I’ve just started experimenting with some new liquid watercolours, made by Winsor and Newton. My intention with these paints, is to use these primary colours to mix and blend other colours, shades and tones.
I’m also experimenting with a more themed sense to my art. I’m increasingly noticing how other artists explore and play within what at first glance, might mistakenly (on my part) appear to be a single idea. My thoughts around the kind of art I want to create have drifted around a lot, seeing themed work is helping me to realise I can explore ideas I come cross in much greater depth and breadth than I previously thought. Less hopping from idea to idea, more exploration of each idea. This will become evident as my work progresses.
Here is one of the first two pieces of work created with the new paints. I’m fascinated by the range of colour brought forth from just three tubes of paint.
Although I made two pieces, together they are titled Signals : Part Three. They are painted onto A4 sized sheets of watercolour paper. One piece has been bought by a friend, and I gifted them the second one. They belong together.
As you can see, I made a slight modification to my signature to fit the style of these works.
The boy lies in the grass with one blade
Stuck between his teeth
A vague sensation quickens
In his young and restless heart
And a bright and nameless vision
Has him longing to depart. N Peart
I was born in 1965, the same year the first ever desktop computer hit the market. The Programma 101 by Olivetti arrived, and overnight, computers went from looking like this:
We took a very different view of computers back then. People were ‘a bit terrified of them’, and concerned that computers would be used to control everything and take away freedom.
I don’t recall ever using a computer during my school years. All our work was written in books, drawn on paper, listened to on tape and vinyl. Signals were likely to be distorted, there was interference, and feedback. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the pen and the brush were among the devices I used which provided some of that feedback. The signals might be quite subtle, but they were there. The response of the writing and drawing instrument when crafting different letters, different shapes, and shades. You don’t get this subtle feedback from a keyboard or a stylus.
Digital Man
He picks up scraps of information
He’s adept at adaptation
Because for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay. N Peart
I started work in the mid 1980s, by which time computers looked something like this:
IBM PC 5150
A decade later I was selling computers to earn a living, and they were common place in people’s homes and at work. I remember starting work for BT in 1996 and being surprised to find no computer at my desk. Some of my colleagues were quite happy to still be relying on inter office memos stuffed in envelopes, and though people were given email addresses – there seemed to be no compulsion to use them.
Fast forward to now, and for most people who read this blog, the idea of not being connected to your work through computers and other devices is practically impossible.
Love them or loathe them, etcetera. And yet…
Analog Kid : Digital Man
…for all the advantages of digital, there remains something distinctly ‘connected’ about working in analog. Those subtle signals I mentioned earlier – the feedback a pencil gives you when you write and draw – that’s a very desirable thing. I recently spotted my friend Euan Semple talking about Blackwing Pencils on Facebook. I followed the crumb trail and discovered you can pay $25 for a box of 12 Palomino Blackwing 24 pencils, produced as a tribute to Pulitzer Prize winning author John Steinbeck. In truth, you’ll be lucky to find these available for sale, they are a limited edition pencil (I swear I had no idea there was such a thing), and seemingly the only way to guarantee a set of these, or at least of future limited editions, is to join The Blackwing Club. Pencils as a desirable collector’s item, how about that?
I digress. Limited edition or otherwise, I believe the humble pencil, pen, and brush remain essential tools to work with. For all the speed with which I can ramble on here, each digit I produce on the screen feels just the same as the last. Q = W = E = R = T = Y. I know from my own experience and from the feedback I gain through arts based learning, that using analog tools to supplement your digital work, creates fundamentally different outputs. When we work like this, I and others see, hear and feel emotions much more clearly, and there seems to be a greater presence of something you might call humanity, when people are creating work together, by hand.
I don’t want to get all dogmatic about this, working by hand is not the answer to making work better, it is an answer. Thankfully, not everything follows Moore’s Law.
This is my 801st blog post. Eight hundred and firrrrrrrrrrssssssssttttt. That’s a lot of words, pictures, songs, and even the odd verse. There are times when the writing feels good, and times when putting fingers to keyboard feels like choking on sand. I once wrote every weekday for a month, and more recently, I see bigger gaps, longer spaces appearing between the writing. I worried a while about these gaps, not any more. There are times when I feel useful ideas, thoughts, and feelings stacking up in joyful abundance, and times when I feel it’s all been said. As Neil Usher puts it so wonderfully here in his penultimate post, that feeling is the Elemental Block.
Maybe it has all been said, Maybe the song remains the same, maybe the tune is different. And maybe not. I wrote a lot about death when my Dad died. That song, those verses, they’d not been written, spoken, sung before. I recently discovered a copy of the eulogy I wrote and read for Dad at his funeral. I’ve previously shared what Keira wrote and spoke at that time, and my words are currently not published. Maybe they should be…
The Archivist
…put out there, into the online archive. This simple opportunity that we have to write, publish and be damned, feels useful. I spotted a tweet from Gary Cookson a few days ago, marking the one year anniversary of his blog. Milestones matter. His tweet drew me to my own situation, 800 down, how many more to go? It struck me that I very rarely look back at this work. In rectifying this today (an experience i have largely enjoyed), two things in particular are dawning on me.
A lot of the writing itself is clunky, poor even. In the spirit of working out loud that’s fine – and I’m conscious too that writing is an art form, and is therefore subjective. Spelling and grammar aside, it isn’t right or wrong, it is right and wrong. Scratch that, it just…is.
There are threads, single strands from long ago, now woven into something stronger. There are seeds, planted way back when, which now stand as plants – more fully formed ideas. I’m thinking a lot about legacy at the moment, and I hadn’t previously appreciated the extent to which those things which currently matter to me, have probably always done so.
Update: I received some kind feedback from Broc Edwards, via Twitter. He tried to post this comment directly but couldn’t due to ongoing tech problems I’m experiencing on this site. Thanks Broc – I really appreciate you being in touch.
