Hope

A place to declutter my mind

by frogpondsrock on April 14, 2011

As a visual artist I do my thinking in public. I am comfortable with that. A nest of ceramic eggs in a public space is the realisation of a series of thoughts as well as an invitation to you the public to join in the discourse, to participate in the public thought processes with me.

This blog is where I start the public thinking process.

A conversation that starts here on the blog as nothing more than a wisp of an idea often coalesces into something much more tangible than an abstract concept.

The simple processes of examination of my ideas and feedback from you is an invaluable tool.

I use this blog to de-clutter my mind, I take ideas out and examine them publicly and see what happens.

I also use this blog to poke at old wounds and see if they still hurt.

My father does not hurt me anymore.

The spiritual wounds received through the loss of my mother though are still incredibly painful and raw and will be for a long time.

In my life there is no one to comfort me in the same way that I was comforted by my mother. I feel as vulnerable and as lost as a child and by writing out these words on the blog I am seeking comfort.

I am also writing the words to lessen their hurt.

To publicly examine that loss and to acknowledge to myself that I am not alone.

I think I need to make something large, something to help me work through these feelings of loss and loneliness.

I think I need to make an angel.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Learning to draw part 3

by frogpondsrock on April 9, 2011

in Arty stuff..,Distractions galore!,Hope,learning to draw

I have completed six weeks of my drawing class so far, eighteen hours of class time wholly dedicated to learning to draw.

My drawings have progressed from this first one where I really struggled with the lines and angles.

To this second drawing where I applied the techniques of optical measuring and and transference of angles. Which simply means I shut one eye and held a stick out in front of me and transferred the angle shown by the stick to the paper.

These next two photos are three weeks worth of drawing practice. The table was set up with one box on top of it and two boxes underneath it. Negative space was introduced, which is the space in between things. Negative space is also where I do a lot of my daydreaming. I find myself looking at objects in relation to the other objects around them, the light and tone will capture me and before I know it I have lost time again.

I am having a lot of trouble with proportion and you would not believe how absolutely tricky it is to get the proportions of the boxes correct in relation to the table. But at the same time I wouldn’t have believed how much I am enjoying the challenge of trying to get the proportion right as well.

Week five we all covered our work with conte rubbed onto a piece of rag and set out to explore light and tone using a rubber (eraser) as a drawing tool to highlight the light and a 6b piece of conte to shade in the dark.

I am now having some moments in the class where I am moving away from the white knuckle terror of drawing and I ever so fleetingly hit that sweet spot and think, Oh Yes I can do this, and then just as quickly the moment vanishes and I am left grappling with lines and angles again and everything looks very wonky.

Drawing takes a hell of a lot of concentration and I have to keep on forcing myself to concentrate on the task at hand instead of slipping off somewhere else within my mind.

As well as learning to draw, I am learning to keep a journal as part of a research project. I have always kept a written journal, which has morphed into this blog. I have never had the discipline nor the inclination to really work at keeping an organised journal of my ideas regarding my work. I have bits and pieces of ideas scattered all about the place. Scraps of paper pinned up to the wall, notes to myself stuffed into cracks in the bookshelf, thousands and thousands of photographs like these next two shots. I have bits of music saved because they remind me of ideas and my head is so crammed full all the time that I lose more ideas than I manage to keep. Hopefully the journal will help rein all those ides in and contain them in one place.

When I was thinking about writing this post this morning I looked outside at the sky and saw this cloud and thought it would be a good image to illustrate how I see things in relation to my work. I am interested in the negative space where the cloud breaks on the right hand side of the photo and there is an almost geometric pattern. There is a horse in there as well. I would like a version of this patterning around the edge of a plate.

I fiddled with the colour levels of the photo to highlight what I mean.

These are the sort of things I do. I am always looking into things and seeing things in terms of light and shade and degrees of tone and a quick trip outside in my nightie at 6 am this morning to feed the ducks stretched out into a twenty minute contemplation of clouds. Welcome to my world.

I am a keen birdwatcher, amongst other things and I remember years ago when I was watching a grey shrike thrush perched on the side of one of my frog ponds. I saw the bird and thought nah it’s only a shrike I wont bother with it, but I got up and got the binoculars anyway. I am pleased I obeyed my impulse because the little bugger was catching tadpoles and I spent an enjoyable five minutes watching him.

The lesson I learned from the bird was to always have another look, to always look deeper.

I hadn’t thought about drawing before as a tool to look deeper until I was listening to a talk given byProfesser Donald Lawrence at the Art Forum yesterday. Mr Lawrence said he uses drawing to solve a technical problem or simply to spend time really looking at something.

That quote resounded deeply with me.

I don’t know how The Spouse will feel about me spending even more time looking at things, but at least now I have my studio and the space to do the looking in peace.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Learning to draw.

by frogpondsrock on March 3, 2011

in Hope,learning to draw,real life

Yesterday I was minding my own business in the canteen line, with no thought in my head other than coffee, when I bumped in to Glen Dunn, the man responsible for the creation of the VIRAL LAB at the polytechnic. In less than a minute of casual conversation I found to my absolute horror, that I was agreeing to join Glen’s drawing class that afternoon.

Commence hyperventilation.

I pushed the thought of actually having to draw something and then show my scratchy lines, that in no way what so ever, resemble what I am trying to draw firmly to the back of my mind.

During morning tea I was somewhat reassured when two other classmates confessed that they couldn’t draw either and as misery likes company I decided to honour my rash promise.

Three trips to the toilet later I walked into the VIRAL LAB and prepared to meet my drawing doom.

I was so nervous that I was on the verge of tears for the whole lesson.

I have always really, really, really, wanted to learn to draw and my inabilty to do anything beyond a doodle has always frustrated me. My previous attempts at learning haven’t been very successful and so I have always just avoided drawing anything.

I was told as a child that I shouldn’t bother drawing as I would never be any good at it and my drawings were held up in class as examples of what not to do. Looking back they were the same shit that every other kid was drawing, except that my sparkly princesses were fond of wearing rather pointy hats. The nuns were very evil in the early seventies. But that is another topic for another day.

Once we had introduced ourselves to each other, the serious business of drawing was about to begin and I really wished for a fire drill, an urgent phone call, anything at all would have done, to delay the inevitable.

The mechanics of setting up the easels was soothing and I positioned myself so I was hiding at the back of the room.I had never been shown how to position an easel before, I didn’t know about the tooth of the paper, about eyelines and perspective and I certainly didn’t know that a perfectly ordinary table would suddenly turn into an indecipherable series of confusing angles and lines.

As I was trying to draw this impossible alien thing, as my hands wouldn’t obey my eyes and my lines were all over the shop, Glen came up behind me and quietly encouraged me to keep on going. I remember a drawing class I had done previously where I was in the exact same situation as yesterday and a box on a table had morphed into a confusing tangle. My teacher had simply taken the pencil from my hands and effortlessly corrected my lines. In that moment of correction, I gave up the idea that I could ever learn to draw.

Yesterday was different. My drawing was still the worst in the room but you could see that it was a table, if you squinted a bit.

All the marks on the paper were my own and what I learned yesterday has given me the confidence that I might actually be able to draw a table soon and with any luck, you wont even have to squint at it to see that it is a table.

Stay tuned…

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Sharing the Love #2

by frogpondsrock on November 24, 2010

in blogging,friendship,Hope,On my soapbox,politics

It is time to give a shout out to a member of the Australian blogging community.

Again I have chosen a blog that is sometimes difficult to read, next month I will direct you towards something a bit lighter.

Australia is a very racist country and anyone that says it isn’t, needs to come down from their ivory tower and have a stint in the real world.

I grew up in a rough and ready working class suburb full of immigrants. My father was casually racist and his language was the language of his peers. I was taught to be wary of wogs, wops, krauts and coons. As kids we were disdainful of those that were different, we were taught British history in school and were confident of our superiority.

Of course when I grew up I moved out of my small suburb and ventured into the wider world. I shed my racist skin and discovered that people were just people.

The media and the political spin doctors would have you believe that Australia has also shed her racist skin, that we are a tolerant country dedicated to the ideal of a fair go and mateship. That she truly will be right and that it is all apples mate. Scratch the surface of working class Australia and you will find men like my father, all too ready to believe that all Arabs are terrorists, that boat people are queue jumpers intent upon stealing their jobs and that the only good Abo is a dead Abo.

Mark “Backchos” Mullins is a human rights advocate and member of the Stolen generation and using his blog Blak and Black, Mark will tell you a story of a different Australia. He writes of an Australia that we try to pretend isn’t real and some people will find it easier to attack Mark and attempt to discredit him rather than hold a mirror to their own faces and see the racist reflected there.

The three posts that I recommend you start your reading with are

A day in the life of an Aborigine,

The subtleties of genocide

Men are respectable only as they respect