Phase 2 Starts Here

I took an unintentional break from writing here last week. A culmination of factors led to a tiredness that would not permit me putting pen to paper. I have started to volunteer at a community art studio in Dublin, I had a family reunion in Wexford and I have a couple of commissions on the go that needed my attention. All of these things were combined with the fact that the last tea cosy I showed you here was also one of the last projects I had readily documented on my computer. Apart from a couple of other works in progress my photo archive has all but dried up and phase 2 of my art archive needs to take place.

I have a hunt ahead of me. I must travel to foreign abodes to photograph, document and capture my work in their now natural habitats. I also have an archaeological dig to do; I must excavate what is now the historical work of my late teens and early twenties. I have a couple of portfolio cases groaning with drawings, paintings, print work and sculpture that I need to scan and photograph to include in this ever expanding document of myself.

So what was a steady and continuous process of documentation may become a less conventional beast, until I find my feet in this new territory of exploration. The photographing stage always takes longer than expected and the volume of work may delay what has been a regular and routine posting up until now.

I hope you can bear with me as my work takes on this new form in the background. It is exciting to re-discover old art work, old talents and dusty capabilities. The opening of my ancient artistic history makes my fingers tingle and makes my heart remember times of creativity past. I already have a longing to re-engage with some of the techniques I haven’t used in some time. Holding the heavy paper, seeing my marks made across it, is like retrieving long lost parts of me. The combination of idea and creative action makes for visceral memory making. I am walking through my memories at the moment and re-connecting with the brush strokes that make up my story. Here is just a taster of things to come.

Watch this space. 

  

Thematically Speaking Part 1

When I was in school, I generally had a frustration in English class. This frustration arose when we would get around to discussing the themes behind poets poetry, a writers novels or a playwrights plays. Themes- what were the ideas, the concepts, the issues behind the creative persons work? One of my English teachers used to sit behind her desk and rattle off the “themes” of a poets work from a photocopied sheet. I remember seeing many other things in the poetry, other hidden messages that had meaning for me. Sometimes I would venture them forward; I would raise my hand and share my personal insights. Generally, I was told; ‘No, that is not a theme in this poet’s work.’ So I stopped sharing my thoughts and I learned to feel stupid for not understanding the art that was before me on the black and white sheets of paper.

Self-Portrait

I’ve never really come back to poetry; my teenage spirit became wounded from my perceived lack of comprehension. I always wanted to shout at the teacher “But how do you KNOW? Were you sitting on the bench beside him when he wrote the stupid thing?” Of course now I understand that many people would have studied the poet in-depth and their findings would have been condensed down for our secondary education text books. I can also see that maybe my own emotional response to the poem and my exploration of that may not have gotten me the marks I needed to get an A grad in my Leaving Certificate. But how sad is that? You may get thousands of students who can spout off the top ten themes of Shakespeare or Yeats but can they tell you how the work makes them feel? I still think there are things in other people’s work that may speak to us and us alone, maybe completely unintentionally, but speaks to us none the less.

'Container' project. Notebook process work.

The reason I share this story with you is because I would like to share some of the themes of my work with you. I want to discuss the reoccurring threads that are woven through my art.

But I don’t want to insinuate for one second that the themes I see in my work are the only ones. You may see other things; feel other things about the pictures you see before you. I would encourage you to trust what you think about the work and your emotional response to it. It may be you feel happy or sad, intrigued or repulsed, invigorated or subdued. You might be surmising about the reasons I make the things that I do because you know me personally or you are making a judgement as a stranger. Some of your thoughts and feelings may tally with my own accounts but fear not if they do not match exactly.

'Container' project. 'Don't Judge a Container by it's Cover'.  Outside.

I am a huge believer in the un-conscious and un-conscious actions. You may be right on the money or an aspect of the work may be mirroring something back to you about yourself. I don’t think an emotional response can be “wrong”. Learning to trust and listen to my own guttural reactions to things has been one of the best tools I have learned for my art and for my life.

'Container' project. 'Don't Judge a Container by it's Cover'.  Inside.

Intuition and instinct can be sorely undervalued so I entreat you to use your own here. The understanding of art and the reasons for making it does not have to be the domain of educators, students and scholars alone. Art is not a mythical language that only the few enlightened ones can grapple with. I am telling you as an artist that I make things to express my thoughts and feelings and as we all express ourselves everyday, I completely trust your intelligence and your humanity that you will understand me.

(Unless, that is, I communicate terribly and that would be my fault and not yours!)

Self-Portrait.

A Friend, a Family Member, a Muse

In going through my old notebooks and visual diaries, there is one familiar face that keeps appearing time and time again. This is Cascarino Lawlor, our beloved family pet from my very early teens to my mid-twenties. The story of his name is legend in our family.

If you know anything about Irish soccer, you will remember we had a bit of a golden period in the late eighties and early nineties. As I remember, it was the time between the Euro ’88 Championship and the Italia ’90 World Cup. When I think of it, it’s like a haze of holiday sunshine. It generated great community spirit and national pride. All of our neighbours watched the matches in each others houses. There was huge excitement because being the underdogs, we ourselves, never expect to win anything. We seemed to clock up one victory after another and the Irish nation reveled in its time in the sun (we still do to some extent).

Anyone who knows me now will be completely shocked to hear my glowing account of this time because at this point in my life I am a known sports hater. I have sports issues. I have sporting-father neglect syndrome. I have “Get out of the way, the match is on!” anger. My dad is a sportoholic and has passed his obsession on to my siblings. I’ve somewhat grown to appreciate that it is a genuine passion in his life and I do my best to accept it. I’ll admit I don’t always succeed. I mostly do my best to just stay away and try not to annoy anyone.

Anyway, I’ve slightly moved away from my point. Tony Cascarino was a striker for the international Irish team at this time (no Grainne, I didn’t have to Google it!). My lovely sister Grainne LOVED him. Yes my dear, I am outing you. She LOVED him so much we named our dog after him. We always called him Casco for short.

Casco was the runt of the litter, a true under-dog, which made him irresistible to me and my sister. His siblings were fat and fluffy while he was skinny and a little sad looking. We wanted him. We wanted to choose him in part because we were worried he wouldn’t be the choice of other people. That’s probably a little condescending but I do think our young hearts were in the right place. He came home with us and has been part of our family ever since.

I always wanted to draw Casco. I wanted to capture his expressions, his pink nose and his tufty soft ears. I drew him from photographs and from real life (if he could sit still for long enough). I learned so much from trying to draw his face. I learned how light falls on fur and how hard it is to accurately draw a muzzle. I think I mostly drew him because I loved him.

He was noisy, he bit my ankles when we went for a walk, he followed me to the shops and when I was out with my friends. He was a good listener and always always got up on my lap and licked away my tears when I was upset. He was a good dog. When he passed away we grieved him. We all have “Casco stories” and he is cemented in our family history.

I feel when I look at the pictures I have drawn of him that I have a special artifact, a personal record of his existence. I examined every detail of his face and when I trace the lines with my eyes I remember unique details about him. I remember his mottled fur and the way his ears crimped when they were wet. Sometimes I am really glad I am an artist and when I’m looking at pictures I have drawn of Casco that is the gladdest I can be.  

       

A Sampling of my Samples

Since I wrote last week about my mother sitting up with me until three o’clock in the morning supporting me to get my work done, I have been thinking about all those “samples” I used to have to make for college. If any of you have been to college or any form of third level education I am sure you are aware of the pressure surrounding due dates for assignments. For art school I feel it has its own kind of unique pressure in the form of the sheer volume of work that has to be produced for any or all assignments.

When I was in college, I wasn’t an out-all-night-drinking kind of student. I took my course extremely seriously (sometimes too seriously I’ll admit) but I wanted to make art my career and I have a very strong work ethic inherited from my parents. Also I think I had just come from school were 70% of the curriculum were subjects I didn’t want to pursue and the excitement of making different kinds of art every day never really wore off, I was working with my passion.

  

Assignments could consist of research work, visual diary development, 10-15 samples of work to support your finished piece (A3 recommended) and then 5-10 actual finished pieces of well executed art work. In my experience, if I created work during the day in college, my tutors wanted to see something new and different in the final presentation. Everything was about the development of our ideas and the ability to produce something cohesive at the end of it.

If I had five different modules and five different assignments consisting of the aforementioned course load, the pressure to produce was immense. I feel if you followed me and my classmates around our college, all you would hear emanating from our group was “Samples, Samples Samples, Samples, Samples”.

The concept for the piece I am showing you the samples from today were taken from an assignment called “Ceremonial Passage”. Our tutors would give us a heading like this and then we would have to develop and personalise the theme into expressive pieces of art.

As I have always been an avid reader, I chose to centre my project around the journey I took from early childhood picture books, to books with pictures and words combined and then finally, to the pure written word of my late childhood and beyond. I always read at night and I wanted to communicate the warm enclosed sanctuary of being wrapped in my bed clothes and disappearing into a fictional world of characters and places I had never been before. The idea was to create a shroud that could be wrapped around me while reading with images and words from the books I loved growing up and helped me develop as a person.

I wanted the top of the piece to be very colourful with lots of illustrations and rounded characters from books like “The Bad Tempered Ladybird” by Eric Carle. I then wanted it to progress into more detailed drawings, for example, the drawings from a very special book my mam brought back from a trip to America called “Make Way for the Ducklings” by Robert McCloskey. I then wanted the piece to be drained of colour as I moved into the black and white pages of “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I wanted the piece to celebrate my progression as person and reader in this large ceremonial shawl.

  

I still like the concept I came up with for this assignment. The samples are re-worked images and illustrations from these and other books. I used pencils, chalk & oil pastels and paint to try to communicate them in my own may. I also used mixed media techniques by preparing grounds and drawing on top of them with various materials.

  

With 20/20 hindsight I can see by the finished piece that I was a bit ambitious with this whole thing though. There wasn’t nearly enough time to execute the shawl with the finish I wanted and on the scale I wanted. If I could go back I would make it smaller and maybe use an existing shawl rather than make everything from scratch. I was and am a perfectionist. I do like to think I am in recovery now but other people might say I am kidding myself.

I was quite often frustrated in college by not having enough time to finish things the way I wanted to. I even resented having to make the “samples” because they took so much focus away from the finished piece, the thing I would have to exhibit. I like them now as I look at them though and they do show a process. The reason we were asked to do things in college wasn’t always clear to me when I was there. I could put it down to poor or mis-communication or even just that the “institute of college” doesn’t feel the need to explain WHY you do something- just do it! Or maybe they were trying to tell me and I just didn’t get it! Anyway it makes more sense to me now and I elect to make samples myself these days even if I do twitch a little every time I start.

  

An Art Process That Has Deep Roots

Today I thought I would show you some research drawings I did for an art piece that sits in the heart of my family. It is a framed felt picture made mostly from felt I hand-worked myself and a lot of embroidery. I will share more about the background of it when I show you photographs of the actual finished piece.

On Monday, I had one drawing that accompanied the post I had written. It is some of the design work I did for this picture. I used this image because the concept behind this work is about strong family ties.

These drawings are the work I did before starting the “real” work. I have discussed here before about the importance of notebooks and acquainting myself with my subject matter before beginning a piece in earnest.

I had a strong image in my head of a singular tree standing right in the centre of my composition. So the next step was to go on a tree hunt to find the perfect specimen to match the imaginings in my head. Gary and I have garnered quite a collection of photographic resource books over the years to help with this exact process.

The three main books I used in this instance are; “Meetings with Remarkable Trees” by Thomas Pakenham, published by Cassell Paperbacks, “Remarkable Trees of the World” also by Thomas Pakenham, first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and lastly, “Mythic Woods, the worlds most remarkable forests” by Jonathan Roberts, also published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

I scoured these books for hours, absorbing all the different images and all the different possibilities. I got out my sketchpad and pencils and started drawing the images that most appealed to me. I know it might seem odd to spend so much time drawing when in the end I will be using fabrics and threads to make the final piece of art. But for me, I find it very helpful to observe the subject matter, in this case trees, to get to know the lines and the curves in great detail. I find it allows me to have confidence when it comes to making the first cut in the fabric, to sew the first line of stitches or indeed how to sew the marks that are to represent the bark of a tree. I know what I am looking to achieve because my hand has already traced the familiar lines before.

From drawing in detail, you can find out how you think in your own mind about drawing trees and then the difference in how you actually draw a tree. The forms can often be different to how you imagine them and it challenges your technical skill to get beyond what you think you see and to then draw what you actually see.

As you can perceive, I favour a high contrast style of tonal work. I like dense dark tones and light white tones at the other end of the spectrum. I was actually talking with my uncle at the weekend about our mutual love of 5B pencils. They are soft and dark and beautiful to work with.

I always like seeing the behind-the-scene work of different artists so I hope you enjoy these early process drawings and that they will give you some insight into the finished piece when I post it. 

http://www.amazon.com/Meetings-Remarkable-Trees-Thomas-Pakenham/dp/0375752684
http://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Trees-World-Thomas-Pakenham/dp/0393325296
http://www.amazon.com/Mythic-Woods-Worlds-Remarkable-Forests/dp/0297843524

The Fat Bee or There and Back Again

The blue and orange bee you see here on this first page was a screen print I did for a printed textiles project. I think he is really the beginning of the Fat Bee mania that followed in my work for years after.

I had designed an apron using this motif. I had several bees flying across the apron but I had this “Fat Bee” lying on his back on the bottom and had written beside him “He is not dead, he is just fat”. The inference being that his body was so large and his wings so tiny that he cannot easily fly around but that does not mean he is dead. I’m interested to see that my melancholic humour that has developed over the years started when I was quite young. I think now that that was quite an odd thing to write but I think I was odd, I just wasn't so self aware as to know it yet.

This second page shows my thought process around making the bees more of a caricature than accurate anatomical drawings. I wanted my bees to have bags of personality and to stand out. I wanted them not to be just one of the hive, I wanted each one to feel unique. This is a theme that arises again and again in my work.

This last drawing I did very recently. I still love observing and recreating images of these little creatures. In a funny way, I unmade their images and bodies and recreated them in my own way, how I imagine them to be. But now I am back to drawing them as they really are. I am trying to be true to their nature and seeing their beauty and magnificence all over again. 

A Short Note from the Author

G’day y’all! Just a short one today. The living of life has interrupted my ability to write anything lengthy. Hopefully I’ll fare a little better tomorrow. Here are some more pages from my research notebooks from my insect projects.

Pay attention to the wasps nest on one of the pages. I did a piece based on these kinds of forms and hopefully I will have some images to show you very soon. 

Contemplating Display

A Wasps Nest

A Scary Ant and more Blind Drawings

Notebooks. Sketchbooks. Mood boards.

I love looking at other artist’s notebooks and sketchpads. I love looking at their ideas before they are all smoothed out and in their finished form.

My work starts days, weeks and sometimes months before I’ll even put pen to paper or thread to needle. I’ll get an idea for something or I will have had a discussion with someone about a commission they want done and then I will start mulling. I’ll roll the different aspects of the project around my head, thinking, shaping and building this new work of art piece by piece in my brain.

Firstly in art class in school and then in art college I learned to write down my ideas. It is very important to do this, as you will be very surprised to know just how often you can forget an idea that you have fallen in love with. You could be consumed with it in the morning but by the afternoon between talking to people on the phone, doing your grocery shopping and watching a movie you can have forgotten the whole darn thing. You can be kicking yourself for days trying to pull it back from the recesses of your mind. But there will be zero, zip, nada. My advice to any young or beginner artists out there would be: if you get a good idea, WRITE IT DOWN! You can thank me later when you have made millions.

What I’m showing you today are observational drawings, magazine/book clippings and photocopies and little snippets I have written down for various projects I have done over the years. They are all somehow bug/insect related so I thought they would be a nice follow on from my Threadbare Bug Collection. Before I made these pieces I had really familiarised myself with insects of all shapes and sizes. Drawing them in detail is a great way to get to know how they work and how their bodies fit together. I have always loved to get my teeth stuck into a complicated and detailed observational drawing. It’s such a great challenge to your skills of looking and seeing and following through by committing the image to paper. I love working out proportion and toning everything until it pops off the page with life.