London Calling

I was over in Ohio last week at the 42nd annual state HR conference. It was an excellent trip catching up with old friends, making new ones, and learning from each other. Whilst there I gave a talk on Art for Work’s Sake, and two more on collaboration. At the end of each session I gave away a copy of Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like An Artist. I give this book away often, so often I’ve lost count of the number of copies I have bought and passed on. This time – I decided to add a little something of my own to the mix, so I included a small water colour and pen sketch with each book.

I painted some water colour onto wet card and let them dry overnight. Then I drew on some iconic London related imagery, added the London Calling call sign, and my signature. All in all I guess each one took me about 45 minutes to make, the blue one slightly longer. I think I will repeat this experiment with future book giveaways, I enjoy being able to include something personal, something handmade.

London Calling 2 London Calling 1 London Calling 3

 

The Point of the Journey

We have been travelling around France, basing ourselves in Paris, Lyon, Clermont Ferrand, Avignon and Cagnes sur mer. It’s a lovely adventure, visiting places for the first time and revisiting some favourites too.

As we travelled, I’m reminded of Kurt Schwitters – who sometimes used bus tickets (and other bits and pieces you inevitably pick up when you travel) in his art. I began to think about using a collage of our various tickets to try and represent our journey.

I figured I would try and cut shapes from tickets then try and match them all up into a perfect fitting jigsaw of travel. I sat at the table in our apartment in Clermont Ferrand and began. I cut the first shape – easy peasy. I began to cut more shapes and quickly realised that this was proving much more tricky than I first imagined. The light was poor and I had a small pair of scissors; the harder I tried – the poorer the fit between the pieces became. I cut and fiddled and positioned and repositioned, getting nowhere.

The Point of The JourneyWhat you see here is the result of about four hours work – four hours! There’s really not much more to say about this scrap of work except that it really brought home to me the notion of ‘the point of the journey is not to arrive’. This odd endeavour has left me with a big stack of travel junk which I plan to revisit and try to create some kind of collage/mixed media work with. For now though – I need a break from bus and train tickets.

 

Cutouts – Pastures New and Harvest Home

I visited the Matisse Cutouts with a friend again recently, I think I’ve been to see the exhibition seven times so far. I love the scale of the later works, and the simplicity and adaptability of the whole cutout approach fascinates me. When I think about how some of my work projects evolve – I wonder how you could apply some cutout principles to them? Keep it simple, the option to position and reposition stuff as the ideas form, building and developing, iterating and improvising.

My friend is in the process of changing jobs, and as we walked around the exhibition and talked of work and the art we were seeing, part of our conversation was about knowing when to start something new, and knowing when something is finished.

I often carry a small supply of card and markers around with me, and once we’d seen the exhibition and gone our separate ways, these ideas of starting and finishing continued to bounce around in my head. Over the coming days, in snatched moments between meetings, two small pictures began to form – first in my head, and then on paper.

Pastures New
Pastures New
Harvest Home
Harvest Home

These two cutouts are an attempt to represent the cycle of beginnings and endings. I have mixed feelings about working with cutouts. It takes me a long time to make something that looks incredibly simple and basic. This is quite a childish method I suppose, and acknowledging that somehow makes pressing the publish button on these recent cutout pieces, feel awkward. Picasso said it took him ‘four years to learn to paint like Raphael – and forever to learn to paint like a child’, and whilst I’m not even aiming at Raphael like standards, maybe I just need to get over myself and be more comfortable with this kind of work.