I’ll have to call this my April blog, due to Covid 19 paralysis (my own).
My small world initially appeared to be the same with Level 4 lockdown here in New Zealand. I felt like I had been practising for it all my life. Having worked from home for many years it was business as usual for the first week.
Reality began to seep in. I found myself reading the Guardian each morning and immersing myself in pandemic news, discussions, opinions. Normally I scan news once a week, but don’t involve myself in information gathering. Too overwhelming and nowhere to put it in my already confused brain.
Social media became saturated with positive people, singing, making, looking back, inventing. I had to share my daily walks with others. I began baking cakes to appease my feelings – the kitchen is not my happy place. I embarked on a 1000 piece jigsaw to distract myself. I started to dream in jigsaw.
I went blank.
I found I couldn’t even sit in my studio. I decided to make a new area for my experiments after watching videos on artists with clear spaces. That’ll be the answer! I dragged an old kitchen benchtop from under the house, cleaned and tidied and eventually felt an assemblance of order returning. I know that making clear spaces is important, but it seems to take up a huge amount of time, cleaning, clearing, preparing for making.
I started using my hands by cutting entire bottles into one long strip. Then rolled them through my little device for wrinkles and then spent hours rolling it again, marking, threading. Phew, a little meditative relief – good old fashioned craft. Challenged myself with a non-colour. Why?
A little diversion
I’ve just finished reading Victoria Finlays ‘Colour’. It’s taken an age.
I want to have her adventurous spirit and be as interested as she was in joining all the dots of such an enormous palette, but I’m very glad she’s done it for me. There are many references of colour coding through the ages, influenced by spiritual belief, power, politics, poverty, wealth, necessity and at the heart of it all, the illusion of nature.
For example
– Wicker used to be the bubble wrap of its time, until it wasn’t – post nuclear world of plastic was invented and the wicker man burnt it and turned it into charcoal for drawing with. p.88
– The Daoists thought that if you were a great artist, you only need use one colour (black). That using many colours was vulgar. p100
– The Inca Empire at the height of its power used coloured knots to pass on information. Black string for time, yellow was gold, blue the sky (the gods). Red represented the Incas themselves, their armies and their emperor. It was life, power and death all bound up in a single piece of string. p158
– The Virgin Mary has not always worn blue. Russian icons she wears red, Byzantine artists showed her in purple. Sometimes in white. Colour symbolism not constant. p324
– Indigo dye in Java was said to get ‘depressed’ when a husband and wife fought, (folk theory), in Bhutan pregnant women were not allowed near the vat in case the unborn baby stole the blue. p372
– In 1665 and 1666 the Great Plague hit England. London lost 100,000 people, universities closed down and Issac Newton was sent home to observe the new rules. In his lockdown, he discovered that the colours of the rainbow were held within white light and proposed upping the list of colours from 5 to 7, adding orange and indigo – Mr Roy G Biv. p 375
Attai Chen #2
We had our second session Thursday 14 May 2020. A long time coming because I seemed unable to work. It was lovely to meet for the second time, and in these strange times and with the ease of Zoom this time.
We talked about Covid 19 and how it was affecting our lives.
I hadn’t thrown myself into the experiments we discussed last time due to my lockdown paralysis…I kept on going back to what I knew. He talked about not making a piece of jewellery from an experiment, and my two-dimensional composition tendencies.
A big question to ask myself is WHAT IS A THREE- DIMENSIONAL SHAPE?
He liked my inspiration board (mostly images already posted in Instagram) and asked me to choose five images, and really discover what they had in common. I do have difficulty finding common threads. I usually start with the universe, and that’s quite large and then everything tumbles in from there, left, right, and centre. And I have always captured images spontaneously – quick snap, and usually a finished composition!
Possibly there is a tension between nature and mankind. Interferences, not always happy ones. Certainly lots of round circles, but also messy shapes. Lots of splat.
Now I have to find that common thread and make 15 objects or drawings that inform that thing. Play with materials. I’m looking forward to it. I might finally do some drawing which I avoid like the plague. And I need to leave the house to visit the specialist glue man.
And we’re meeting again in two weeks!
