expressive markmaking

I’m struggling a bit with the exercises in expressive markmaking for Open College of the Arts Textile 1. I can spend hours making marks – some that I like, some that I don’t, in different media and with different techniques, but I don’t naturally see any of them as expressive of sadness or happiness, even when I am trying to convey these specific emotions. I am making judgments about them, but not related to mood. I see them as interesting, boring, ugly, beautiful, etc, and I don’t have too much trouble with strongly visual words like sharp, smooth, delicate, but I get more doubtful when it comes to words like fast and slow, hard and soft. That is – I can relate those words to the gestures I’m making when I make the mark, but when I look at the mark, it doesn’t seem to reflect the speed of the gesture. Or a softly placed mark doesn’t say ‘soft’ to me.

Not sure where I’m going with this, just getting the thoughts out.

While I was musing and wondering about it yesterday I googled for expressive markmaking, and rediscovered TRACEY, an online journal devoted to contemporary drawing research. Specifically the issue on Syntax of Mark and Gesture. Masses of material here – I’ve bookmarked this to read over the next week or so. Following their links I also looked at Access Art and their online workshop ‘Draw!‘. After that I thought I am just being too precious ahout this and I sat and brainstormed in my journal some other evocative words and visual ideas around what sadness and happiness mean to me.

happy and sad words

During the week I’ll spend some time finishing the exercise by making marks around these thoughts. But today I’m going to go on to the next stage, using marks to create surface textures.

These are some of my favourite efforts from yesterday. I notice they are all paint, except the first which is a candle resist with an Inktense pencil wash. The results I get drawing with pastels, crayons, etc don’t grab me much – maybe an indication that I need to spend a little more time getting to know these media. They work well for me in rubbings, stencils and so on, but not when it’s just me and my bare hands!

markmakingmarkmaking

markmaking

markmaking

felt again

well, I now have three felts that I can use for the appliqué hanging – I don’t like the green as much as the first one I made, it lacks some shades of turquoise and some acidy greens that I didn’t have in the merino, but I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this. A layer of coloured silk chiffon is going over it, after all, and everything will be different in the end. Today it has rained endlessly but just about the time I finished there was a lull and I ran out to take a picture.

felts2.jpg

I can hardly bear to stop making felt now and get on with quilting and drawing and work and those kinds of things.

feltmaking today

I’ve been making felts for the wadding in my wall hanging. The red is prefelted, the green – well, it’s done and the colours are what I wanted but I used some alpaca fibre and it’s very fluffy – I think I’ll probably use it for something else and do another, but first I’ll get the purple made. The fleece is mostly merino, space-dyed by Jan Hicks, with some plain colours (maybe also merino) I got from Reticule here in Kendal, and a little pink and red fleece I still have from a workshop with Jenny Cowern many years ago.

felts.jpg

samples for hanging

I took advantage of the sunshine yesterday to make a felt sample outdoors, and spent most of this afternoon stitching it to sample ideas for my City and Guilds appliqué assessment – I wrote about the design in this post. I’ve changed my mind and gone down to two layers now and if I need a third (I’m not sure if this actually has to be technically a quilt), I’ll add it to the back – two layers on the front will obscure the felt layer more than I want. My roses have become more open as they just looked like blobs otherwise – not abstract roses – just blobs…

samples1.jpg

I’m expecting some silk gauze to arrive soon and hoping it may be a little more sheer than the silk in this sample, which is just some I had in roughly the right colours. I need to practise my machine stitching too as it’s ages since I’ve done any – I like freedom and a certain rawness – but only if it’s deliberate!

back from Islay

Just returned from a wonderful week on the Hebridean island of Islay. We stayed in a delightful cottage at Kintra Farm, looking west over the sea – beautiful sunsets.

sunset from sgeir cottage

Islay is home to many beaches, from sand that stretches as far as the eye can see, to rugged coves where seals haul out onto the rocks, and pebbly strands with glass clear water. Home to deer, wild goats, rare pigs, alpaca, many colours of sheep and cows, rabbits galore and all sorts of sea and land birds, plus eight whisky distilleries – we visited the newest at Kilchoman, but came home with Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain – and a brewery.

On the textile trail, we visited the Islay Quilters, Elizabeth Sykes Batiks, and Tormisdale Croft Crafts, which doesn’t yet have a web site, but is full of luscious yarns and handdyed silks.

Highlights of the week were watching the seals sleep, swim and fight at Portnahaven, and encountering a beach sculpture of a woman gazing out to sea at Machir Bay. She fascinated me, I’m thinking about garments with nets and ropes and the colours of the rocks further along the bay.

seals at portnahaven
sea woman watching
sea woman
sea woman sketches
fringed rocks