My Reflective Journal.
Initially on this project I started to investigate textures using photographs I had taken in a local boatyard. - Diary of events and work undertaken:
- *Oct 14th: Silk screen printing with Emma and May
- *Oct 17th: Interviewed Terresa Wickstead in her studio
- Oct25th: Glass workshop with Lawrence- silk screen were stolen so I spent the time re-doing them
- Nov 1st In hospital with an asthma attack on top of the Norro virus
- Nov 7th- 18th: took photographs in woods and brainstormed ideas for project:
- Nov 21st Cutting and enamelling onto glass workshop with Lawrence in glass
- Nov 24th: developing images to be silk screened
- Nov25th: Silk- screening
- Nov 28th: Strecthed largest silk screened image to make a canvas
- Wed 30th Nov- Got Adobe photoshop to start manipulating photographs
- Dec 3rd: Exhibition opening of Rame School of art at Maker in new space
- Dec 8th- Dec21st Reading for research and contextual study and altering photographs in adobe photoshop, with walks in the woods taking more pictures.
- Dec 31st: wrote contextualising essay on Pop arts influence on today's society.
- Jan 12th- making small books in preparation for the day in the woods day
- Jan 20th- All day silk screening images for the show
- Jan 26th- Inthe woods art event meeting with other collaborators
- Jan 27th In the Woods all day art event
- Jan 30th Edit video with Jon Brok- we couldn't save, I had trouble learning how to edit without an induction and I had to write another essay
- Feb 1st: tutorial for assessment: on task-
- Feb1st- 7th finishing writing all essays and completing all artwork for the assessment.
- Feb 8th: hand in of project
- Feb 9th: Hung show with all my practical work: framed and mounted portraits of people on woods day, observations on the woods book (bound by myself), book of portraits drawn on the woods day by myself, Small short story 'dummy- book' with quick sketch illustrations, Large photographs of woodland images 'lacey leaf and log' and framed and mounted drawing of my parents watching tv to compare and contrast people in different environments, video of the day in the woods event- unedited and shot by Jon Broks to evidence collaboration.
I felt that the visual impact of them was powerful enough to translate them into artworks which commented on man’s impact on the environment. So I digitally manipulated them in Adobe Photoshop - which was a new programme for me to learn and so I had to get to grips with learning how to use it. I was quite happy with the photos and then wanted to learn how to apply some new processes to push what I could do with the images further.
I decided to learn how to silk screen and transfer the manipulated photographs onto a silk screen and print the images onto canvas and then work on top of the images with textiles and paint and build up the surface in layers.
I had a vision of ending up with a mixed media piece a bit akin to the abstract expressionist Robert Rauchenburg.
Whilst I was researching artists who had used silk screening in the production of paintings, to situate my artistic practice and the process of silk screening historically, I rediscovered Andy Warhol’s silk screened paintings.
Of course he then had an influence on how my images were transferred to the canvas. I started to print series of the images going across the canvas, akin to his Campbell soup cans. I stayed close to what I had originally intended with a couple of the silk screened images and sewed different samples of cloth to the surface of the silk screened image, building up the surface textures and trying to come close to a Rauchenburg aesthetic (see two images above).Unfortunately after contemplating these images I felt they were lacking in something. In order for a screen to be made to print through you have to photocopy the original image in black and white and then photocopy this onto acetate. Although I was happy with my original photographs and enjoyed their subtleties of tone and variations of pattern within them, once photocopied into black and white, the images became too dark and lost all definition which had made them powerful images to me in the first place. It was only on reflection that this became apparent to me. Once I had placed the acetate copies of these images onto a screen by exposing them in a special machine which shines light through the acetate and exposes the light sensitive photo emulsion covered screen I squeegeed ink through them and they became even more abstract. Which at the time I thought was fine because I was excited at developing them into new images with a new process. However I felt afterward they weren’t containing a strong enough message to stand on their own as abstract images. The content of what I was saying had been lost and the composition was no longer visually exciting enough to make me want to continue with the project.
So I discovered the project started to grow almost organically as I developed and read more and reflected more. I began to question the reasons for the production of artwork and it was no longer satisfying enough for me to produce an image without trying to convey a message within it for the viewer. I thought more and more about what it means to observe art and as I learnt about collaborative art I was fascinated with the idea of trying to take an audience with me into the artwork and involve them somehow in the production process.
This is when I developed the idea of taking a group into the woods to have a creative day of drawing and ‘playing’ in the woods. I liked the idea of people getting closer to nature and being totally immersed in it. To draw a subject, to contemplate a subject whilst surrounded by it, is what first fired up my creative spirit when I was young, and I wanted to rekindle this feeling within my artwork again and to share the experience of it with others. Instead of trying to comment visually within my composition man’s impact on nature I wanted to let nature take over people for a day and document the process. I decided to draw the people I invited while they drew or observed the woods we were sat in (in a little book which I made called observations).
In the afternoon I built a ‘stick-man’ picture out of sticks and foliage with the children of the adults who had come along. I showed them a picture of a green man first and told them the story of the green man.
I did some story-telling with the children and we made up a story about the glade we were sat in. They loved this and so I made a little book with illustrations with the story in it as a memento afterwards. We all had a great day and left the woods tired but refreshed by nature.
I took some photographs throughout the day to document the event and have put these into the back of the little book which I made where people drew or jotted down their observations in.
I plan to exhibit the drawings made by the people who took part in the day alongside their portraits which I drew while they were drawing.
The book theme is a reoccurring theme within my own art practice which I would like to develop more in the future. Journals have always been very important to me. A place to document and comment on the world around me, reflect on passages in my life (being inspired when young in some part by the author Alan Bennet), write poems, do doodles, write lists in, recipes etc. My journals are nearly always handmade, as I like to personally decide their size, choose the paper, sew them together and decorate them. So right from the start they are a personal object where I feel able to do anything. I don’t feel obligated or pressurised by them. I don’t feel the need to make them appear ‘arty’ or successful in any way shape or form. They are just for me to carry around with me as an emergency bit of space to jot things down in when carrying it around in my head has become overcrowded.
Sometimes they are a place to gather visually from any given environment I am in. During this project I decided to separate out the different ways I use my little art books into separate books. Into the following three different themes:
1. Observations.
2. A story: A Walk in the Woods.
3. Portraits.
Observations contains the drawings by some of the people who took part in the woods day experience in the front and then photographs documenting the day in the back.
A Walk in the Woods is the short story made up by Thea and Sol (my friend Sarah’s three year old twins) and myself about the woodland glade where we were sat. I have illustrated the story with pen and ink drawings.
Portraits is quite simply a collection of portraits I made on the day of the people who took part (bar the two musicians right at the front who were already in there- I couldn’t resist starting the book early).
So the story of our woodland day is as follows:
The people who took part in the day were: Tamsin De-Groot and her baby Corine and little boy Jan, Sarah Morris and her twins Thea and Sol, Rosie French and her little boy Talisin, Fiona ? who took on catering for us and also did some drawing, John Brooks (the camera man who filmed the day and helped me produce the video which I edited later), Innes ? who kindly took some photos of the afternoon activities and myself.
It was a beautiful day as we set off from the Maker with Rame church car park, our meeting place at 9:30am, where we met up with Tamsin and her baby Corine after she had dropped her little boy Jan off at his play group. We all trooped down the hill, across the field on the public footpath, across the road at the bottom and into the woods. The trees have an old feeling in there, calm and settled, and the old stone steps led us down through the trees to the muddy track at the bottom of a slope. The tall trees stood straight on a steep hill, leading down to a field, overlooking a tributary from the river Tamar, Millbrook ‘lake’. In the background you could just make out Plymouth dockyard and in the very distance Saltash Bridge. We shimmied down through the trees from the muddy track on a narrow path, which led us down to the mouth of an old stone quarry. Overgrown with trees growing all the way around the sides, but it still had bowl shaped curves and a protected feel to it. A winding path led us into the quarry where we set up base camp for the day.
Fiona quickly set about cutting up wood for the fire which she laid on the embers of an existing fire someone had left before us. There were two large logs arranged in an L shape around the fire. This provided a nice centre for our little camp for the day. She put the trivet over and placed a nice bubbling cauldron shaped pan on top with a good hearty vegetable stew inside.
Meanwhile I unpacked my art stuff and John scouted around the area with the video camera looking for some nice shots to take.
As we were doing all of this a buzzard came and soared high above us around in circles above our camp- as if blessing us.
Tamsin selected a nice log to sit on to draw and write down her observations in the little book I’d made. I sat down opposite her and did a couple of drawings of her, one on a separate piece of A3 paper and another smaller sketch in the little book of portraits. Tamsin is very elegant and graceful and looked so serene with her baby Corine nestling in close to her on her lap. The drawing she did was of the top of Corine’s head (who was fast asleep after a feed) and of the glade, with the trees on the rising bank in front of her. She wrote words in a creative way which described what she was observing- the Kenny kettle with smoke rising through the middle of it, leaves, birdsong and other sounds she could hear like the humming of an aeroplane.
When we had finished drawing Tamsin left to see to her other responsibilities in the precious few hours she had before collecting her other son Jan from nursery group at lunchtime, but said she would return later with Jan after playgroup.
I drew Rosie next, who sat on a mossy log further up the slope on the other side, while she drew my wooden art box and the surrounding foliage, focussing in on the small details and busy feel, as if she was slightly unable to settle. Her son Tali was playing quite happily with Fiona who was building up the fire and chopping up vegetables for the stew in the background. I sat down next to Rosie and drew an A3 portrait of her in charcoal. I felt it was much more successful than the first portrait of Tamsin and felt a bit more ‘warmed-up’ artistically. Rosie left with Tali to walk on down through the woods to the field and then take the road which winds next to the lake back to the village.
John had been busy charging about filming with the video camera getting different angles during both of these drawings, but now everyone had gone I invited him to do some drawing while I drew him. We had a tea break with Fiona and then Fi went to find a sunny spot out of the glade to draw in the little book. John and I tried to make another cup of tea in this time, but my Kenny kettle skills are a bit rubbish and the water was taking ages to boil so we just went to join Fiona instead. I just had time to draw her before the rain came over and stopped us. There was a beautiful rainbow over the river in the distance which Fi included in her drawing in the little observations book.
Just as we got back in the quarry we heard Sarah, the twins Thea and Sol, Tamsin, Jan, Corine, Sarah’s friend Innes and her dog Marlin all coming through the woods to join us. It was still raining so I climbed up a bank and attached the top end of the tarpaulin around a tree and with John’s help put another tree branch up to the bank to form an A frame which we then put the tarpaulin over to make a shelter from the rain. The stew was done so we all nestled in under the shelter to enjoy good helpings of it. I got the green man drawings out to show the children and tried to encourage them to do some green man pictures of their own, but they were far more interested in ‘doing’ stuff and didn’t settle to draw. Ok so drawing was cancelled then. We made a stick man out of sticks instead- much more fun and the kids were jumping around finding twigs for fingers and leaves for eyes and climbing the banks picking big handfuls of grass for the hair and mouth. We found a big log for the body and longer sticks for the arms and legs and arranged them around on the ground to make our stick man picture. The kids all ran around squealing with excitement and having fun rolling around in the damp leaves, clambering up and down the banks of the quarry, while the adults had another cup of tea and warmed themselves around the fire.
Tamsin left with Jan and Corine to collect her daughter Grace from Primary school. Innes had taken some photos of the afternoon’s stickman creative efforts and then I drew her portrait and her dog Marlin’s before they took a walk home through the woods.
I sat down on a log with the twins and we made up a story about the trees in the glade where we were sat to keep them happy while everyone was packing up from the day. It went like this:
Once upon a time in a little wood, in a little quarry, when nobody was there, all the trees came alive. One by one they plucked their roots out of the ground schlupp! Schlupp! And they started moving and dancing around the little glade together! Singing songs and swapping stories of their day to each other. They picked their roots out of the ground and moved around as Ents (I couldn’t resist a reference to Tolkien) and spoke to each other. All the little creatures who were too shy to come out and play and be seen by humans all appeared after we had gone. All the bunnies hopped around and the squirrels chattered and hopped and jumped from branch to branch and dug up nuts for their drey nests. The spiders span webs in pretty patterns, the birds carried on warbling songs and the buzzards soared effortlessly around in concentric circles above the treetops and herds of deer played chase through the woods around the trees. Later the stars shone brightly over the trees who liked to take walks around in the moonlight when nobody was watching. Sometimes they had tree parties and sang songs to each other. The young sapling trees played games together like who could jump the highest, who could run the fastest, who could spin around without falling over the longest and of course hide and seek around the trunks of the oldest trees who couldn’t move around very much at all anymore, on account of being so old. They had wrinkled bark and big knobbly noses and crooked branches which they could barely hold up at all. The trees sometimes made pets of the bushes which lived in the woods near them. The bushes would go for walks with their tree owners like dogs and run around yapping and biting each other unruly if they weren’t very well trained or were too young to know any better. Rhododendrons were a very popular pet choice for some trees on account of how pretty looking they were in flower. They needed lots of grooming or pruning to stop their shiny coat of leaves getting out of hand and becoming too unruly in the woods. But some trees preferred the prickly holly bushes because of their spikey little characters and happy natures, but you had to be careful not to get too close as they had a nasty habit of nipping trees they didn’t know very well. Some trees didn’t like bushes at all and would rather carry ivy wrapped around their branches instead. It really all depended on the character of the trees. Beaches liked to do hand stands a lot, oaks were more sedentary, ashes were fast and sylph-like, fir trees were rather serious and gloomy in nature whilst Conker trees were the most playful, often having conker fights in the Autumn.
But as soon as the dawn started to appear on the horizon all the trees would make their way back to their homes and place their root feet back in the ground schlup! Schlup! They finished their chats before the first humans appeared to walk their dogs. The bunnies all ran away and hid and only a few squirrels and birds and sometimes the odd deer could be seen moving through the woods.
So next time you go into the woods think about the trees and their world. Be kind to them and hug them when you can, they like this and it will make you feel good too.
So that was our day in the woods, where the woods dominated the day and technology was only there in the background, barely noticeable at all.
I have learnt a lot in this project and I think the things which I have discovered about my own creativity and where it truly lies will carry on in future projects probably in a more authorial illustrated book format which I hope to get published. I enjoyed working with other people and making a day of it was more fun.
I hope the images I have produced provide people with an insight into nature and how having a day out in the woods can be fun and encourage more people to get back in touch with their own creativity. I also hope they make people more aware of how looking after natural resources for future generations is important, not just because trees produce oxygen for us to breathe, but because they also offer great free entertainment in a relatively safe environment. With people so concerned with living a ‘flat screen existence’, both at work, at school, at home, at play, what is the alternative? The woods offered this to me for this project and I hope it inspires visitors to the exhibition to go for more walks in the woods near them.
Bibliography:
Anthony Gormley (DVD recording)
Ego: the strange and wonderful world of self-portraits (dvd recording) directed by Sebastian Barfield.
Friedling, R, (20 Oct 2008), The art of participation 1950 to now, London, Thames & Hudson
Furlong,W, Gooding, M, (16 Sep 2002), Song of the Earth, London, Thames & Hudson
Orta, L& J, Orrell, P, (24 Aug 2007),Lucy + Jorge Orta pattern book: an introduction to collaborative practices, London, Black Dog Publishing
This is Civilisation : save our souls (dvd recording)- looking at the work of famous art critic Ruskin.
Springford,M date?, Imagine art is child's play(dvd), place of pub?, publisher?
Tala, A, (30 Mar 2009)Installation and experimental printmaking, London, A & C Black Publishers Ltd
Woolf, J, (13 Oct 1993), The Social Production of Art , New York, Palgrave Macmillan
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