Preparing for Take-Off

Posted on October 1, 2011 by hatchery
Breaking Free

Breaking Free

Mixed with anticipation and excitement at the prospect of moving to a new town and new area, is a sense of loss.  It seems I have just begun, at last, to build a creative foundation, making connections, working in a studio I love, and exhibiting my work.  Now, I’ll be leaving it all behind and starting fresh.

I find I need to focus on that aspect – fresh.  Every facet of my life is about to change.  Friendships, professional associations, living arrangements, frequency of time spent with family, and my daily life are undergoing transformation.

I’ve never been great with change, at least not on an inner level.  Outwardly, I cope.  Internally, it’s always a struggle letting go of the known and familiar.  This time, I hope it will be easier.  This is my decision, my choice, my bid for financial and emotional freedom.  Yes, there is trepidation. However, I’m discovering from recent visits to what will be my new home, and already being warmly welcomed by other artists, that there is definitely an exciting and positive side to this major shift.

When I came to Maldon, over twenty years ago, I knew no one.  Being a sole parent with two school-age children very quickly changed that situation.  There’s nothing like getting involved with the school’s parents’ association to break the ice in a small, rural town.  As the kids grew older and moved on to secondary school, so my friendships changed.  Professional writing and editing brought new and different alliances and comradeship through shared interests.  Starting my own business and publishing a short story magazine brought me in contact with yet more folk, perhaps not exactly friends but certainly valued associates.   More recently, allowing art an important place in my life took me to yet another, previously distant environment and its inhabitants.

Change in the past has meant loss, growth and revelation.  I expect this transition will bring more of the same.  This time, though, I’ll be spreading my wings earlier and more eagerly as an independent woman, a writer and artist, who has learned from changes that have gone before.  There is something to be said for growing older.  Time becomes more precious.  Not only does every minute count, so does every experience.  The potential for beginning new friendships encourages joy and anticipation, which reduce the fear.  Life may be turning me upside down and inside out, but that’s more than okay.

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The Call of Change

Posted on August 27, 2011 by hatchery
Wolf Cub - pastel

Wolf Cub - pastel

When major changes enter our lives, either through our own choices or because of circumstances, normal routine can become non-existent.  Such has been the past couple of months.

In the throes of preparing to move house, my environment is at present an alien place.  Half-packed boxes brood in each room, waiting to be filled and taped.  Walls have been freshened with new paint, and  the familiar has become the opposite through the lack of personal items and mementos.  The house no longer looks or feels like my home.  Soon, I hope, it will be someone else’s.

As I sort, toss, file and pack, too regularly agonising over what to keep and what to discard, the past thrusts its way into the present.  Events, the great and the terrible, are reviewed before being sealed away.  People, once dear and cherished who have slipped from my life, are remembered with fondness, and at times regret.

There are moments, and hours, when I feel like a youngster, trying to assimilate and comprehend a world viewed for the first time.  There comes the urge to throw back my head and howl, with a  mixture of fear and confusion, and, in celebration of the changes taking place. Twenty-one years is a long time, the longest I’ve been in one place in almost sixty decades.

I’m yet to tackle the studio, the place ‘of my own’ that I longed for and worked so hard to manifest.  It calls to me, almost hourly, demanding in its neglect.  It is also a reminder of what is possible.  What I’ve done once I can do again, perhaps a tad easier and with less restrictions on space.  Even so, it will take time and a whole lot of physical effort before I can grab my morning coffee and walk  through the garden to my creative haven.  In the meantime, the muse pokes me, hard, in the back, unwilling to be ignored.  For a while, at least, you’ll find me sketching and pulling prints at the kitchen table.  No great hardship when the view through the window is superb.

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Memories of Christchurch

Posted on June 11, 2011 by hatchery
Designing Christchurch Block - Linocut

Designing Christchurch Block - Linocut

Having only worked with lino a couple of times, the first way back when I was a secondary school student, I decided to ‘have a go’ for the Silk Cut Lino Award.  Inspiration for the design came from the earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand.

In 2008, I had the privilege and joy of travelling to new Zealand and was particularly drawn to Christchurch.  I loved the historical buildings, the architecture, and the ornamentation, the feel of the city.  Numerous photos didn’t really do the sights justice, but they were precious reminders, just the same, of a place I felt a deep affinity with.  Only later, did I discover that one of my great-grandmothers was born there.

Also having a fascination for gargoyles and grotesques, I had the yearning to capture in printmaking some of the amazing faces I’d snapped in Christchurch – the guardians that had watched so long over that lovely city – which, a mere blink in time later, were quite probably rubble and dust.

Using the photos as reference, many hazy from distance (me on the ground, them way up there), I first made sketches.  Wanting them of a more uniform size, needed for fitting onto the block, I scanned the sketches, fiddled in Paint Shop and re-sized.  These adjusted images I printed onto A4 tracing papare sheets.  Good old carbon paper came in useful for transferring the ‘faces’, while others, the smaller critters, I sketched directly onto the block with grey lead pencil.  The dark lines of a Sharpie gave me a good base from which to carve.

The block took quite some time to complete, with numerous rubbings and test prints along the way.  Hand pulling a print I was pleased with took a whole lot longer!

Remembering Christchurch

Remembering Christchurch

In the end, I used a torn-aperture mask to cover the too-regular boundaries of the block, more in keeping, I felt, with the nature of the subject.

Whatever the opinions of the judges of the Award, I’ve produced something from the heart that I’m (mostly) pleased with – I’m a person hard to satisfy when it comes to my own work.

I’ve no idea how many, if any at all, of the guardians of Christchurch remain, but they will always exist in my photos, my prints and in my heart as something precious  that when lost, can never really be replaced.   Unfortunately, sometimes, all we have left are the memories.

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The Dizzy Ride to Completion

Posted on April 20, 2011 by hatchery
In times Gone By - Mixed Media

In Times Gone By - Mixed Media

Is it just me or do other folk spend time agonising over the best way to proceed with a piece of artwork?  The woodblock print on vintage paper had been on the drying rack for days, well past its dry-by-time.  I’d look at it, knowing I wanted to do something more with it, but what and how was driving me in mental circles.

I had the print mind-marked for a mixed media piece, but a constructive how-to was proving elusive.  Rather than become dizzy from the thinking roundabout, I turned to another project, an accordion book incorporating hand carved ‘stamps’.  This one, too, was giving me conniptions, as both projects were to go into the Easter Art and Craft Show.

While ruminating over the book, the Idea Fairy gave me a whack on the head.  The mixed media piece above is the result.

Collaging a background with an eighties pattern sheet from a Burda magazine, along with some sections of embroidery transfer sheets, from the seventies, adding the print – machine from the early nineteen hundreds and fashions from the forties – and embellishing the work with leafy lace from the nineties, and some gorgeous old trim from around the thirties, I now have a time capsule for what was once classed as the ‘gentle arts’.

By turning my mind, and hands, to an unrelated project, I went from a baffling quandary to a piece of artwork I’m pleased with.  Life and art-making can be like that some days.  Now, it’s back to the book.  Just hope I don’t have to spend hours doing housework before the Idea Fairy whacks me about that one!

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Piecing Together Ideas

Posted on April 18, 2011 by hatchery
Keeper of the Sharps - two-block print

Keeper of the Sharps - two-block print

The Maldon Easter Quilt, Art and Craft Show is coming up this weekend.  Although I admire quilts and quilters, quilting is one thing I have never tried.  I particularly like crazy patchwork, and have done a couple of small pieces in the past, which I enjoyed.  With that in mind, and in keeping with my fascination for all things vintage, I decided to do a couple of prints incorporating both themes.

The pincushion shoe is done from a sketch from a photo and is a woodcut on MDF – not as ‘crisp’ as I would have liked.  The crazy patchwork design is etched into a flattened milk carton with an embossing tool.  The ridges formed by the folds add to the patchwork effect.  The colours were achieved by simply using red, blue and yellow ink on the same roller.  Both prints, first the background and then the woodcut, were hand pulled using a barren.

Grandma's Day - two-block print

Grandma's Day - two-block print

Me being me, I decided to cut another woodblock, this time of a vintage sewing machine.  The block is cut from Masonite, harder and ‘nicer’ to cut than the MDF.  Considering it was an off-cut found in the woodpile, and no doubt had absorbed at least some moisture, I was quite pleased with the way it worked.

Using the same background block, but with more muted colours and ‘haphazard’ roller method, it has come out as quite a different print from the first one.

Whenever I cut a new block, I can’t resist playing, trying a few different ways of printing it.  To be expected, I suppose, when quite a lot of time goes into making a block, whether wood or milk carton, and I’m not all that keen on editioning prints.  The eras are out of sync, but I decided to print the sewing machine block over a vintage magazine page.  I’m guessing the machine is from the early 1900s.  The magazine is from 1944.  Not an accurate marriage.  However, the machine I first learned to sew with was an old Singer wind-the handle model, and that was in the early sixties.  My grandmother was still using her old treadle machine long after electric models came in.  So, perhaps the time differences aren’t that important, after all.

Woodcut printed on vintage magazine page

Woodcut printed on vintage magazine page

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