I have traveled to Scotland. Perhaps thats why I have not written a post in this Lockdown Week 19. Before I left a photographer making a series on people’s experience of Lockdown was pointed to me by a mutual friend. Jaskirt visited and made some portraits. We talked about my experience and how drawing people/portraits and writing a weekly post had helped me keep sane. I’ve been thinking about that a lot since we met, and how I am a social being missing face to face contact with friends, family and people I don’t know, but might just meet by chance as we go about daily living. Masks have made that less possible.
In Scotland I met a neighbour on Thursday morning who told us he had been awake all night as his 77 year old partner was taken by ambulance to hospital at 1am, suffering from angina and in need of an emergency cardiac operation. He could not go with her because of covid restrictions. Thankfully we were not masked during the conversation and shared the pain and anxiety face to face.
A hug was required, but not achieved. Even in this situation we could not bring ourselves to forget the virus.
I’m unclear, but struggle on to make sense of the pandemic and its affects.
Travel!
I returned to the City of Birmingham City from West Wales where the Irish sea rolls into the dark jagged cliffs and long quiet beaches. I have not planned to visit London, but the Barbican’s Curve space has a show of drawings by Toyin Ojih Odutola which is a must see. The drawings are described as narrative portraiture, although she says it is ‘misleading when people call me a portraitist. I work from photography and often it’s a composite of multiple people. But I’m very fortunate to have really badasss beautiful people around me that compel me to draw them.’ Kilian Fox. Observer, Aug 2 2020.
Last week I promised more when I read The Rothko Book by Bonnie Clearwater. I have now read it and understand more of how he transitioned from figurative to abstract art, while as a ‘philosophical romanticist’, retaining his belief in art as an agent of meaning. Rather than writing my interpretation of the author, below are a selection of quotes that point to his thinking on his transitioning works.
He began his final transition to pure abstraction when he wrote the introduction to (Clifford) Still’s catalogue. In his statement ‘The Romantics were Prompted’ published in Possibilities (1947-8), he used similar terminology to describe his own transitional abstract paintings. He stated that he thought of his pictures ‘as dramas’, while’ the shapes in the pictures are performers’ and ‘organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.’
On his conception of the Progression of his work from figuration to abstraction: ‘It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were new substitutes for the figures.’ He considered his abstract forms objects or things, with a perceptible density just like figures and symbols, that could trigger an emotional response and stimulate thought, but could do more precisely than his earlier figurative works.’
‘… Line would have detracted from clarity of what I had to say. Death and mortality, he added, were always present in his mind when he painted. This, after all, was the human condition, and it was his hope that it would be present in his work without his having to illustrate it with skulls and bones.’
On edge and border
The indeterminate space surrounding Rothko’s areas of colour became an essential element of his paintings. He aimed to prevent the border of a painting from acting as a final enclosure. Instead, one may glimpse a scene of illimitable dimensions. The edge, in effect, acts like a freeze frame of a film, which captures just one episode of dramatic transformation.
On size
‘The reason he painted large canvases ‘is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint small is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience….you paint the larger picture, you are in it.’
Finally: The Portrait.
‘He could refer to his paintings as ‘portraits’ because, like all great portraiture, they were about the artist’s eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions – in short the human drama.’ The repetition of (his) classic image was in itself irrelevant, because the great portraits throughout time are the painting of ‘one character’. He added, ‘What is indicated here is the artist’s real model is an ideal, which embraces all of human drama rather than the appearance of a particular individual.’
digital drawing
Pogus Explains, while we met and shared Handsworth Self Portraits @Pogusceasar @MacBirmingham @BLMUK.
Printmaking!
I’ve been silkscreen printing! After 5 months away from printmaking facilities I was given special dispensation to spend two days in the BCU Parkside Printroom to complete two prints for an outstanding commission. Two Prints to be made in two days, as my supervisor said” “you will have to get your skates on.”
It was wonderful to see the drawings, transferred to the screen, the inks mixed, the screen locked in the bed, the 300gsm Brockford Smooth paper positioned, pull the ink through with the squeegee and see the appearance of the image that has been waiting in Covid abeyance for months to be revealed.
It was not without its challenges that had to be resolved, but the prints are valuable and for the first time in my research the subjects are photographed, drawn and printed to look directly out. This approach had been adopted as the portraits are commissioned to celebrate the role of Magistrates in the history of their Association and plans for the future. 2020 Vision: 100 Years of Justice exhibition.
I proposed to make two portraits on the theme of “Future: Race and Criminal Justice” and made an offer to magistrates that sit on the West Midlands benches to have their portrait drawn and printed to positively reflect the theme. There was a lot of interest and I selected the youngest Mixed-race magistrate and the first Asian person to sit on the region’s benchs.
Below are photographs from the printmaking experience. The final portraits will be revealed next month when they go public.
The visit to the print room was safe and successful. I had received a Campus Visit Form to present at the Arts Design and Media building in Birmingham’s Eastside. Justin, the print technician met me as planned and showed me the routes to follow. We both wore our masks. He familiarised me with the routines to be adhered to in the workshop to ensure social distancing. It was eerily empty, quiet and strange to be in a building usually teeming with creative young people. However, once I began printing, I resumed with internalised techniques and behaviours of the medium. It was such gift to work with Justin after so many weeks in isolation. Being in a workshop with someone else was an experience in itself. Being in a creative productive situation with a colleague was even more rewarding.
Following using the facilities I cleaned all items I had used and after I left for the day Justin cleaned any surfaces I might have touched to make sure there was little chance of any virus transmission between us or others that will enter the workshop. I am extremely grateful to Justin and all of those behind the scenes at the University who that made it possible.
COVID PRINTMAKING at BCU PRARKSIDE
masked printmakers
APROS
mark resist marks
screen print
emulation
sceen tough emulsion application
exposure unit
exposure timings
exposed screen
copper and gold ink
copper mix
black, crimson copper swatches
copper glistens
paper selection
first copper print
mixing
GLOVES
second copper print
looking out
masked printmakers
stop & Wait
urinals
WC
Cultural Recovery
The Culture Recovery Fund that the UK government announced is now being ruled out with criteria for artists and arts organisations under threat from the virus can apply for grants of loans. ‘ACE is running the Grants Programme which offers financial support for cultural organisations that were financially stable before Covid-19, but are now at imminent risk of failure.’
While the recovery plan is underway the Creative Industries Federation has made a valuable proposal to rethink how culture and creative industries come out of lockdown better prepared:
“We don’t need a reset, we need a re-think” – CEO, Caroline Norbury on the launch of our Creative Coalition’s Plan to Reimagine
‘No deaths reported in our region for third day in succession’: the welcome words of the Wales Today newreader. Yes, I have travelled in a car from Lockdown Birmingham City to a Lockdown Pembrokeshire sea village in West Wales where the Irish sea rolls into the dark jagged cliffs and long quiet beaches.
The isolated walks are welcome reminders of the pleasures of big skies and landscapes that in pre covid times we enjoyed as holidays from city life. At the end of normal walks, the village café or pub would invite ramblers to enjoy warm hospitality and home cooked seasonal produce of fish from the sea and meat and vegetables from the fields. Today masked young people in front of makeshift serving tables run in and out to fulfil orders for sustenance, cooked in hidden backroom kitchens and served outside, come rain or shine. Pre covid, quiet and slow holiday isolation in contrast to city life was something to escape to. Now the city is quiet and slow, West Wales with vast expanses of land and sea seems an oddly similar experience. A neighbour tells me that a company in the capital city has told its 300 employees that they need never come into the office again: ‘work from home, wherever that may be.’ On the journey up an old Indian colleague from Birmingham reported he had sadly lost two relatives. Even through current deaths are at zero the mourning of loss continues to be felt, now and for many years to come.
Museums under pressure
A tsunami of sad and angry tweets have followed announcements that the city museum has begun a period of staff consultation brought on by the lack of revenue from social distance preventing public attendance, public funds and zero commercial activity. The recent announcement by the UK government of an Arts support fund of £1.57 billion was a welcome a sign of recognition that cultural industries are core to a functioning society. Practically however, there are few methods in place to get the monies in place quickly enough, to prevent threats of redundancy to those that have kept our culture(s) alive. This situation is mirrored across the country.
Writing
Before travel much writing has been done: submission to the annual Ort gallery Schwarmerei (excessive sentiment) members show; applications for campus access to complete a print commission; revisions of an academic paper due for completion, annual 12 month research review and forward plan. They are demanding in their individual ways, but the forward plan is particularly challenging while looking out from lockdown. The ambition to make and create prevails, but a return to a pre covid creativity norm is unlikely, if not impossible. ‘Lockdown has created an uncertain psychological mindset, ‘slowed’ research and led to questions of validity’.
My son and Mark Rothko
My son messaged me with a photo of a Mark Rothko framed print that he was considering buying. Son: ‘Aware of him?’ Father: ‘Yep! Amazing US abstract Expressionist. Massive dark colour canvases. Some in Tate Britain next time we get to go.” Son: “Yeah recognised the name instantly, but couldn’t place it. Feel like you’ve mentioned it before.” A few days later in in West Wales I came across the ‘The Rothko Book’ on the shelf in a bedroom the son had slept in many times.
I txt’d the photo to him and leafed through the pages to be surprised by the amount of figurative works before the big colour canvases appeared. I should not have been too surprised as many biographies of twentieth century painters including the super famous Picasso’s, Dali’s and Duchamp’s open with figurative drawings and paintings of family and local landscapes that were their early years subjects. I was reminded of this at the recent Bridget Riley exhibition in the National Gallery of Scotland where the last room was brilliantly dedicated to her teenage years painting in Cheltenham culminating in her copied painting of the classical red Italian renaissance portrait she submitted as part of her application to Goldsmith’s School of Art.
Marcus Rothkowitz, b 1903 into a Jewish family in Dvinsk Russia. He followed his Father to the US in 1913, with his Mother and Sister. They embarked in Brooklyn, travelled to relatives in New Haven, Conneticut before joining his family in Portland Oregon.
He was influenced by his engagement with a number of US artistic movements over 40 years as he saught to give meaning to his paintings. Illustration, mythology, surrealism, symbolism. He took all in earnest and engaged closely with many peers and partner artists including Clifford Still and Barnet Newman until he began to investigate and experiment with colour and shape without figurative references. More of which when I have read The Rothko Book by Bonnie Clearwater.
digital drawing
To See it all. Reading Kate Bush’s words on photography looking in Tim Walker’s Wonderful Things show at Va&A. ‘When we could meet and share’.
Looking Ahead Link
The first announcement of Arts Council and DCMS support
In previous weeks I have applied a format beginning with Covid virus updates. This week covid will be relegated to last on the list and a reflection on artistic responses to isolation will lead the way. Take Care.
Lookout Lockdown – Restricted Realities
Lockdown has encouraged many weeks of reflection, on amongst many considerations, the local environment. If one is lucky enough to have a garden then the natural world of animals, birds and foliage has become more apparent, or we have become more aware, than before covid. However the darkness and quietness of early mornings without the demands of a structured day ahead has led to slower rising. Hopes of getting up and out to work in the fine art silkscreen print room are overtaken with the restricted reality of lockdown and to ideas of digital drawing conceived as an amalgam of photography and digital printmaking that can be approached in isolation.
The self isolating bedroom has thick wall to ceiling curtains, pulled tight in the evening that create a disorientating waking into darkness. When the curtains are pulled open light enters the room and reveal looming trees of green, wafting in the breeze that become mesmeric. Confirmation that they and the outside world is still there is welcome. Seclusion is the nature of lockdown isolation. Outside is seen from inside. A quickly taken smart phone photograph of the view looking out though the window does not capture the ambience of a room that is usually left, once awake. The world is still there and the air moves, with or without the virus.
Restricted lockdown reality makes one even more inquisitive of unaccustomed views seen by peering out of the prison window with its horizontal and vertical muntins. Looking out inspires the making of images to express the physical and emotive experience of isolation. Responses to the outside world over lockdown weeks has led to drawing out from photographs of the environment with increasingly non figurative window frames. Naturalistic drawings remain centre stage as the frames around them change, but retain their containing structures. The first drawing of the weeping tree in a trapezoid frame took many weeks to complete. The act of drawing became a meditation on the nature of the weeping foliage. It was contained by a stepped back simplified image of the window frames. In contrast to the detailed literal drawing thick dark ‘bamboo’ lines were over drawn creating a new dramatic frame to the forefront and on top of the greyed background. The addition of colour, in similar technique to under printed silkscreen layers, defined the contained drawing to the exclusion of the all other window framed images, leaving the focus on the one frame.
Lookout Lockdown #1 Wilting. 2020. A3 digital colour print. Hahnemühle German Etching 320 gsm.
With LL#1 complete additional images appeared in waking mornings. By shifting viewpoint to the right the highlighted leaves on the maple and plane trees next to the weeping tree became the focus for LL#2. A similar process of drawing and composition was adopted. However the literal image of the window frame was rejected and replaced with a simple structure to hold the trapezoid drawing. This became a much more abstract framework in the style of a silkscreen print with the application of flat colour in contrast to the drawn and coloured central naturalistic image and Bamboo black border. In following weeks a single growing creeper appeared on a lower window frame and was drawn with a simplified frame structure and the black bamboo over drawn frame. Latterly the weather changed and the rains came which inspired LL#3. The window glass no longer transparent, but holding the raindrops as patterns of light against the dark trees in the background. The cell coming closer and curtailing looking out. #LL4 took the same format of central drawing with bamboo black frame, however this is imposed upon an abridged framing structure. The central drawing is rectangular which emphasises the skewed angle of the framework. The drawing has white surrounds between it and the frames rather than being butted up against them, and hangs like a mirror rather than integrated into the frames. The framework edges are straightened off in the photoshop programme used to compose the multilayered image. Straightening is made with lines of white which have fine dark outlines. The effect is that each edge is ‘taped’ which is a very different approach to previous images that float unsecured on a plane . On the computer screen the taping is an abstract contribution to the image, but when printed it pins the frame and drawing to the paper, in contrast to the prominence of the drawing of the patterned rained upon glass.
# full tree
# new growth
#rain
Lookout Lockdown Drawings #1-4
14 weeks into lockdown the first four prints are completed and must be finally titled. ‘Lockdown Lookout’ was the original choice implying intentions to make images that inspire positive images made from the negative restricted experience of Lockdown. On review of the images, ‘Lookout Lockdown’ seems more appropriate as the intention is to put lockdown in its place and not be restrained by it.
Considering these titles raises questions on the imposition of Lockdown. Are we imprisoned? Are we being punished? Are we prisoners in caves gazing at framed exterior environments, unsure of what we are seeing? Unlike Plato’s cave we are not looking at illusory shadows, but although what we see is approaching a reality we are familiar with, the context in which we are looking is unfamiliar. Not free to see, but restricted by an agreed communal response to a threat. We do not converse with others. We receive worldly knowledge through media channels, television, radio, social media. Is our incarceration going to arm us with new knowledge to re-enter the worlds we knew, empowered to contribute to enhanced social understanding of a new world? These are contemplative questions considered as the drawings are made to reflect the visual realities presented in locked down waking moments. Having voluntary agreed to participate in imprisonment, to protect wider society we yearn to escape to return to a freedom of our western normality, where the air between the wafting tree and waking cell is not unknown and threatening.
digital drawing #BLM
Lenny Henry celebrates his Mother’s Jamaican laugh when we could meet and share his autobiography.
15 weeks in and its beginning to really, really drag
Cases are down, GOOD. Deaths are down, GOOD. Optimism is down, BAD.
digital drawing
Digital Drawing continues to be daily a staple and making drawings with the hashtag #BLM is central to this structure. The drawing below is from the Grand Opening of the Fierce Festival last November in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when we could meet, (hug!) and share the best arts in performance, politics and Pop.
Frieze Launch, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 2019. iPad Drawing.
Surface Tensions
I received an invitation to exhibit prints made during lockdown from the Printmakers Council to which I shared the analogue, digital, analogue print: Surface Tensions, with this description:
Prior to Lockdown, the abstract image began during testing of water and powdered lamp black ink on the gleaming glass printroom mixing surface. Its opacity was tested by fingerprinting on a scrap of cartridge paper which I photographed as it was so expressive. The image remained as a record in my digital photographic archives waiting to be revisited at this unexpected lockdown moment. I imported the image into photoshop and played with it until it ‘stood on its own’. As I do not have access to analogue print room facilities right now, I have had to conceive, trial and test new print techniques. The A3 inkjet printer I normally use for outputting photographic images for print planning was in need of a cartridge top up, and I began to experiment with digital printing techniques to preserve tactile marks. The finger ink image had a breadth of tonal and material marked qualities that offered an opportunity to test this digital to analogue print system. The image was proofed on a number of papers and once the image tone, colour and detailed marks were in balance, it was printed on coated textured Hahnemühle Digital German Etching paper.
Made by hand, kept as photograph, printed with inkjet.
Surface Tensions.E J Turpie, 2020. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle German Etching paper 310gsm, 28 x 38cms
Although the virus infection and death rate figures are thankfully going down there has been only very general analysis of the detailed demographics behind the generally available figures. The interactive infographic below provides analysis and some understanding of the people lost behind the figures in England and Wales.
Click image for all information
Socially Distanced Garden Meetings
Andrew Kulman, Jug and Lemons. Woodcut 2020
As the lockdown is eased socially distanced physical meetings are possible to consider between know participants. Midweek we were invited out to a neighbour’s garden and my partner suggested I leave my phone at home. I did miss it. There were a number of occasions when I reached to make a search, confirm an event or view an image, but as the evening progressed, we relaxed into our face to face live experience. We are lucky enough to have a garden and the following evening an impromptu invitation to a fellow printmaker and partner from across the city was welcomed. Following their 11K paces from theirs to ours, we met and dined together. On arrival a series of three woodcuts were kindly presented to us. Summer images. Another enjoyable digital free evening!
#Digital Sociality.
A new term has appeared on my research agenda: Digital Sociality. This describes the increased, and potentially positive social exchanges taking place during the lockdowns and isolations deployed in the global pandemic. It is coined by ethnographers (Saxena and Lee Johnson, 2020):‘During a global pandemic, the wide geographic reach of digital media allows for articulation of imaginaries across places and opens possibilities for shared worlding. Used digital platforms may widen the reach of social and cultural exchange’.
digital drawing
Continuing making drawings with the hashtag #BLM. Below is from the 60 Years Room at Tate Britain last year that celebrated the work of British women artists from 1960s to the present day. The room focuses on the work of British women artists. It included work from several generations who have explored similar themes. Spaces and structures, the idea of home, and fictional identities featured throughout the works. The display highlighted how women artists have been under-represented by galleries.
Identity and belonging. Tate Britain. 2019. iPad Drawing.
Alder Keleman Saxena and Jennifer Lee Johnson, 2020.
Cues for Ethnography in Pandamning Times: Thinking with Digital Sociality in the Covid-19 Pandemic. Dispatches from the pandemic. http://somatosphere.net: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
The numbers debate: Politics (economics) Vs Science (Health)
Following art week’s decision to open my photographic archive to make new drawings relevant to #Blacklivesmatter with the iPad for sharing on Instagram, I have posted the drawing below. It is from a photographic celebratory event at the Birmingham Hippodrome and features portraits of Birmingham’s female Black elders, in the places they feel most at home. They are brought to life via augmented reality that sees the women in the portraits tell their stories and talk directly to viewers about what home means to them. Today is also WindrushDay 2020 when communities across the country celebrate the contribution of the Windrush Generation.
Listening to Vanley, at Brumhippodrome. 2019
Home was an exciting exhibition of augmented-reality portrait photography that has grown out of a creative project by renowned photographer Vanley Burke and Friction Arts and is presented for the first time at Birmingham Hippodrome.
Vanley Burke is often described as the ‘Godfather of Black British Photography’ – his iconic images have captured the evolving cultural landscape, social change, and stimulated debate in the United Kingdom over the past four decades. His body of work represents possibly the largest photographic record of the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, and as an avid collector, Vanley continues to connect histories through his substantial archive housed at the Library of Birmingham. From local community organisations to the Victoria & Albert Museum and Whitechapel, Vanley has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom, and as far afield as New York, South Africa and China. Find out more at vanley.co.uk
UK culture news
UK government announces theatres, cinemas and Museums can open with social distancing on ‘Independence Day’. Theatres rely on live audiences for the financial model to operate, cinemas may be able to survive with smaller audiences; Museums may be able to apply social distancing, but they will not be in a position to pay the staff to implement the rules as the income from trading is not to a sustainable level.
#printgang
Taiba rehearses her presentation
#Printgang continues be a shared forum for making and for me Lockdown Lookout drawing. This week Lucy set up her walk and Taiba rehearsed her presentation
Lockdown Lookout
Lockdown Lookout #4 Rain has been completed in the computing drawing, composing and editing stages. Digital print Proofing onto paper will be carried out this week.
#Blacklivesmatter and the horrendous results of racism have compounded the painful reality we are living through. As activists have said they “Are Sick and Tired, of being Sick and Tired.”
As well as revisiting drawings I have made in Art Galleries of people and exhibitions that we used to share. I am opening the photographic archive and making new drawings with the iPad, and sharing them on Instagram.
Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts. Whitworth Art Gallery 2019
#printgang
Boyanna points to her new work on metal.
#Printgang continues be a shared forum for making and for me Lockdown Lookout drawing. This week Boyanna joined from Bulgaria where she has relocated for the summer. She is in 14 day quarantine, but continues to make her art works and uploads a daily Vlog:
Lockdown Lookout
Lockdown Lookout No 4 has begun.
#Blacklivesmatter
22 year old black football player from Manchester builds on his active volunteering to force change in government policy to provide lunch vouchers for people in need. #maketheUturn. Can’t say how Big this is. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/53055256
Apologies that week 12 is more visual than literal, but writing has been focussed on a paper that has to be completed for an upcoming deadline.
Can’t look at the Covid figures. There’s a sickness in the air.
#Blacklivesmatter and the horrendous results of racism have compounded the painful reality we are living through. As activists have said they “Are Sick and Tired, of being Sick and Tired.”
I have revisited drawings I have made in Art Galleries of people and exhibitions that we used to share. I am sharing them on Instagram.
M is for Migration. @StudioOlafureliasson @Tate digital drawingFrom a Small Island. @andrewjacksonphotography @Mac Birmingham. digital drawing
#Printgang continues be a shared forum for making and for me Lockdown Lookout drawing.
Lockdown Lookout
Lockdown Lookout No1 has been made and digitally proofed and printed. It awaits editioning as a digital print or the basis for a larger silkscreen print based on the layers that have come together in the making.
Lookout Lockdown #1. 16×13. digital drawing on hannemule digital
Lockdown Lookout No 2 has be made and digitally proofed.
Lockdown Lookout #2. digital drawing
Lockdown Lookout No 3 has begun.
Lockdown Lookout #3. digital drawing
Apologies that this blog is visual rather than literal this week, but writing has been focussed on a paper that has to be completed for an upcoming deadline.
There are amazing human examples of care by families and health professionals across the world as people fight to survive the virus. It is increasingly difficult to comprehend the reality of the figures reflecting individual suffering.
Above is the current situation. The beginning of the graph is January 1st 2020 with covid at zero. Click the link and be shocked by the trajectory of this interactive graph.
Birmingham School of Art #printgang
: : : (red), 2016 Color sugar lift and soap ground aquatints 45 × 42 in 114.3 × 106.7 cm Edition of 25
I had an in depth conversation with Justin and Taiba about the Jaqueline Humphries’ print: ‘Red’ referenced in respect of her use of emoji figuration, pattern and abstract grounds. Justin had seen the print for real in a recent visit to Crownpoint Press, San Francisco where it had been made. He reported that it was an impressive work and its size, for an etched print, added to the impression.
We discussed the potential to silkscreen a mark resist drawing on to an aquatinted etching plate by printing with drawing fluid on the plate for it to be dissolved and let the acid bite. Like silkscreen parts of an image may be stopped out to protect from further inking, but in this process areas of the plate can be stopped out for deeper biting. I am not an etcher and am not wholly sure of the process, but it is worth thinking through and experimenting with when back in the Printroom. The concept of mixing silkscreen and etching is appealing.
Masking
Meeting a friend in the street we participated in a socially distanced catch up conversation. Jayne is a top costume designer who has designed and made covid masks and kindly offered to make us one each. A few days later the doorbell rang and she and partner Dave had placed a jiffy bag with two masks in a socially distanced way on our letter box. Taking the opportunity to share some time we walked round our communal garden and showed them the neighbour’s developing veg garden and greenhouse reconstruction. We talked beetroot, bees, damsons and peacocks. As we went our separate ways Jayne said this was the best part of making and giving masks to friends: the talking and sharing. Nice!
LockDown LookOut
Lockdown Lookout No1 has been made. It awaits editioning as a digital print or the basis for a larger silkscreen print based on the layers that have come together in the making. Drawing No 2 has begun.
Looking out of another window a range of tree leaves and light are framed by the rectangular window section. Beyond the sunlit highlights I am drawn into the undergrowth on the ipad’s electronic surface feeling my way through the branches, leaves and shadows. The digital magnification function allows one to see further into the detail and the drawing of its, before reducing the view back down to observe the drawing in context of the whole. The first layer has been drawn in 7 days, not 7 weeks. Probably because a format/concept for a series has been established and one can progress with confidence, while aware that a second drawing may not be as satisfying as the first.
On day 4 I was drawing late evening and a tv documentary following 90’s comedian Tony Slattery as he tried to find solutions to his continuing mental health concerns came on. At 60 years old it was an emotional roller coaster ride for him and his partner Mark as he faced psychiatrists, alcohol consultants and past childhood demons. The next day when I returned to draw from where I had left off, I began to be aware of not only the memory of the drawing approach I had taken, but also memories of what was going on in the Tv programme. An image of Tony Slattery battling through against the odds appeared as a type of mental trace. It seemed to be initiated by returning to the same focussed drawing modus operandi that I was pursuing on the iPad screen, while in front of the Tv Screen 12 hours before. The two aligned in a manner not anticipated.
Lockdown Lookout #2. digital iPad drawing. layer 1
#Blacklivesmatter
At the end of this week 10 Lockdown is met with terrible trauma in the murder of George Floyd. The reality of vicious racism has been brought to the global stage and protest by all of us is demanded. The disproportionate burden felt by people of colour in the care, employment and justice systems must be recognised and addressed in this pandemic moment of change for the future.
Birmingham Museum acknowledged this need as has artist Mohammed Ali.
posted 1st June 2020
painted 1st June 2020. Birmingham, B14 Silver Street.
