Many artists suffered from a creative drought during the deepest weird of the pandemic but I seemed merrily aloof from it and just kept creating. This summer though I felt completely drained of creativity despite wanting to work every day. I carry the lingering sense of loss from lockdown version one in 2020. I deeply miss the revealed vision of what a re-ordered and world could be like. Seeing everything slotting thoughtlessly back into the same tired grooves as before seems like some sort of coping mechanism for society but I pine for the missed opportunity. Quieter roads and improved sleep, the lack of road soot on the windowsill, seeing people enjoying the outdoors when and where they never did before, learning the names of things and foraging, being able to just stop and reconsider things for a bit, and to treasure being alive instead of fretting at being unable to inflate a car tyre because of an enormous petrol station queue.
A few weeks ago I felt the volcano of creativity coming back as the annual summer holiday tourist crowds stopped scaring me off the streets, and then suddenly I could make new work again.
New artwork - ‘Aesop thwarted’
This piece is taken from a real-life view in St Leonards-on-Sea. It sparked some meandering thoughts and I was perfectly poised to make this the work that drew me out of that desert. If you want to read a little more about it then it can be found here. I always intended to use watercolour pencil over the stippling for this work because the glow of the mossy branch is just too lovely to leave monochrome. Along with my other work ‘A housing crisis’, from last year, I think there is a time and a place for setting aside my assertion that people’s brains colourise a monochrome scene automatically. I like the idea that humans ‘see’ colour even when there isn’t any, like supposedly seeing edges to objects in reality - can you ever actually draw the outline of a tree or can you only just suggest its form? The hyper-natural colour of mosses in a built environment now sometimes leave me unable to resist. The atomisation of the form in this series of work continues as I remove all the drawn lines, and I’m not too fussy about colour bleed on plant drawings either as it reminds me of movement. I’m working towards depicting a sense of things.
Experimentation - Tetra Pak
I recently heard that you could cut open Tetra Pak containers and use them for printing. Having fought a lot of internal battles over sustainability and waste I was getting super-frustrated with discoveries that the local council was no longer taking this kind of packaging for recycling, despite it being one of the best ways of cutting back on my dairy consumption and the only way of getting certain legumes. Hearing that printing might give the waste a second use was intriguing. There are lots of tutorials available online, but basically you etch the foil surface with a metal point and ink the ‘plate’ before pressing it. I’ve got a long way to go before I get the results I want but here are some examples of hand-pressed plates on my first attempts.
An inked plate depicting my work ‘Fang’ from earlier this year.
Lots wrong with this but a fascinating start.
A better result that taught me a lot about the wetness of the paper and the inking method.
That’s all for now, I need to try and make some new work today. Fingers crossed.