Getting ready

I can tell I'm procrastinating when cleaning the crusty saucepan that's been soaking in the sink for a day seems a more attractive proposition than snapping on my gloves, turning on the hot plate and starting printing my edition! But tomorrow I shall have no more excuses as I've torn all the paper, sorted out blotters and boards and tissue and dabbers and those little bits of card I use to put the ink on the plate. I've cleaned my work surfaces, put fresh water in the paper bath, mixed the ink and pulled the blankets into place on the press. All that remains to do is to make the damned prints, and it's the 50-odd hours of work in completing the whole edition that's bugging me, because I'm essentially a lazy creature and think that it sounds too much like hard work!

I had a lovely meet-up with Jan Allsop in a delightful coffee shop called 'Cocoa' on Friday, and how nice it is to re-connect with someone you haven't seen for ages but whom you suspect sees the world in much the same way that you do! We talked about all sorts of things, but in the end the conversational topic I keep grappling with, because it is at the core of my existence as an artist and many other things as well, is how to position my practice centrally when that seems to entail just the sort of selfishness that makes me feel uncomfortable, and which my mother told me wasn't anything to do with being a woman. I was brought up to do everything on the 'needs doing' list first, and if there was any time left once all the chores had been done then I might - if I'd been good - be allowed to do something for myself for a change. And I struggle with myself daily, usually because I don't realise that this is exactly what I'm doing, all too well! And then I find that I'm spending all my spare time moaning about not having enough time to do anything because of all the chores and I slip into being just the sort of boring person I can't stand...

So I'm trying really hard to stop myself, and came to the major decision that I'm going to reduce the amount of ironing and other disagreeable activities that I do, and try hard to do/make/enjoy some more art instead. Hoorah! Now that has been established so easily I'm going to procrastinate my way to bed.

Time flies...

... whether you're having fun or not, I think. I'm startled to see that it's over a month since I posted on this blog although I have managed to keep my 'daily drawings' more-or-less up-to-date. Things have been a bit tricky in the last little while, with Michael being very ill again, but hopefully we're over it now as we have a diagnosis and a treatment plan and Michael is responding well. Phew, because it was touch and go there for a while.

Anyway, from an art perspective a few things have sorted themselves out in my mind, the first of which is the progress of my PhD. You may remember that I am - allegedly - doing one. But if you're wondering what happened to it, I put it formally 'on hold' while moving over here, to give me a chance to settle into being in a different country and completely altering my life. Despite my good intentions and the intentions of my colleagues at UWE, however, things are not really working out. The sheer distance to travel to see anyone is a huge block to face-to-face communication, and electronic communications via email and the post-graduate forum have failed to take off not least because my UWE email ID was rescinded as soon as I put my PhD on hold! The consequence is that I have exchanged very little apart from vague Christmas greetings with my colleagues at UWE in the last year and I have had to reconsider my options. I should add, at this point, that I'm not criticising my supervisory team: it's obviously very hard for them to keep tabs on a candidate so far away, especially when that candidate wanders off for a year and says, 'see you when in 12 months' time'! So what's the answer? Well I think the answer is to move my PhD to a local institution, and Southern Cross University in Lismore is the likeliest candidate. I have explored the possibility with them, since I have links with Tim Mosely and Associate Professor Jan Davis, and the signs are encouraging although I obviously have to got through a formal application process. I am sad to be losing that link with UWE, which is a great place for visual arts, printmaking and artists' books but hopefully the professional connection will survive the cutting of PhD ties!

Meanwhile, if you read this blog and are interested in book arts in all their variety you might be interested in a new forum on the 'Ning' network called "Artist Books 3.0", set up by Robert Heather in Melbourne. Check it out and join us if it's up your street! I know that on-line networks aren't for everyone, but I find them incredibly useful (although I withdrew from Facebook about a week after joining up because it was such a pointless waste of time!!! Obviously I'm not sufficiently cool...), for a sense of community and as a source of information.

Up and down and round and round

I have had a bit of a rollercoaster two weeks, with good news and bad news. The high point was finding out that the print I've documented making on this blog has been selected by the Print Council of Australia (PCA) for its 2008 print commission. This is just great! The PCA exists to support printmaking and both established and emerging artists working in print media, and each year it commissions up to six artists to produce a limited edition print which is then distributed through a subscription scheme. I'm a member of the scheme myself, and by paying a bit more each year I can chose one print from the annual commision as well as receiving the usual member benefits. Imprint, the PCA's magazine on print media, is really interesting and the prints I've chosen through the commission scheme have been brilliant. You'll recall me writing several times about GW Bot, and although her work sells for vast sums of money (well out of my league!), through the PCA print commission I am now the proud owner of one of her prints. I am so pleased to have been chosen, and slightly stunned too. I really didn't expect it, given that I arrived in Australia less than two years ago... Now all I have to do is to produce six perfect proofs and an edition of forty perfect prints!

Last weekend was great fun: I attended Glen Skien's workshop on making boxes and books, at the Primrose Park Art & Craft Centre near Cremorne in the northern suburbs of Sydney. The building itself nestles in a wooded park, tucked down a steep and winding side road, and I was extremely glad that my friends knew where it was and were willing to take me there! I think the whole site used to be a sewage pumping station (and that the old stone building is the craft centre) and also a waste incinerator. It probably means that underneath the adjacent rugby/football/hockey pitches horrible contaminants are lurking, but it looks lovely.

I didn't realise that it was so far away from any shops and that refreshments weren't provided, but the lovely people who were on the course with me shared their food and were so kind. I had a great time and made new friends as well as running into a couple of old ones. How great, when I haven't been in Australia that long, to find myself recognising people when I walk into a workshop!

Susan Baran gave me a cheery greeting as I walked in, and it was lovely to meet her again. She is one of the leading members of Warringah Printmakers, where I attended Seraphina Martin's viscosity printmaking workshop last year. Susan was very helpful and gave me an impromptu introduction to solar plate etching, which I must make use of! Also at Primrose Park was Christina Cordero, whom I was thrilled to meet. She's someone whose name I seem to have known for years and I love her prints. I was very sad not to have had enough time to visit her just-finished exhibition at the Australian Galleries works on paper gallery in Paddington, but I just didn't get a chance this trip... Christina is a lovely person, very modest about her own work, and very encouraging.

The tutor, Glen Skien, is a printmaker and maker of artists books who lives in Brisbane. He's another modest, self-effacing person, and you would be hard-pressed to get much information out of him about what he does! But he runs the Silent Parrot Press as a vehicle for his own work, and it's beautiful. The object of the workshop was to show us all his method for tearing up and cutting out bits of prints - an ideal way to 'use up' duff prints or working prints that don't make the grade! - and collaging them onto book boards and boxes. So to begin with we made the boards and the boxes, and it was great to be able to make a hardback book; it's something I've read about but never attempted, and although the final binding is deficient in many ways I had great fun doing it and am inspired to do more...














It was lovely meeting all the people at the workshop, and I was particularly lucky to share a table with Sue Anderson who is a very talented and experienced bookbinder. I tried hard to find a good picture of one of her books up on the web but the only example I could find was this one, which with its cover of vellum and snakeskin, among other things, sounds fascinating and looks beautiful...

I stayed with friends in north Sydney, who were absolutely great, and had two wonderful nights' sleep. All was well when I got home, but on Wednesday the roof fell in as Michael was suddenly taken ill. Hopefully he'll be fine, but we've got a few tests to get through before we have a diagnosis and/or treatment and in the meantime I've fallen way behind with everything including my art...

Finally

It's Friday evening, but the crucial difference between this Friday evening and last Friday evening is that I've finished the damned print!

You'd have laughed to see the set up I had for soaking the sugar lift off the final version of the plate - I ended up with the large black plastic trough full of water balanced on top of my wheelbarrow, out in the car port, so that I could wheel the trough into the light as it faded (and also to help my back by raising it up a bit while I brushed off the stop-out varnish).













My nifty wheelbarrow setup!

Etching it was fun and games. I put on a killer aquatint and... left it in the acid for too long and bit it all off again. Second time around I was more careful and it worked, and then I had to cover up the aquatinted areas to protect them while biting the rest of the plate so that the embossed areas stand out enough when printed.



It looks a bit surreal, but this is the plate in the water as I finished brushing off the stop-out











Once etched - finally - it took a while to work out how to ink up the plate. I have to be very careful applying the ink so that it doesn't get into the areas that I want to appear as an embossed white-on-white texture on the print, which means careful application and removal of the ink. Having practised three-cloth wiping, I tried chalking the embossed areas and using tissue paper for a final polish-up of the plate surface to remove tone, and I think I've got there. It took half a dozen goes to produce a bon a tirer print, but I did it, dried it, packed it and couriered it off to Melbourne on Monday morning.

The final print - but this was taken before it was flattened so forgive the kinks in the paper!


I know it arrived safely so now all I have to do is wait to hear back whether it's been chosen or rejected. I must say that I have no high hopes of it being selected, partly because I have no idea of what other prints will be offered, but also because I can't seem to make any judgement about my own work. If I like it other people don't, and if I don't like it then other people do! Or at least, that's how it seems.

The Big Battle of Juanbung Swamp

It's 10pm and I've been printing all day, all week in fact, and I am tired tired tired, but what is worse is that I'm not much better off than I was when I wrote my last post on Monday!

I am having a huge battle with my print, although I guess I knew that it would probably turn out this way because it often does and it's partly to do with the 'artistic process' generally rather than my own specific quirks. I mean, how do you decide when something's finished? Or if it's 'good'? Or even if it's good enough? Each artist has their own point when they have to stop/recognise that it's right/realise that if they do anything else to a piece of work they'll ruin it. I seem to keep working and working and working at it until I just can't face doing any more. Along the way I will have had a few happy moments of thinking that perhaps what I'm doing is 'good' in some glimpsed-at way and more unhappy moments when I think it's all rubbish and that I should just throw in the towel right now. It's a bit of a roller-coaster.

The last few days have been a real roller-coaster as I've grappled with yet more unfamiliar techniques. Art-school aquatint theory says that it well-nigh impossible to lay one aquatint over another when using an aquatint box to distribute the rosin evenly on the plate, or at least that's what I was taught in printmaking evening classes. But it turns out that if you use the rough-and-ready method of sprinkling rosin over your plate from a flour-shaker with muslin tied tightly around the top then you can, actually, layer several aquatints over each other to beneficial effect, so that's what I've been doing. I imagine it must have looked quite funny as I sat patiently sprinkling rosin onto my plate on the back verandah, wearing my P3 face mask, and then teetered on a chair to blow-torch the underside of the plate which was suspended from the verandah roof on two wire coat hangers with one of the racks from our gas barbeque creating a shelf on which the plate could sit... I hate to think what would have happened if I'd toppled over!

Fortunately I was able to apply the aquatint, but unfortunately it wasn't particularly successful and J 'P for perfectionist' Willis did point that out. I should say here that he was only articulating what I knew but had hoped he wouldn't notice, but Willis isn't a perfectionist screen printing artist-cum-art tutor for nothing and he noticed straight away. His advice, which is usually well worth having, was for me to bite-out the existing aquatint, thus creating a deeper line on the plate which sounded attractive, and then to re-apply the aquatint into the deeper line, thus creating a better aquatint AND a nice embossed mark all at the same time.

Sadly all did not quite go according to our plan. I was able to bite-out the existing aquatint and re-apply a new one (and believe me, this was a convoluted process involving cleaning and degreasing the plate, rolling on a hard ground using a hard roller so as to protect the flat surface of the plate while revealing the lines so that they could bite properly and having to do tricky things like stop-out the back of the plate without damaging the hard ground on the front) but... in the end the rosin dust settled nicely into the 'floor' of the bitten-out line, and didn't adhere to the sides, which meant that when the line printed there was much less definition of the edges and in some places not enough aquatint to hold the ink. ^%$(*$ !!!

I am, of course, up against a tight deadline and I still have to work out how best to ink and wipe the darned plate, but now I'm going to have to re-make the plate (and try to salvage this version by re-aquatinting it again in the very faint hope that things might improve), from scratch. Drat and tarnation, I say. And now I have to clean up which is NOT my favourite part of printmaking.

Rainbows, autumn leaves and experiments

Autumn leaves






We had a lovely few days away, driving 1500 kilometers across the mountains behind Coffs Harbour, down through Armidale where we stayed for two nights, over the tablelands and into the Upper Hunter Valley wine growing region where we stayed for another two nights before driving back up the same, spectacular road and home again. We got a brief taste of autumn among the deciduous trees planted by European settlers in the colder weather of the tops. Most local trees are sub-tropical evergreens around here.

The rainbow graced us with its presence in a delightful vineyard where we'd had lunch, both beginning and ending among the vines.




Rainbow













Back home I've been battling with the biggest plate I've ever etched, which has confronted me with various challenges! Willis suggested I try screen printing a mark drawn onto TruGrain and applied to my plate, using sugar-lift solution instead of ink so that I could then treat it as a lift-ground image, soak it off in water and hand-aquatint it using rosin applied through muslin.







Abortive attempts to make fluid lines in brush and ink...









Well, what fun I've had. Firstly it took a while to work out how to make the marks on the TruGrain. Brush and ink and pen and ink were both discarded when I discovered I couldn't reliably produce the feathery line I wanted. Marker pen was more fluent but less descriptive somehow, so in the end it came back to chinagraph pencils. Willis made me re-do my lines a couple of times because he's a perfectionist and didn't like some of the curves!



The finished chinagraph line on TruGrain film




Half way through re-doing my lines I realised that I'd been sent copper plates that were slightly larger than I'd ordered, and the extra millimetres made the difference between being able to wash out or etch the plate in my plastic trays and... being completely stuck without a suitable tray. Cue: minor panic and trips around photographic shops, farm supplies shops and eventually a large hardware store which resulted in the purchase of an ENORMOUS plastic crate thing, which is the only container I can find that is large enough.

This of course creates its own problems because then I realised I might not have enough Ferric Chloride in which to etch the plate since it would now have to cover a larger surface area in the new tray and I don't have time to order any more from Melbourne. Cue: another panic trip into town, this time to visit an electrical bits and bobs store that just happens to stock litre bottles of 42 baume Ferric Chloride for the nerds who etch their own PCBs locally. Thank goodness for nerds! There was a slight panicky moment in the shop when the cashier noticed a discrepancy between the two bottles I'd found on the shelf and the stock inventory, which seemed - momentarily - to suggest that I couldn't have the bottles because they didn't show up as being there on the stock list, but we overcame that little hiccup, although strangely I still had to pay full price for two bottles that technically didn't exist. ??!



The TruGrain line screen printed onto the plate




Now I still don't have much Ferric Chloride, but I've got as much as I'm going to get locally, and remembering Archimedes and his bath I started thinking about displacement of liquids in a tank... somewhat nobly, I think, I decided to sacrifice my liver to the altar of printmaking and have emptied a few winebottles over the weekend (although not, I must confess, alone. I had help.). I'm going to fill them with water so that they don't tip over and place them in the etching tray to help raise the level of Ferric Chloride. Eureka!

Fine detail washed out - not enough sugar in the lift? - but I like the slightly ragged, raw look to it anyway

Having solved these minor technical problems I decided I'd better soak and then aquatint my plate, which I did today. All I have to do now is to etch it tomorrow, print it, fiddle with it and produce a bon a tirer print by the end of next week. Fingers crossed.

Nozzles - the answer to my prayers

Now you'd think, being female, that I'd know about this sort of thing, right? After all, I spend my time playing with hairspray and stuff... not. Apparently, as every graffiti artist worth their tag knows, it's not the spray paint that makes the difference, it's the nozzle. So what I need to do to get a finer spray is pull the nozzle off the top of the can and experiment with some different ones. So now I might have to go to the chemist and buy lots of cans with nozzles on them. Drat. Oh, and the other thing I should do, once I've identified the perfect nozzle, is to spray up in the air and let the mist of tiny particles fall down onto my perfectly prepared plate.

OR... I could go back to using resin as an aquatint and apply it by hand, using muslin stretched over a flour shaker to distribute the dust over the plate and then blow-torching the underside of the plate. Half my problem is that a lot of my equipment is still in boxes as I don't have a permanent studio space in which to work, but I think I do have a blow torch top lurking somewhere that I simply have to attach to a bottle of gas, so this may be workable.

The other part of the problem is that I often just don't have a range of techniques at my disposal - just whatever I learned in printmaking classes. So it's great talking to people with more experience than me, even though I'm left feeling frustrated at my own ignorance sometimes!

More spray paint antics

It's dashed tricky, that spray paint aquatint! I wonder if it's because I bought car enamel rather than a different kind of spray - I may have to investigate whethere something else gives a finer mist. My biggest problem is atmospheric: high humidity and/or a stiff breeze make spraying anything evenly with fine droplets a bit of a problem, and I have to do it outside because I can't use all these solvent-based products in the office I share with my husband...

Saline etch update

Yes, at long last I feel well enough to put up some photos! I can't believe that two weeks after falling ill I'm still ill... mind you, the last few days of coughing have been down to the nuisance activities of one of our neighbours who appears to have decided to chop down and burn a number of trees in his back garden. Protected koala habitat? Fire ban? Permit required...? Nah, who cares about that?!

Anyway, a while ago I got on with making a saline etch solution and using it to make aluminium plates for my exchange project with Tina - so really this post should be on my Complicities blog, but anyway... I made up a sugar lift solution, dried it on the plate, used bituminous stopout to cover it, dried it again, washed it out in hot water and... realised that I'd need some sort of aquatint in order to retain ink in the open areas. Of course! Silly me.

Now I do have an aquatint box, but it's sitting in the carport still wrapped in corrugated card, just as it came off the container 18 months ago. I haven't re-instated it because I don't have anywhere suitably ventilated to put it. Somehow it doesn't seem fair to put it into the office/studio space that I share with Michael, at least not without equiping him with a P3 mask first. And it's a bit dodgy because we're in rented accommodation and I suspect there's fine print in the lease about using carcinogenic substances on the property! Fair enough. So I read up on techniques again and came up with spray-paint aquatint.


Here's my newly purchased can of black car enamel!














I was surprised at how easily this went on, although in retrospect I think I need to practice in order to get a finer mist on the plate. While I was waiting for the enamel to dry - less than 5 minutes in this climate, despite the humidity today - I made up the saline/copper sulphate solution. Then I coated the back of my plate with varnish to protect it and put the plate in to etch. Having read Aine's post about saline etch solution I was careful not to leave the plate in for too long, and anyway, having never used nitric and so not being used to my plate producing bubbles as it etched I was a bit wary of over-doing it.

This is the result. I can't show you a close-up as the right lense wasn't on the camera

I think my spray was too coarse and I need to practice getting that right, but I was pleased that it wasn't more uneven and that there wasn't any undercutting of the individual dots of enamel while the plate was in the etching solution.

The third attempt at printing because I was a bit messy the first two goes!


As you can see, the aquatint is a bit coarse but I think I'll be able to rectify it. I understand it's fairly easy to re-aquatint a plate using the spray paint method; I'll have to see whether I have enough energy to re-spray this plate while I'm busy etching the others! But overall I'm pleased with the result.

Meanwhile I've also printed Tina's plates, which are decidedly more interesting than mine! These are the plates for January and February inked up using a surface roll so that I get an embossed texture from the more deeply-gouged areas. And the plates really are deeply gouged, using drills and built up areas of lacquer I think, judging from the bare plates.













And these are the resulting prints. I need to change the size of the paper slightly; we'd agreed to print within the plate margins slightly and of course I forgot that the paper would swell while it was soaking... so to get the deckle edge I need tear the paper slightly smaller than the desired size to give it room to expand in the water.

Bleeeeeeeeargh

So much for the Easter bank holidays! Michael came back from Europe with a cold last week and it's going round the whole family. Not his fault; with all those germs floating around in the recycled air on planes it's no wonder people come back from long-haul flights with a cold! It's come as a shock to us all, though, because Giardia not withstanding we've all been so well since we moved to Australia. I haven't had a cold like this for a couple of years, and in the UK I used to have one most of the time...

Anyway, it's been a yucky weekend enlivened by a visit from my sister and her husband, which was lovely. Unlucky for them that they've been exposed to all of our germs, but great for me!

The plate with stop out. For some reason I can't edit it so you may see the psychadelic patterns in the sugary areas!

The only things I have managed to do are to coat my sugar-lift plate with slightly diluted bituminous stop-out, take a few photographs and update The Daily Drawing which took a lot of will power given how lousy I feel.




The sky this evening was beautiful and definitely merited a photo

Sugar syrup, lots of fun

I managed to fence off some time to myself today so that I can get started on some experiments with saline etching on aluminium, but of course realised that first I have to make some marks on the plate! My thoughts turned to lift ground etching, but then I realised that I no longer have my trusty bottle of Camp Coffee, which I've never actually made up as a drink but which has stood me in good stead for years as a sugar solution for lift grounds. I guess it was one of the things I had to ditch when I moved over here: the Australian Quarantine Service is justifiably hot on examining the luggage and personal possessions of people moving over here, and I had to get rid of loads of stuff... everything from pine cones in with the Christmas decorations to bits of bark I used to make rubbings. Spike Island Printmakers in Bristol were the lucky recipients of a lot of my printmaking chemicals that I couldn't bring over here, so maybe they're using up the Camp Coffee now?




Sugar syrup, yummy













Anyway, I dug out my trusty copy of The Complete Printmaker by John Ross, Clare Romano and Tim Ross (ISBN 0-02-927372-2 for the paperback version), and found several recipes for making lift grounds. In the end I mixed together some gum arabic (a small dollop), some black and some red liquid gouache (because I only have small tubes and didn't want to use up all the black!) and a small squirt of washing up liquid, and then I decided to stop mucking around and make some sugar syrup (small amount of water, large pouring of sugar, stirred over a low heat until dissolved and then boiled vigourously for 2 minutes, then cooled and bottled), which I added to the gum arabic/washing up liquid/gouache mixture and duly painted onto my aluminium plate. Voila! As I speak, it's drying nicely on the plate.


It's that river image again - I can't get away from it...

Copper Sulphate

I'm going to have fun at some point in the next couple of days, trying out something I've never done before: making up a Bordeaux Etch solution of equal parts copper sulphate and salt in distilled water in order to try etching aluminium plates. I've been looking on the web for information about how to make up the solution as my printmaking books are a bit vague. Both the Warringah Printmakers website and the reference to Cedric Green in the right hand side bar will give you a clue, if you want to do it. I was unable to find a chemist or a vet to supply the chemicals (apparently a copper sulphate mixture can be used on pets to treat wounds), but it was readily available at a local farm supplies store at only $7 per kilo. I'll let you know how I get on!

Willis tells me that the bite on aluminium is fast and unpredictable, but as I quite like foul biting and open biting perhaps that will suit me.

After-thought

Actually, I realise that one of the main ideas running through the daily drawings is about recognition, and specifically, how much information you need to see about something in order to recognise it. I was just thinking about that in connection with another love of mine, which is surface, which in turn gets translated into texture. For me there's a bit of a conundrum here: in paint I seem to work either with lots of 'surface', lots of texture, or none at all. When I'm working with none at all it becomes part of the challenge of what I'm doing to depict whatever I'm drawing without resorting to texture to give visual clues about the subject, which is a bit sneaky when sometimes I'm also messing around with scale. In print I work quite differently: texture and surface are and have always been important in the finished image, but I guess I don't always use them as signifiers of the content.

And there's another thing that interests me that has only dawned on me through looking at the daily drawings: I realise I'm often interested in what things aren't as much as what they are, or what they appear to be. Hence a continuing fascination with biological examples of chimerism. This has been of abiding curiosity to me for a number of years and I suppose I'm working away at it in my head, because I can sort of feel that soon it will begin to come out in my work in a way that hasn't been possible so far. And that's something I've realised, too: I do work with themes that grip me in strange and unexpected ways. For a few years now I've been working through a looping twist of river that has surfaced and resurfaced in a number of pieces. Why? I don't know, except that perhaps it has provided me with a 'way in' to the Australian landscape that hasn't been to do with the painterly 'problem' of how a European tries to render the colours of the bush!

So there you go - these little drawings have really been working away at me. I feel a bit silly really. In some ways doing a little drawing every day isn't much different to taking your sketch book around with you and using it. I do use sketchbooks but they tend to be places in which I work things out: dimensions, ideas, make notes about other artists and their work or make plans for future pieces, rather than being somewhere I draw... I do think that so much of being an artist is about these bizarre and labyrinthine thought processes, about examining yourself and what you do (and not in a narcissistic way) and recognising what you do, or at least, it is for me.

The Daily Drawing

I started another blog on January 1st called The Daily Drawing, taking heed of an art school adage about 'doing a drawing every day'. I've made it simple and small, and I have done one drawing every day - 69 drawings so far at 7 x 7 cms, all in black on pre-cut squares of heavy etching paper that I had lying around. It's been a good way to use up scraps! I don't do any philosophising on the blog - no titles other than the date of the drawing, and no commentary... and I thought it would become a chore when I started out, but it's quite the opposite. In fact, these little drawings may be the most important work I'm doing at the moment.

For one thing, I have to cast my anxieties aside. There isn't room to fit anxiety into 7 square centimetres, but anyway you can't be precious about a drawing that size. My stepson asked me how I decided where to start drawing on each square, and the answer is that I don't make a conscious decision, mostly I just put my pen down until it touches the paper and start drawing, and the end of the image is wherever the edge of the square happens to be. Tiny things though they are, these little squares have freed me up. The rules are quite simple: I'm not allowed to edit, I'm not allowed to accumulate drawings on a different day to the date of that drawing (no cheating! It's one drawing each day), and if I don't like the outcome I have the option of turning the square of paper over and starting again on the other side, but I can't throw it away and get another square - I scored and tore 370 pieces of paper, so there are only 4 spares in case I'm travelling and lose my bag or something. I guess if I'm travelling and lose my luggage I might be allowed to re-draw the ones I've lost, but I'll decide about that if and when it happens.

The benefits of doing this have been huge. For one thing, it's started me drawing again, and in a much less self-conscious way. I've been drawing in cafes, Ella's riding/ballet/piano/swimming lessons, while waiting in the car, just before I go to bed, while I'm cooking... anywhere, really. And it's been fun. And I've been looking at what I'm drawn to draw and it's been quite illuminating. I'm drawing what I see around me. Not with a purpose in drawing a particular thing or in a particular style, nor with the object of presenting myself or my life in a certain way. I draw what catches my eye, and often it is little things: the way block lettering on a magazine cover falls down a page and the letters beneath each other form a random line with irregular spacing... the way in which a tiger on a bag of rice is drawn using lines, not sketched in an anatomically detailed sort of way... how the thatched roof of a cabana contrasted with the shapes of the leaves next to it... how the cheese board looked once I'd laid the table when friends were late coming over for dinner... the pattern on my daughter's flip-flops.

So I wonder if I should be painting the same things. Maybe next year's project should be a painting a day! Colour would bring added complexity to the idea, although it would be more difficult to paint spontaneously in a cafe... No, I'm thinking that this is all a scaled down version of my view of life. If I find it hard to paint because I'm not sure what I'm trying to 'say', perhaps I should look at these little pictures and recognise that 'my style' is in them. What I'm drawing is what I'm trying to say, so perhaps I should try painting it as well. There are plenty of other artists who paint domestically, as it were. What about Morandi? And there's an Australian artist whose work I really like called Peter Atkins, some of whose source material apparently comes from things like packaging that he sees around him.

Time I loosened up in paint, anyway, and did some experimenting.

Beautiful day

This isn't a blog about my life outside of art, but it is such a beautiful day that I have to say something about it or I'll burst! The beach was lovely this morning: 18 degrees C, just perfect, sunny, and with the foamy edge to the water that creeps up the sand with each wave and bubbles out again. Toby, our dog, loves it and spends a while running through the surf with the ball clamped in his mouth as if to tell us that he's too busy having fun to muck around chasing the damned ball, OK?

Now I'm back home and the sun is shining on the grey horse Jacko as he wades through the dam (small lake) at the bottom of the paddock, the currawongs are warbling, a large female swallowtail butterfly is looking in vain for somewhere to lay her eggs on the pot plants outside the studio window, and I'm listening to 'Viens, Mallika' from Delibes' Lakme - a stupid plot but a sublime song. It's very, very nice.

Awards

Well, to my astonishment I got an award today, from Jan Allsopp who writes the '...in my spare time' blog (http://janallsopp.blogspot.com/). This is it...




Thank you Jan!




The deal is that you reference the person who created the award, Emila, and then nominate 5 blogs you love to receive the award themselves... trouble is, I feel a bit funny about that because, as a relatively new blogger with a small audience I guess I haven't made that many contacts in the blogsphere and feel a bit uncomfortable about embracing people I don't know. How British of me! But it really is a great way of telling people about other interesting blogs, so without going the whole hog of sending them the award I'd like to tell you about these five sites that I visit, and maybe you'd be interested in them too:

Indexed - just a really amusing take on the world

ScienceWoman - ah yes, fighting the pressures of modern living, being a mother AND studying. I've been reading this blog for over a year, with enormous sympathy and recognition that I'm not doing what I do alone!

The Lancelet - who knew fossils were this much fun?

PrintFreak - this hasn't been updated in a while now, but if you're a printmaker it's still an interesting read!

Hackleys - the adventures of David Abbott, with whom I was at UWE for a brief while. He's definitely got more energy than me...

Dis-order

I've finally managed to finish a post that I started back in January, when Michael and I had a weekend away (courtesy of Patrick, who baby-sat Ella) and we went down to Sydney to overdose on art! Owing to the fact that I started it a while ago, now that it's published it appears way down the page, but if you'd like to read about the exhibitions we went to, and how my views on Callum Innes and Tim Hawkinson chimed with the Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald's views, page down and have a read!

Fire Balloon fun at the Tweed River Art Gallery

I'd only been in Australia for a couple of months when I was lucky enough to be invited by Tim Mosely to participate in a Codex event at Southern Cross University in Lismore, which is a 2 - 3 hour drive north of me depending on the weather conditions (we get a lot of weather in northern New South Wales, as I am discovering!). The Codex events are an unfolding series of projects rooted in papermaking, printmaking and artists' books, instigated by Tim and populated by marvellous and varied people he knows of and knows. The group that I worked with were indeed marvellous and varied, and I had such a great time working with them! Louise Irving, Jo Kambourian, Rebekah Evans, Liz Deckers and Darren Bryant plus me and Tim.

The balloons fold down into book format. They look like the boats that bring most refugees to Australia





Suspended from clear threads the boats float along a wall and out into a wider exhibition space. The flotilla moves through the air erratically, as if pushed around by the waves





The project is referenced more fully in a previous entry for January 2007, titled Codex 4. Since then Tim has initiated a conversation with Susi Muddiman whom I met when she was Director at the Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery. Now she's moved back to the Northern Rivers area and is Director at the Tweed River Art Gallery, and so Tim and the project are relatively 'local'. Susi's very interested in works on paper and was able to offer an exhibition space for the work at the gallery. I went up there on Friday night to attend the opening, in Tim's absence, which was also a welcome chance to catch up with Louise.



Samples of the paper we made and printed hangs with the boats in standard frames













The images are, on closer view, harrowing









I hadn't realised that there were, in fact, four exhibitions opening on the same night, and that our fire balloons were in illustrious company! Euan McLeod was there with an exhibition of paintings and etchings; photographer Gilbert Bel-Bachir was showing portraits of the local South Sea Islander community; there were items from the Wagga Wagga national art glass collection and our fire balloons. You might think that we'd all have been a bit crowded, but in fact the different shows worked beautifully in what is a lovely space.

Paper cutting

This should almost be posted on the Complicities blog because it is through cutting text for my artists' book that I'm documenting on that site that I came to these other links, but it has all reminded me of a childhood fascination. When I was little and living in High Wycombe in the UK, my parents would sometimes take me to a place of wonder: a litle book shop in a house that was, I think, called The Red Barn. I remember finding shelves of books tucked away under the stairs, down corridors and in small rooms and I remember the excitement of being allowed to browse for one special paperback that my parents would buy for me... or which might be the fruits of a christmas or birthday book voucher - my favourite kind of present! I still remember some of the evocative titles: Casilda of the Rising Moon, The Wierdstone of Brisingamen and The Red Towers of Granada. But a favourite author was Joan Aiken and although I loved the stories of her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, I adored her books of strange fairy tales illustrated by Jan Pienkowski. His style in the early 1970s was of silhouettes on beautifully marbled backgrounds, and for years those swirling, magical drawings heavily influenced my love of patterns and of black against white.

I was reminded of all that when I stumbled upon a website through a devious route that I cannot now retrace. It's Cindy's Scherenschnitte blog, which is great. Pienkowski doesn't use papercutting, as far as I'm aware, drawing his illustrations in pen and ink, but the overall effect is similar. I wonder what attracts me to the style. Simplicity is one key, which opens up the possibilities of imagination. Although the castles, undersea worlds or dark forests are presented in black, they become coloured in my imagination with visual references from all the medieval stories I've ever read, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, William Morris, Russian folk art, persian carpets... the list is a long one. What fun!

Through the Scherenschnitte blog I was also directed towards Su Blackwell's amazing sculptural paper, as well as to Peter Callesen, whom I already reference in this blog, and to Tord Boontje, whose lacy paper cutouts have garlanded my walls and my lights ever since he was 'discovered' in the UK interior design market a few years ago.

This meandering path through different blogs and different websites is one of the great pleasures of blogging! Not only do you put your own thoughts and vision and work out there for other people to look at, you're able to take small peeks into other people's worlds and see what they do, and also what interests and influences them. I find it endlessly interesting, not in a voyeuristic way but sometimes just as a reassurance that there are 'others like me' out there, or that in some way there are 'benchmarks' against which I can measure my own work. It isn't competitive, but how else does an artist see what's going on in someone else's mind and/or studio, unless they're lucky enough to be working in a creative environment (group studio, perhaps, or at an art institution) or have an enormous circle of generous and creative friends? Blogging has opened up the inner life of artists in a way that hasn't seemed possible before, and I for one am enjoying it.

The Daily Trance!

I have been putting up a lot of posts, but not so many to this blog because I've been absorbed in both my Daily Drawing and Complicities blogs, both of which have required me to step up my efforts. The real joy of both has been in the making. I have been able to become absorbed in the act of creation and in the process I've taken myself back to that semi-trance state that I found easier to enter into when I was younger, before I let everything else come between me and making things! 'Trance' sounds like a dangerous word, evoking Sixties hippies getting high on dope and Nineties ravers chilling out on Ecstacy, but it isn't that sort of trance... or at least, I don't think so! It's more akin to serene meditation: the business of my conscious mind is occupied by something else, often an audio book, while my unconscious mind gets on with resolving problems and really looking at what I'm doing. I love it. The hours pass and I am really happy, and I've been able to engross myself like this for at least a very brief time every day, and more recently, all day while I make an artists' book. Lucky me, I have another 11 artists' books to make this year, plus a series of 12 dry point etchings plates, so I won't go cold-turkey until next year!