My West Dean Summer

This summer I treated myself to two back-to-back residential courses at West Dean College near Chichester.

The college is located in a stunning house set in huge grounds that used to belong to Edward James, a surrealist poet and philanthropist. He was a double inheritee (from his father and his unlce) patron of Surrealist artist and there are several original Dali pieces at the house. There is an interesting documentary about him on YouTube

The courses I took were Jeanette Appleton's Exploring Colour and Transparency in Felt Making and Cas Holmes' Tracing Shadows - Dyed and Stitched Textiles. Both tutors were superb and I'd highly recommend them. As well as the location of course.

From Jeannette we learnt a softer much less messy and energetic way of felting. She advocates a pre-felting technique that uses none of this 100 rolls one way and then the next. And much less water that I was used to. You are left with a delicate, diaphanous piece of felt that has a handle I was not used to - not the thick stiff stuff, more like nuno, felt that falls like fabric. One of the best things about it is that you can do as much as you can/want, take a break and come back to it later.

She encouraged us to think in 3s - e.g. coarse, soft and something else - what is that third thing? Texture, contrast, colour, dimension? She also drew attention to the mark-making properties of felt.

Something that has had a great impact on me since is that she encouraged me to hang my pieces in three dimension in front of each other so you could see through. She also suggested looking at a space like a museum or an exhibition hall and thinking: how could I respond to it with my art?

I was rather prolific and came away with lots of resolved pieces - although my first piece was 'permanently borrowed' by someone!

Here's some of my work in Jeannette's class:

Felted pieces - one texture based and one colour based

Cutting things up to assemble

Felting the back

The piece coming together

A bit of rolling

The final piece that someone liked so much they borrowed it

The next piece coming along

Nearly finished

Detail of the mark-making capability of felt

Tacking threads left to show through

Hanging my finished pieces in a row

Two more finished pieces

Cas Holmes is a fan of recyling, reuse and repurposing - use what's around. In her first tutorial she used a fish skin from supper! We did heat transfer printing which I have totally fallen in love with. Lots of block printing and a little bit of sun printing because the weather was not at all condusive.

Cas encouraged us to build up a 'stock' of semi-worked pieces and audition them for resolved work which I am doing lots of now. The drawback is that I'm finding that things that would be samples are becoming 'stock' and I'm reluctant to stick them in my sketchbook.

I'm also a bit precious about taking next steps with 'samples' in case I mess up. Cas' philosophy would be that anything 'messed up' can be repurposed and auditioned for new work at a later time.

And this is what I came up with in Cas' class.

Preparing heat transfer paper

Some fabrics for 'audition'

Preparing mono printing

Applying wallpaper paste to pieces so that they run under the sewing machine easily without a hoop

Imaginative use of block print sources

Heat transfer results

More heat transfer preparations

Heat transfer results

Sun printing, but without much sun

Resolved (mostly) piece containing heat transfer, block printing and sewing

Another Visual Exercise

Having really enjoyed exercise 13 from Finding Your Own Visual Language - a practical guide to design & composition by Jane Dunnewold, Claire Benn & Leslie Morgan I decided to try nr 2.

The goal is to "explore the possibilities of stamping as a design tool."

Simply cut one lino block a day for 30 days. Or, if you can't wait, cut six in one go for five days. Then print, print, print.

They suggest using rubber erasers. I bought some 'soft lino' which is essentially a rather slim piece of rubber which is indeed very easy to cut into. A pleasure compared to real lino although the deeper you go and the nearer the sides the less sharp is the edge of the cut. Or perhaps that's just my tools.

Here's how it went for me:

Penciling in a pattern

The pattern cut - you can see how the edges 'fray' in this lino; this was happening when I was going over a previous cut with a deeper one - this lino doesn't like it

Cutting the lino

I had some plain acrylic paints and rollers from way back and decided to try out some samples.

Inking up a perspex plate

First impressions

The inking plate after an impression

First results - the orange block here has a full border and a lot of positive

Immediately soaking the blocks - acrylics dry really quickly

The next colour and some other tools to make impressions

Second sample

I also tried some out on fabric in my class.

Hodge podge of prints (this includes impressions from some screens as well as the blocks)

One block in a small range of colours

Detail - I love the painterly effect of brushing on the colour instead of impressing it

I veered noticeably towards the blocks that had less positive carved into them. This made me realise how many of the blocks I'd made with too little negative and full sharp borders making them heavy and 'blocky'. The full borders are much harder to line up than blocks that don't have borders.

So I started to reverse some of the blocks I'd made.

Two versions of the same pattern - positive and negative

And made some blocks that were all borderless and mostly negative.

Some more samples:

The green block is printed out three times left to right before re-inking therefore getting fainter each time

I also made a traditional lino cut which I overlaid on my soft lino block (printing out four times top to bottom). I love the surface quality of the leaves (plus they look so 'tumbly')

So far I haven't quite cut 30 blocks. I started out well, with a couple of consecutive days of 6 each time but then fizzled a bit. I'm finding it hard to come up with motif ideas. Partly because I'm restraining myself instead of letting loose on the lino. One evening I decided to get really angry and do whatever even if it meant slashing the lino to bits. And even though there was no-one watching I just couldn't!

So this is where Slasher Frankie has got to:

22 blocks

If you fancy taking this to another level then how about designing and printing a half drop repeating pattern?

Sketchbook - Early Progress

In a previous post called The Importance of a Sketchbook I kicked off my fledgling effort. The main question for me is how does the sketchbook help in the artistic process.

Here is one example of an answer.

Pictures of birds in flight in formation generating words like 'order', 'tempo', 'beat'.

Initial drawings include quick, impressionistic scribbles with my favourite graphite pencils.

The scribbles got translated to block prints made from foam and printed onto a scrap of fabric using screen-printing inks.

The value of the thinking time the sketchbook work gave me meant that I came up with those pencil scribbles to translate what I was seeing. I think these will work really well in stitch by the way. For this exercise though the end result were some block prints. I had to translate spidery scribbles into an outline for printing blocks to work. I'm really pleased with the result.

I'm also learning to use resources around me for inspiration: the world; the internet...

None of this would have happened left to my own devices!! Thanks to the course I'm doing tutored by Louise Baldwin.

Artists' sketchbooks

Always on the hunt for how others handle their sketchbooks, I found Shelley Rhodes' really interesting to flick through.

I also found Cathy Cullis' Sketchbook Sundays really helpful and will follow them eagerly.

Recommendations

Any recommendations of places to see sketchbook work will be much appreciated.

Block Printing

The next stage of my class, after all the colour and texture work, was to make block prints from the theme we've been exploring: birds.

I really enjoyed making the interpretations from the pictures I'd collected. It made me feel like an artist!

Bird theme as inspiration - from my sketchbook.

Detail of the bird drawings - they look rather stitch-like. I love them!

More from my sketchbook

The block prints made from foam with the results.

Detail of the block prints

The results from my sketchbook.

Even if we didn't have that long to make work in class I thought block printing was great fun. I loved the painterly effect - I simply painted the ink on instead of pressing the ink from a plate - and essentially block printing gives you freedom to mark anywhere on your background. You can choose to be regular or random. There's something pleasingly quirky about it. I'm definitely going to be doing more of this. I may even dig out my lino.

Can anyone recommend artists who work with block printing that I ought to know about?

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This post is part of a series: see Part I -- this is Part II -- see Part III
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