Boats among the trees

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Judy

There are only a few days left before Luke Jerram’s Withdrawn installation disembarks from Leigh Woods and sets sail for its next, possibly, ultimate, destination.

I finally got a chance to visit last Sunday, and really wasn’t sure what to expect. A fleet of unseaworthy vessels arranged in a woodland – part of me couldn’t help but ask why. The boats have formed the setting for a variety of cultural performances throughout the summer, as well as asking grand ecological questions – but beyond that, what is the emotional impact of this artwork?

I love trees, and I love boats, so an afternoon tramping through to a leafy land-docked harbour was irresistible. Any when we arrive and glimpsed Grey Gull through the foliage, something deep inside me leapt for joy.

Because, in a curious way, it made perfect sense. Not only in the sensible sense that these seafaring craft are made primarily from wood, so to return them to a woodland offers a delightful symmetry to it, but because the boats themselves look perfectly at home.

Being a Sunday, the woods were awash with family, mainly in wellies and bright waterproofs, and it led me to wonder if part of the reason this works so beautifully is because it harks back to the Swallows and Amazons adventure games of childhood, when any fallen tree trunk could become a pirate ship, mountainside or palace in an instant.

The installation is both absorbing and unexpectedly transportive. Joanne Marie has a cockpit where a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles rests, and a lobster pot lolls on the stern. Stand close to Gloria Jean and you’ll catch an enticing whiff of saltwater.

More than that, though, is the way nature has quietly been taking hold. The peeling paint has inevitably peeled further, moss is quietly springing up, and thick cobwebs are appearing in interiors we ourselves can’t enter. Oak leaves gather where once seaweed might have strewn.

And I’m fairly certain that when all the humans leave for the day, the badgers, squirrels and other Leigh Woods’ residents come out to play.

Luke Jerram’s Withdrawn installation will be in Leigh Woods until 6th September 2015.

Are you an artist or do you know an artist who would like to be showcased on SkyLightRain.com? Get in touch at judydarley (at) iCloud.com. I’m also happy to receive reviews of books, exhibitions, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Eco-art in Bristol

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Judy

I recently encountered a pair of whales in the centre of Bristol. Not in the harbour, where you might expect the occasional sighting of a cormorant, but in a fountain on Millennium Square.

Made from Somerset willow woven into the two immense marine mammals, it’s a truly imposing work, with 70,000 plastic bottles, collected at the Bath Half and Bristol 10k forming the swirling, glimmering ocean they swim through.

And yes, those are bottle tops hanging from its imposing tail.

It’s a really dramatic, beautiful way to draw attention to the 15 million bottles we send to landfill every day – apparently around eight million tonnes of plastic end up in oceans each year, equivalent to the body weight of 45,000 blue whales.

So the message is, avoid single use plastic, upcycle and, when you’re thirsty, think of the whales.

The artwork will be in situ until 1st September 2015, when, I presume, the whales will migrate to warmer waters. Find more details at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-33548708 and www.bristol2015.co.uk/bristol-whales/

Lifework with Yurim Gough

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Judy

Who says drawings need to be done on paper or canvas? Korean artist Yurim Gough has found clay to be the perfect medium, much to her own surprise.

“It was always my dream to be an artist, but in my own country I never even touched clay,” says the former fashion designer, who moved to Bristol eight years ago in search of a new creative direction.

In fashion design Yurim experimented with a multitude of materials, but says it took five years of exploring “new mediums for my art, such as wood-carving, before I found that the feeling of clay told me that it was my thing to use. In fashion design I took great satisfaction from realising my imagination, and the attraction of clay is in being able to achieve that same satisfaction.”

Since early childhood, Yurim has “always been drawing. I was looking for a long time for what I could do that would make me the most happy, and since the drawing had always done this, and now the clay did too, it just happened that I brought these two things together.”

It was a visit to “a reclusive local pebble beach” that helped realisation dawn. “I was playing with the stones, drawing on them with a pencil for fun and making up stories.”

Yurim is entirely self-taught, developing her skills through “concentration and repetition. I went to lots of life drawing sessions on and off for a period of almost 20 years.”

To create the ceramic bowls and other objects that she likes to draw on, she explains, “I hand-mold the pieces, then they are bisque fired, then I draw in front of a live model with ceramic pencil.”

Following this, the artwork is glazed then fired. “I then apply gold lustre and fire again.”

Through combining her ceramics with her beloved drawing, Yurim says she had something of a breakthrough. “I have never rubbed anything out when life drawing, because there is not enough time,” she says. “One day I was drawing and made a mistake and in frustration, I crossed strong lines through the attempt. It made me feel so free, I suddenly realised that this was me, and carried on. I also found that drawing like this, I could focus in a way I had not been able to before.”

The result is a sketchy, vibrant style crammed with vitality. Her figures are gorgeous but imperfect, just as we are – in fact, their stunning beauty lies in their imperfections.

Being in front of a living, breathing model has an impact too.

“I love the human energy giving me craziness, sadness, happiness and other feelings – it is different every time.”

They fizz within their stillness, seemingly holding in emotions evident in their posture, and where their tensions lie, with Yurim’s lines emphasising this with powerful understatement.

The restrictions imposed by a life class drives her productivity, that, “and wanting see what the result will be. Living in my country, and working in fashion, I never had any time. Coming to Bristol things slowed down and I realised what I could do with limited time. In life drawing, you have a fixed time limit for the pose but you have to slow down and see what comes out.”

Find more of Yurim’s work at yurimgough.com and shop.theotherartfair.com/artists/yurim-gough.

Brilliant hues with Zandra Rhodes

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Judy

Early this year I interviewed the inimitable Zandra Rhodes for Simply Sewing magazine, and it was an absolute pleasure. The piece has been published in issue 3 of the mag.

I began the feature with the paragraphs:

It’s 1973, 6am in the Red Centre of Australia. In the desert chill a young woman sits sketching Uluru, the sandstone monolith then better known as Ayers Rock. Her hair is bright green, but within a few years it will be shocking pink, and will remain that colour well into her seventies.

“I sat there very early in the morning in the freezing cold light and waited for the sunrise,” says designer Zandra Rhodes, now aged 75. “Then I drew the way the shadows laced over that rock.”

Zandra Rhodes’ Ayers Rock sketches from 1973

Decades later those early sketches have become a series of fabric designs for Coats, which was the reason the interview took place, but it was fabulous to delve into a mind with so much creative energy, to gain an insight into her celeb clientele, but, even more fun, chat about her trademark meandering wiggles.

Zandra Rhodes’ Lace Mountain fabrics cr Coats

“All my things have wiggly lines!” she exclaims, seeming amused by this. “When I fill in a background it’s far more likely to have wiggly lines than be plain.” She hesitates then adds: “Wiggles are friendly. Prints have the power to make you happy. They supply extra depth to what you’re thinking about. You put the thing on and the print supplies a jolly face for the day.”

There’s an awful lot more to this interview – and lots more images too. Find the full piece in Simply Sewing issue 3, available from www.simplysewingmag.com.

Visual impressions with Midge Naylor

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Judy

Selm Muir by Midge Naylor

Looking at Midge Naylor’s paintings, monoprints and photographs, I’m struck by a sense of Britain’s coastal landscapes, places of wildness, wind, rain and brief glorious moments of sunshine when the light catches on drenched edges and makes them suddenly sublime. Her work offers up shapes and shades that shortcut you to the feel of a place.

“Painting,” she says, “is my preferred medium and I use lots of different materials, reworking by removing or layering until it feels ‘right’. And then there’s colour… that’s why it’s the medium I use most often. The materiality of a painting seems to increase its imaginary potential and feeling of presence.”

The same impressions feed through to her monoprints, a process she came to almost by accident. “I started monoprinting when on an etching course a few years ago,” she explains. “Soon realising that the long process involved in etching didn’t suit the way I like to work, I used the equipment to produce monoprints. Most are really monotypes – I don’t use the plate for more than one print and there’s no going back – probably fewer than one in four is a success.”

Midge’s photographs are equally abstract, capturing details most of us would overlook. “The unexpected and the usually unnoticed attract me, together with fine textures, patterns and colour,” she says. “Editing of photographs is kept to an absolute minimum.”

The way Midge works is enticingly exploratory: “I think of the work as experimental – it refers to landscape but it’s a psychological landscape,” she says. “I’m a studio painter and I draw a lot, but don’t gather material for specific paintings from observational drawing outside. I have no idea what will happen when I start a work and the excitement is in making visual a kind of reverie. ‘Selm Muir’ (at the top of this post) is an example of this. It’s an ‘inscape’ created spontaneously, driven by memory and emotion.”

Many of her pieces don’t have titles or have non-specific ones “because I don’t really like putting ideas about subject matter into the mind of the viewer, particularly in the more abstract works.” It means we’re left to read into the pieces and make sense of them however we wish or are able to, creating an unspoken collusion between artist and audience.

Midge’s landscape piece March 15 #2 (it’s the second she drew on that date) is currently on show in the RWA’s Drawn exhibition. It’s already been sold, so take a look while you can!

Organic shapes with Cheryl Brooks

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Judy

Elderflower buds - lino cr Cheryl Brooks

Elderflower buds lino print © Cheryl Brooks

Organic silhouettes and echoes printed on circles enclosed within squares form the heart of artist Cheryl Brooks’ work. “I lived in Barcelona for eight years and grew very interested in the geometry of Islamic tile patterns – they can’t depict anything natural, so it’s all about the shapes, and they must look perfect, but can never actually be perfect. That was the beginning of the idea for me.”

Drawing these ideas into her own work, Cheryl began to meld it with an obsession with the geometry seen in plant life, and then expanding it.

Geometric Sero - Green & Peach cr Cheryl Brooks

Geometric Sero © Cheryl Brooks

“While in Barcelona I had a dog who was not my dog,” she smiles, “and I would walk in the park with this dog who was not my dog. I began taking lots of close-up photos of the flowers I saw there, examining their intricate forms.”

Back in England, Cheryl continued to explore, developing a series of pieces playing with the visuals of cow parsley, elderflowers and other botanical shapes. “I love taking something small and making it bigger,” she says. “No matter how small the original blossoms are, the natural geometry is still there.”

Long before she realised she wanted to be an artist, Cheryl recognised the joy making things gave her. “I love working with my hands – cutting, pasting and printing,” she says.

The desire to make and create initially led to Cheryl training to be an interior designer, gaining both a BA and MA in the discipline before taking a job designing spaces for pubs and nightclubs. “I eventually left that because it was so stressful and on such a large scale,” she says, “but I still wanted to be in that industry, so I worked with an architect in Cheltenham, still as an interior designer, but on much smaller projects.”

At this time Cheryl began taking a life drawing class, and then left Cheltenham to go travelling. “An Australian friend I had met while travelling asked, what do you really want to do? And I said, be an artist. Then she asked, are you good enough? And that got me thinking.”

With questions like that, who needs a life coach? The result was another BA followed by an MA, both in Fine Art. “So now I was MA squared,” Cheryl grins.

The most important thing she felt she learnt on these courses was how to transfer her ideas into art. “I had all these thoughts in my head and wanted a way to express them, to find my own way to make sense of the world and share this.”

Part of Cheryl’s MA was spent in Barcelona, a city she fell in love with so deeply she returned in about 2004 to make a go of being a full time artist there. “It was really hard,” she admits. “I did have a gallery who sold my work, but still… You have to get used to being very poor, and after a while that’s all you can think about. It gets in the way of the work, of the creating.”

To counteract this, Cheryl trained as an English language teacher, which freed her up to focus fully on creating whenever she had the time. After eight years in Barcelona, though, it felt like time to return to England, this time to Bournemouth with its profusion of foreign students in need of a good language teacher.

Teaching, for Cheryl, is about sharing her knowledge and encouraging others to join in – an ethos that also informs the collaborative art project she launched, titled Image Flowers https://imageflowers.wordpress.com. “We have a series of core images that people can look at and think, that reminds me of… and then produce a work in response to it, or simply submit a photo,” she explains. “The idea it that the initial image is the centre of the flower and each of the responses is a petal. It’s about opening up dialogue. Anyone can get involved.”

Being involved, a part of something bigger, has worked well for Cheryl. While settling into her new Bournemouth life in 2013, Cheryl joined Poole Printmakers. “They’ve been going for over 20 years. It’s a cooperative where you can go and use the presses, meet other printers, do courses. It’s very inspiring!”

Having a space to go and be creative in was especially important to Cheryl at that point. “I was renting a room in a shared house, so had nowhere to work,” she remembers. “These days I have a studio in my own house, where I tend to hand roll the prints, but if I want to use a press I go to the cooperative and make as many as I need.”

The break away from painting to printing made a huge difference to Cheryl’s perception of her work. “Printing takes me away from concentrating too much on the concept and allows me to focus on the image,” she explains. “It allows me to create something more immediate, and by making multiples rather than a single image that takes a long, long time, it means each piece is not so precious.”

Cheryl’s materials emphasise this, as many of her striking round pieces are created using the polystyrene circles you find in the packaging of shop-bought pizzas. “I love the round shape,” she comments. “The polystyrene is very receptive to the oil-based printing inks I like to use. The surface is quite soft so you can create a lot of expressive marks simply by pressing lightly.”

It sounds really satisfying! Cheryl also creates linocuts, which is a lot more challenging but results in a very different effect. “A pizza base plate has a very limited life, while a lino plate will print again and again,” she points out. “The lino is harder which means they’re much more precise. A pizza base will always squidge a little, which produces a very different look.”

This technique for creating prints has in itself formed the idea for another online project, this time in the form of an arts hub called Pizza Base 15 http://pizzabase15.wordpress.com. “It’s a virtual arts centre, with workshops, a café with cake recipes, exhibitions and more,” she explains.

More recently, Cheryl has been taking a course in surface printing on textiles. “I’d like to take it away from fine art and back towards craft,” she says. “I want to explore the possibilities of making things you can actually use and wear rather than just hanging them on a wall – learn about pattern repeats, the dyes and inks you need to use, and try printing with pizza bases onto fabric.”

Cheryl particularly relishes the juxtaposition of circles within squares, a pairing seen in many of her framed works.

“It’s the infinite within the rational,” she says, “The organic world is full of spirals and spheres, but there are no squares in nature. It’s a manmade shape. I love putting the two together.”

Find Cheryl at pizzabase15.wordpress.com, imageflowers.wordpress.com and cherylbrooks.weebly.com.

Midweek writing prompt – portrait

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Judy

Old Woman, Burma © Premgit

Some faces really tell a story – their lives are printed on their skin, in the lines like rivers in a landscape tracing the journeys around their eyes, mouths, brows.

The image above was caught by Premgit, and you may use this if you wish, but equally look to the people you know, and see if you can pick out the experiences marked out on their faces. What has made them joyful, hopeful or afraid? And how can you spin this into a fictionalised narrative?

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

A vivid morning with Amy Vans

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Judy

Welcome to 2015! How are you feeling today? In case you’re still a bit groggy after your New Year’s Eve shenanigans I thought it would be good to start the day, indeed the year, with some of Amy Vans’ colour-saturated paintings.

I encountered Amy’s artwork in a basement flat on an art trail and was blown away by their dazzling intensity.

The one shown at the top of this post – Bristol View – immediately caught my eye, but Amy’s initial ideas took root far further afield, when she was journeying across the world.

“My travels took me to Melbourne where I met Mirabela Varga, an emerging Australian Artist who inspired me with her free style and use of colour,” Amy says. “I then worked as studio assistant for Mirabela in Barcelona whilst she was exhibiting. Working with Mirabela provided me with a fantastic source of knowledge and learning both technically and creatively.”

After a year soaking up Mirabela’s influence, Amy returned to England where she set to work, allowing her own style to evolve.

“I’ve broken free into new forms of expression,” she enthuses. “I work very spontaneously, regularly changing my palette and experimenting with different processes.”

Much of Amy’s work “reflects the different countries I have been to and the people I have met. Most notably, living in Barcelona amongst the vibrant art scene, and the intensities and richness of India, fuelled my passion for colour. Over the years my process has evolved but the thing that has stayed consistent is my strong use of colour.”

The brightness of Gaudi’s work had a big impact on Amy’s work during her year in Barcelona. Amy admits to “having always been slightly nocturnal”, which she says has had an impact on her pieces – “a lot of my work tends to offer an impression of the lights of city streets at night.”

Back at home in England, Amy is influenced by the music she immerses herself in. “I tend to paint only to familiar music, feeling most comfortable in my studio listening to bands such as Portishead and Massive Attack.”

When painting, Amy is enviably absorbed in what she’s creating. “I’m wholly focused on the image I am creating and where the next swipe of the palette knife is going to take me,” she says. “I enjoy the technical side, moving the paint on the canvas. Generally I work straight from the tube and mixing is done on the canvas. Choosing which colours is a massive part of my process.”

Amy also enjoys experimenting with different textures, dragging her palette knife through paint “and seeing what marks can be created using different tools. I like the plastic qualities of acrylic paint the most but I’ve also explored a range of mixed media as seen in ‘Fractured Image’ (shown below) – if you look closely you can see the newspaper print coming through the paint.”

She adds: “It’s only occasionally that I set out to do anything representational. Mostly I’m interested in exploring the colours, textures and depths that I can create. The image develops as part of the creative process.”

Find Amy’s art at www.saatchiart.com, www.londonart.co.uk and facebook.com/AmyVansPaintings.

Midweek creative prompt – image flowers

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Judy

Something a bit different to get your creative juices flowing, or indeed, flowering, this week!

Launched by Cheryl Brooks, Image Flowers is a collaborative art project, with which you’re invited to participate. All you need to do is browse the images hosted on the Image Flowers site and create a visual reply to any that move you. This can be a painting, collage, photograph, or whatever comes to mind. I supplied Corner, the image at the top of this post.

The project began when Cheryl, a fine artist, began a series of works exploring visual connections generated from one starting point. In my recent work “I have been exploring natural geometry especially in relation to flower heads, so this and an exhibition I saw where two photographers had over time created a visual conversation by responding to each others images, is the inspiration behind this project.”

The image that started it all, by Cheryl Brooks

To take part, simply spend some time at Image Flowers and find a picture that intrigues or moves you. Then email the picture to Cheryl as directed on the site, including the details of the image that spurred you to get creating!

Of course, if you find yourself moved to produce a written piece instead, that’s fine – just send it to me instead of Cheryl.

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

Carol Peace – a quiet space

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Judy

There’s an unexpected sense of lightness to Carol Peace’s work. Her figures float, soar, skim – sometimes suspended from giant fish, occasionally riding personal balloons, or just gazing outwards – mind apparently occupied elsewhere.

Yet her materials are decidedly solid in nature – gleaming bronze or earthy clay – fixing her sculptures well and truly to the ground. It’s a juxtaposition I enjoy, and connects in a way to Carol’s thoughts about herself.

“I don’t remember much from early childhood,” she says. “I know I also liked cooking and horse riding so it could have been either of those instead of art. Sometimes I think I should have been a farmer, being out in nature all the time. My granddad and uncle were farmers and I did work on a farm after college and went from rougher (basically wedding in a massive field) to ploughing in one job… Perhaps I’ve missed my vocation!”

However, it was art that eventually stole her heart. “I remember copying drawings out of books a lot when I was little – I was always drawing,” she comments. “Later I spent a lot of time in the art room at school – it may have been because the teacher was good and very encouraging and the fact that is was a quiet space. I don’t remember feeling lonely or bored as a child so that’s probably a sign that I was quite self sufficient.”

She continues to relish the psychological aspects of sculpting, painting and drawing,

“There is quietness and space,” she says. “It can be fairly tough on the emotions – I always work honestly so it’s brutally direct sometimes, but I don’t mind. People often think the work is very calm and peaceful – I think they see the feeling I experience when making, but not the difficult starting points.”

On a tactile level, it’s the clay that Carol loves, “together with the process of changing something so fluid and fragile into bronze, something that will last forever. I am quite practical so I like the physical nature of sculpture, but I have a growing lust for painting as well.”

Carol draws inspiration from a wide range of sources, including travel, which she says helps her see things far more clearly. “It’s like when you start looking, your receptors open up. You can’t expect to make art unless you are really looking all the time. You can’t make art in isolation. To live life as a tourist, even at home, enables you to see things. Through time, familiarity and repetition a new place can become home but it’s good to keep wide-eyed.”

Nature plays a distinct role in this, particularly trees and leaves. “There’s that moment when the first red is coming into the trees and the lime green is leaving. You can’t just be busy, busy, busy all the time. You need moments in normal days to appreciate things.”

Carol continually seeks the stimulus beyond the habits of everyday life. “I’m not very good a routine,” she says. “I find no comfort in it at all, I like contrast. At the moment we (Carol and husband Graham) are experimenting by living half urban with the hub of traffic and distant train noises and the sound of screeching skips being dragged across yards and half in the middle of nowhere on a hill, in a field…it’s magic. Each time I go to the other place it is new and exciting, and I can see it afresh.”

Increasingly, Carol has been finding herself creating art with family at its core. “I see my ‘Family Tree’ painting (above) and realise its not a family tree at all its just about parents and me. The orange pair of leaves is them, as strong and intense in colour as the land. But I am a leaf. They are leaves.”

When asked to define her style, Carol says: “I work clay like I would a charcoal drawing, the texture is often defined by the pace of working, there are areas of focus and areas that fade or are less detailed. I put bits on and take them off all the time. I could never be a stone carver.”

She adds: “Sometimes there are marks over the work from the tools I use – they show direction of movement, and sometimes they are like deep scars. The way I work is a response to being alive, from the basics of the blood pumping round inside you. Like drawing form observation it is a direct and intuitive response so I don’t feel it’s a style its just how it comes out!”

Carol is opening up her artist’s studio (Unit 5.3 Paintworks, Bath Road, Bristol, BS4 3EH) to the public from 6-16th November 2014, with a Private View on Thursday 6th November 6-9pm. On Friday 7th November, her studio will be the setting of a special literary night, ‘Travel, Identity and Home’. Find out more here.

The writing workshop Writing From Art takes place in Carol’s studio on Wednesday 12 November. Find details here.

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