On The Tiles

A few weeks ago I spent a very enjoyable morning making a design for a ceramic tile in the company of Judit Matthews. Judit is an illustrative artist who lives and works near me, who recently offered to run a workshop on tile painting. Keen to try something new, I signed up and went along.

Judit’s studio is a lovely light filled room with loads of windows, and very high ceilings. It’s a great place to work. There were six of us in the workshop and with Judit’s guidance, we all managed to finish a piece of work in the two hours we spent together. Here’s mine.

I have plans to make further tiles using leaf and other designs, I just need to source the raw materials, and find the time! This piece will be placed locally over the weekend as the latest free art drop.

Update. Someone has asked me how you might frame a ceramic tile. I have fixed a small folding hook to the reverse so you could hang the piece unframed. I also mocked up a deeper section frame idea as an example.

If I was going to frame it like this, I would remove the hook (it is glued on and would slice off with a sharp knife) and fix the tile to the back of the frame with strong glue dots.

Museum Piece : An Invitation To The Tate

Carole and I recently visited the ceramics department at the V&A museum. We were blown away by the range and quality of what we saw, here are just a few examples.

As we left the museum, I spotted a jar of seed markers on sale, and bought a few. I knew I wanted to do something artistic with them, I just wasn’t sure what.

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Seeing how they were meant to be used in a garden – I returned to a previous favourite of mine, the poppy. I worked up an abstraction of poppy heads on the reverse of the sticks.

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I’m really pleased with how these turned out. I should have left it there, but sometimes it’s tempting to keep on keeping on, and before I knew it…

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…I’d gone too far. I really didn’t like what I saw in front of me so I painted over this image.

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Frustrated, I abandoned the work. A few days later, I went to a preview of the new wing of the Tate Modern with a couple of good friends. We had a great time, and on my return home – I painted a version of the graphic which was on our preview invitation, onto the blank seed marker ‘canvas’.

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An Invitation To The Tate

I certainly didn’t imagine this when I first spotted the seed markers at the V&A, and I’m OK with the fact that I’ve ended up with an abstraction of a museum, painted onto something I bought at…a museum.