NEW STUDIO Week Nine: Easter Egg Hunt

This week began badly, Monday felt like an awful day, one of this where you feel as if nothing is going right without being able to put your finger on what’s wrong.

Rendering the Garden

Rendering the Garden

I took my laptop to the shop to render out some new video while I was working on other stuff. I am encouraged by the idea of what I’m making on the computer and by where it might fit in the overall vision of geranium, but I’m not happy with what I have made yet. The idea is to have the video fade into a drawing that walks you around the garden and then fade back.

I also decided I needed to move ‘Snow Line’ so I broke it, I think this is what put me off the day, I knew I needed to move it and when I moved it was obviously too fragile so I discovered I had to break it. It did help me resolve the top piece that I was unhappy with though.

Snow Line Broken

Snow Line Broken

I also stripped out some of the underside and applied a new coat of blue and made a fillet for the top section that is ripped out which will also be blue.

Screen First Coat

Screen First Coat

and the other side

and the other side

Wednesday was a better day, although still punctuated with the rendering struggles. I continued to paint the screen, hung the drawing and stretched some new paper and fixed the blue fillet into ‘Snow Line’

Snow Line - Compass Points - 17 04 2019

Snow Line – Compass Points – 17 04 2019

The base, added Monday, is deliberate.

Screen Painting Wednesday

Screen Painting Wednesday

and the other side

and the other side

The screen has two sides now, and is progressing.

Garden Drawing

Garden Drawing

The drawing hung upstairs.

I also thought I could use a small desk at the front of the shop so I reclaimed some wood and made one.

Desk

Desk

On Friday, Good Friday, I didn’t get to the studio as I was preparing for the weekend. I did re-submit my Project application to ACE, and I made a sign for Monday!

Easter Egg Hunt

Easter Egg Hunt

NEW STUDIO Week Seven

Spent Monday preparing the plinths. I decided that I wanted to keep them very basic as it’s all work in progress so I only painted a section at the top. Installed some of them on Wednesday…

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

here are the three from the Wheatley Hall Road studio and the two maquettes for the screens that will be built from the shelves here. The new one at the back, or the mostly new one, is called ‘snow line’ based on Dream Song 28 which is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

The piece is being built around the armature I built at the last studio and is clad in the flooring the last tenant ripped out of the first floor of this studio.

Snow Line

Snow Line

On Friday I took the forty one Garden Collage drawings from the Ptolemy’s Garden series to the shop.

Shop April 5th

Shop April 5th

The idea is to display as many as possible alongside the sculptures I’m building in the space. I think I can get 30 of them around the room and up the stairs without too much fuss. Everything takes longer than you think it will. I’d originally decided to use a steel wire along the wall and hang the drawings from it using bulldog clips. I want to keep the ‘in progress’ aesthetic, implying a constant state of flux. That’s why I’m building in the space as well.

Shop April 5th

Shop April 5th

You can some work on ‘snow line’ at the back but a better view is provided on the video

I also revisited an old film piece and ripped the sound to add to a track for the installation. The film now runs through the interlaced Burnt Norton/Tithonus poem, into a piece called stations which uses some overheard comments and a few half memories to suggest something of a reverie and then into the short poem paraphrasing the first piece. I will post sections when I’ve edited it to be small enough to upload.

NEW STUDIO Week Six

Monday 25th March.

Started the day by filming the installation with a tripod and adjusting the lighting in the camera. It’s not an expensive camera so the quality doesn’t improve much but it gives a better idea of the space. The videos are very big so I’ve put them on Vimeo.

Vimeo MVI_3310 https://vimeo.com/326652463  6 minutes – Eliot/Tennyson

Vimeo MVI_3311 https://vimeo.com/326652287 3 minutes – summary poem.

rudimentary plinths for shop space

rudimentary plinths for shop space

Subsequently spent time downstairs checking out the lights, the sockets are are working fine but I need a couple of dozen new bulbs, and making some simple plinths to stand the five sculptures I’ve got there so far. Two are put together so far but need painting. The aim is to be able to open the big window shutter by next Friday.

This Wednesday was spent out of the studio doing a spot of teaching. I also spent a full day on an ACE application – got to keep trying – and planning for a potential commission.