a constructed landscape

my worktable has been strewn with papers for two weeks now... printed images that have been edited and cropped and cropped and edited and printed on a variety of papers of varying degrees of transparency

 i am not a proficient at editing but iphoto makes it fairly simple and when i get something i love I stop and hit "save"

(it's also how i know when a piece of work is finished - when i love it, it's done... rather simple really, at least for me)

last week was all about layering the printed images, trying various combinations in varying scales

a few were good but two stood out

the first is the simplest... the background piece was a cropped enlargement of an image of the side of the klondike sternwheeler taken on a rather brisk day this past march

(it's getting some restoration work done so i feel fortunate to got have several good photos of some the weathering along the sides)

the image placed on top of that is of trees at marsh lake taken last summer when i was there for a campout

again, heavily edited: cropped, reversed, and changed from colour to silver tone, then printed on some rather transparent tracing paper

(for reference, the original image is in the centre of the contact sheet ifurther down in this post)

the layered image makes the weathered boards of the ship look a bit like water

the trees, boards to build the ship

the trees, fuel to run the ship

the ship ran on the water 

the water weathered the ship

and decades on, there are paddlewheelers along the river rotting back to the earth, feeding the growth of new trees

this next one is comprised of three images: the top portion is a failed acetate print of the quonset hut layered over a cropped image of the clay banks that line the yukon river with a scrap of wave action at marsh lake the bottom... kind of a stylised shoreline view and that was when "a constructed landscape" popped into my mind

i like that - it's kind of a guiding light in a way... something to hold in my mind as i work

i turned it on it's side which abstracts it somewhat but prefer it the other way

the contact sheet i made from some of my favourite images... seems it's always sky, water and wood

after finishing those two collage pieces i realized i was getting way too attached to making good meaningful work and that, along with the whole of it just making me miss the north too much has led to the decision to put this work aside for now... it's summer and i want to do something lighthearted, to play and experiment and not get caught up in the outcome

the flowers are blooming and nature is calling so i'll take the techniques i'm keen to explore like mono and gelli-printing, photo litho, and embossing/intaglio with my wee printing press and try them out with all things floral

today i started warming up with a few sketches and tomorrow i'm making a plan... kind of an outline of what i want to do and the order i'd like to do it in

kind of like summer school...

a new sketchbook...

letter writing... not a common thing any longer, at least not the "written on beautiful paper with a fine pen" kind of letters, but my friend christine and i do write each other letters, twice a year

hers are so lovely to hold in your hand, the papers she chooses have a beautiful softness to them and the ink clear and dark...  christine always begins each letter by telling me the type and origin of the paper followed by a description of the pen and ink

i love that

 i've had a thing for fine writing paper since a friend and I began collecting stationery at the age of 12... my understanding of fine pens began in high school with a parker 57 given to me my grandfather when he retired

the description of paper, pen and ink not only informs, it also causes a pause whilst i look closer at the pages, running my fingers over them a while before settling in to enjoy the letter itself

i've always saved them - letters like this must be saved but a couple of weeks ago i took a notion to make something with some them...

in need of a new sketchbook,  a search at the two stationery/art shops in town yielded nothing, nor did i have any paper suitable for what i was wanting

fingers tapping on my worktable, i cast my eyes around the room

and then i saw the latest letter with it's corresponding envelope...

picking them up, turning them over in hands, looking close at the grain and how the ink sat on it, feeling the sturdiness of the paper I thought that if they were given a light coat of gesso they would be perfect for sketching

and the envelope could be trimmed, reinforced with other paper and used for the cover

so i set to work

a scrap of blue mineraux paper christine used to wrap a previous gift is a favourite so it would be used on the cover somehow

for the front-facing cover i used a failed acetate transfer print and then glued the mineraux paper to the inside of the envelope flap for a wrap-around cover

below you see first page - enough gesso to obscure the handwriting, not obliterate it

and those beautiful deckle edges

acrylic gesso does have a bit of a plastic feel to it but it has not significantly changed the way the paper feels in the hand

I'd like to find a more natural one but not sure it even exists

using nine pages, i made three signatures with three pages each

a button and a twisted cord to tie it closed

 i'm going to enjoy using this over the coming days and weeks as i do some summer sketching... a reminder of a day several years ago when i was in england and christine and i sat in front of the derwent dam and sketched on a sunny spring afternoon

on the go

one of my little grand-daughter's favourite things to get hold of on the days she was in my charge was my cell phone and every so often she would grab it and set off about the room rapidly tapping the screen with her pointer finger

one day she managed to open the camera and through her tapping took this picture of the blinds with the floor and bottom edge of the loveseat

the image is fractured, most likely because she was moving at a rapid pace, trying to get away from me retrieving my phone

when it came up in my photos application i thought it looked rather interesting so decided to play around with some photo editing to see what I could see

haven't done anything else with it as yet though i've been toying around with a few ideas - it has certainly sparked an interest in abstraction of interiors so i was delighted on arriving home to find a good friend had gifted me with a beautiful photo book for my birthday

"BLACKWELL

WITHIN

a photographic

evocation"

by

Graham Murrell

words by Sarah Hall

small but packed with beautiful images that "balance the geometry and detail with the play of light and shade, reflection, texture, to create a counterpoise between the solid reality of the house itself and the evanescence of the passing moment within it's spaces", it's a photographic essay of captivating images of the interior of a beautiful estate in the lake district of the uk

on the go again, this time to Edmonton for a week to visit our son, i packed a few drawing materials and at the last minute grabbed this book and a very few scraps of fabric and threads that were laying on my worktable

in the spare moments of the last few days I have begun four small textile-based pieces drawing from some of the compositional elements in a few of the photos

not to make exact replicas

rather, a start point for simple geometric pieces that along with added stitches will hopefully create works that will have a sense of the images, both in their geometry and atmosphere

not sure i can pull off the latter but for now i've made a start at the former

the fabric choices aren't necessarily the best but i had less than twenty fabrics to choose from so making do was the only option

trying to capture a sense of the strongest elements though not through direct representation

simplicity at it's best here...

this last one is the only one i'm not sure about - it's very literal but i'll keep on with it just the same as these are to be a set and perhaps this one will have a duty only to complement the others

apologies for all the wrinkles but alas, no iron

we head home tomorrow where all will get a thorough pressing and then on with the stitching aspect

when i travel it's difficult to get stuck in to any one thing but in odd moments here and there this has been a joy to take up and work on

and as ever, it's feeding new ways of looking, of thinking and of working