mostly still trying to get some quality reproductions of my work! I think I can be better placed to get what I need when I next have a photographic session.
So in my usual slightly-overconfident fashion I was leaving #Letter365 until this evening. I had not taken into account that working from home today I had only a minimal range of materials and decided that I really needed to go to the studio. I also did not take into account that my printer might malfunction in a much more complete way than a visit from Violet Lines. When there is a problem my printer communicates the issue by specific numbers of flashing lights. In this case it was twelve. I looked up what 12 flashes meant in the manual but the list had a reason for 11 flashes and an explanation for 13 but 12 was omitted from the list! Fortunately my partner, Sally, was able to print it for me. This little scenario made me even tighter on time and I was a bit “flustered” by now. By the time i got to the studio I was back to a composed state and set to work. Even after a false start – well two false starts – I remained confident and relaxed. I even took a little time out to make some notes of ideas for something else and to try out a little technique to see if it would produce th eresults i was looking for. I only started getting stressed again when I was photographing the elements when I heard a drip that was clearly inside the studio. It was lucky that I was there to put a bucket under the drip or else a sketchbook and some drawings would have been ruined. I moved everything else that might suffer to what i hoped was a place of safety!
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.
Back of No139
Oh and the summertime heatwave music is slipping on to the envelope. Here’s one that is mentioned
I have been struggling with this post as I did with today’s piece. It’s a muggy old day and there is still that unsettling electricity in the air that last night’s thunderstorms didn’t clear. It makes the bees irritable and over-defensive and me too really. I thought it would be a good idea to force some kind of resolution on some elements that I have been playing with for a few days or more. I thought I could use that idea up and get it out of the way, but of course things have their time and today wasn’t it! After a few other false starts it was time to take a step back and stop struggling. Now I don’t mean that in the way of giving up or giving in, rather I mean that sometimes battling with something head on does not bring results and oblique strategies and sideways thinking may prove more effective. As soon as I started to work on some other things not related to #Letter365 an elegant solution started to form and opposition crumbled away. Struggle was only interested when it thought I was up for a fight
That strategy didn’t work so well for the envelope or this writing or indeed the other work I was doing but, hey, you can’t win ’em all!
No132 goes in the box with a caress from Violet Lines
I am so tired that it has been really difficult to do the simple tasks of creating the envelope, photographing the work and getting it in the post. Fortunately when I returned to the work (which I had done much earlier) I was very happy with it. As I walked through the door of the studio I had a little anxious moment thinking “what if I don’t think it is good enough?” It was already late and my energy was really low. I am barely going to make this before midnight: goodness knows how I would have managed to create another from scratch!
As to the work, it is another new direction to explore, coming from some possibly sculptural ideas I want to develop.
And Violet Lines has returned in almost spectral form
As you can see the weird stuff is no longer getting printed on the envelope, though I can’t easily stop the smudging at each edge. It was the nozzles needed cleaning.
Well today was a scorcher. Yes the weather was hot too but I felt sad about putting today’s piece in the envelope.
Most of the afternoon it has been raining; sometimes so hard that I have found excuses not to make the walk up to the studio or back down to the house. It has been so dull that photography of my #Letter365 piece was not so easy. Almost the second I got back from the post box it stopped raining and the sky cleared. Isn’t British weather wonderful. Actually the day was relieved at times today with some wonderful skies that went a small way to compensate for yet more rain.
Take a look at the edge of the stamp sheet I have left attached. Royal Mail clearly doesn’t understand socio-economic groups: Buckingham Palace is definitely not the house of someone in group C1.
I am really fed up with the weather being so drear and dismal again. Yet the trees are coming in to leaf and the summer visiting birds are gradually arriving. A friend said they had seen the first swallow. Fingers crossed for some finer weather soon to go with my fine art!
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year
