I listened to a podcast with Ellen Heck today, I love the delicacy of her prints and the way she incorporates wood block with drypoint. I’m still a big fan of drypoint, I’ve just not had much opportunity to do more. However I’m starting to think more to the future, a future without the pandemic that is. It really excited me listening to Ellen, the podcast even went into some detail about her practice and how she makes her prints.
She mentioned a huge inspiration for her were the prints of Mary Cassatt, which I can really see in her work now she’s pointed it out. I don’t know her prints so well, but her paintings were ahead of the times, which says a lot considering the limits put onto her gender as well. What was interesting was that Ellen spoke about the time spent with these prints, she owned a book of Cassatt’s prints that she used to analyse to help her understand Cassatt’s process. Ellen’s work definitely has that lightness of touch of Cassatt’s. I may have purchased a secondhand edition of this book!
She said several interesting things in this podcast, one was her colour studies, which reminds me that the colour studies I did at the beginning of lockdown were useful studies and I’ll do more when I can. The other was her description of printmaking as ‘a collaboration with chance’. What a great way of thinking about the process. You have to embrace this challenge, it suits her because she’s quite a graphic artist and it takes a bit of control out of her hands and gives her the opportunity to work with the unexpected, which is exactly my experience of printmaking. It’s so good for my work in this way. Although the line on the plate can feel very direct at the point of contact.
Heck also mentioned a podcast with printmaker Kathryn Polk, I don’t know her work and plan to take a listen. They mentioned her in relation to making exciting work later in life, which is comforting for me! Her lithos do look exciting. I have so much more experimenting and time to be spent with print. This is truly the beginning, despite such tricky times.
Ellen also uses lots of photos as references. It’s funny how photography as reference really divides people. I feel there is a place for it, it’s such a useful tool in the kit, but being slave to a photo would just be dull to produce as an artist and as the person looking at the work.
Hester Finch is an artist I’ve recently come across on Instagram and I’m loving her use of colour and mark-making. She’s so expressive and verging on the abstract in some areas, but then pulling it back into recognisable form and shape in others. It’s the spaces in-between her marks that makes this so accomplished.
And another artist who’s Instagram name is na-Seoil, her faces are so expressive and those hands! Looking on Instagram in lockdown has really been helping me visualise where I am seeing my work going.
Artist’s like these are capturing something intangible, the marks feel born out of their feeling for a person, rather than just trying to represent their physical features, which can only ever tell us a limited amount about that person under the skin.
I’m continuing to delve into my unconscious and am curious how easy it appears for some artists to do this and so harder for others (like myself) to trust theses deeper creative instincts. I am trying and when I can let go and just draw it does come together. The oil pastels are still helping me relax into this. I’ve even started using pencil crayons in my sketchbook drawing again. I find it fun and relaxing and my lines are free to wander without my judgement!
Having come away from my blog entry yesterday I realised I’m troubled by a lack of boundaries and I am feeling like I can’t feel my way to the edge and I’m groping around in the dark.
Having listened to the lecture on Teams given by Ian Monroe and seen how Rachael has set out work on a table to try and join the dots I’m more aware that I need to stop trying to produce new work. I can start thinking and consolidating ideas and set proposals in motion for the future, but to try and formulate and start brand new projects is just not helpful right now.
I’m working on these with more focus and confidence as a result. None of the cast come out perfectly, but I’ve mixed the ink with a lot more copper oil than I had been, which makes for a stronger print. I do have some strange white marks on the new batch, which might be because the mix was a bit watery and I might not have mixed it thoroughly enough.
I’ve cast a medium plate as I suggested in my last post, I think these would look good on the wall, more effective, more weight to the subject than printing on paper. While the small ones I think can still be presented standing up more like three dimensional objects.
I have a better sense of satisfaction having decided a few ground rules for myself in lockdown and for the foreseeable future!
1) consolidate and develop drawing skills. So technical drawing, copying some drawings and painting I find inspiring. Picasso etchings, Matisse portraits, Rego drawings etc.
2) keep digging into the unconscious, experiment wildly! Heart over head. An ongoing journey for me. This is best seen in my portrait painting, the pastels and also some crayon/charcoal in my sketchbook.
3) continue to develop existing MA work. The plaster casts being an example. I am now wanting to cast all my smaller works and only print my larger portraits on the press.
4) start pulling together my critical evaluation and reflective essay. This is best to be done once I’ve consolidated my current work, laying out what I have will help. What is the work saying, are there surprises seeing it all together, can I see new ways forward with it, or are there gaps crying out to be filled. Questions I need to be asking myself.
I should probably add in that I need to start a commission I have, but not feeling it right now. It’s all gone so crazy that I can’t meet him to draw him, nor meet him to hand the portrait over. I’m not sure I should have continued with the portrait once the consequences of Covid become clear.
These small casts are slowly increasing in number and getting better as I learn. I have also thought some of the middle sized plates could look great cast and hung on the wall (see below!). I’m trialling one today and will see what it looks like tomorrow.
Small plaster casts of my zinc plates (3.5×4.5cm)
I feel like I’m in a haze this week, I’m going through the motions of doing a bit of work here and there, but I cannot think clearly. I’d hoped good work would come out of lockdown because I want to see some positives in this situation, but right now I can’t see beyond the day I find myself in. When I think beyond that I get depressed and sad. I have lots of thoughts around drawing the day to day and seeing where it leads me, but the reality is the girls have their heads down doing work. Both of them find sitting for me boring too. I might insist with Cléa because she likes my ideas and wants to be a part of it (in theory!).
Maybe work will come after the event. Maybe it’s all too close. I just don’t want to look back and regret not trying to find ways to work harder through lockdown. Motivation really fluctuates, which is crazy because I am so motivated by my MA, but that feels pretty much over to be honest.
I was reading about Angela Kauffman’s Self-portrait: Hesitating between the arts of music and painting, painted in 1791. Apparently the 18th Century was a popular time for paintings depicting choice and it made me think about how I could perhaps use my portraits in this sort of way. I’m grasping out in panic, all my ideas are half baked and they need a lot more working out and on. I still have the Celia Paul and Freud inspired images of my girls circulating around my head, but I think it’s more important to work on things I can put down easily. So it’s sketchbooks and working on images I’ve already got. Perhaps consolidating is a good aim. I need some solid aims, I feel I lack edges.
I have been trying to have specific aims every week and I tick some off, but there seems to be so much dead time between doing things with the girls. I have been spending a lot of time working out problems with my press. Printing is such a time consuming thing, especially when you have no technician by your side. And at the end of the day it’s frustrating if I haven’t even resolved my problem (which I haven’t!).
10/06/20
A the latest incarnation of my objects, I’m trying to recreate a more gallery style view of them, obviously understanding scale for the viewer is still going to be difficult. They are definitely in conversation with one another, in an intimate space of their own, but they’re also taking a look at those who look upon them.
Ideally I would have continued to create more of my small army of women, I do in fact have another one, but with all the home schooling and lockdown it’s been incredibly difficult to have enough time in the studio, but I will complete the set in time.
One of the 16x12cm portraits cast in plaster
These slightly larger plates are much more challenging to cast in plaster and I’m hitting a few issues with pouring it on the plate quick enough, I’m not sure I have the time to pursue many more of these for the moment. The smaller ones are more resolved in this medium than the larger ones, although I can prop the 16x12cm ones against a wall on the floor or on a table. Taking them slightly off the gallery wall.
Last week we had our first group crit online. There was nine of us and I was last. There were too many to get through and I’m not sure what I got from it. They didn’t hate the oil pastel (below), I think they saw it how I see it. It’s an investigation into something deeper. Leo wasn’t sure about the background and I’m going to try using colourful paper and leave it blank. I’m struggling to deal with the background, I don’t really want it to draw attention to it, but white is too stark.
Oil pastel
*I’ve worked on the pastel since the crit’ and changed the background to see if I could develop the portrait a little more. The marks I made give the portrait a sense of movement, or energy. The energy and fission I feel right now in fact.
Eliz gave me great feedback on this piece and appreciates what I’m trying to achieve in the work I’m doing at home, I like talking to Eliz. Rachael also said she could imagine my small plaster etching dramatically lit, which is really helpful feedback; dramatic lighting will go on this plinth along with the “objects”.
It’s strange if I’m honest, to be working with pastels and oils at a time when I thought I’d be consolidating my prints. I’ve realised a part of why I’m not printing is due to not having solid time. I need long days in the studio. Time to conceive, prep and draw then etch and print a plate. Then possibly re-etch and so on.
I’m sticking to my four aims, to consolidate my MA work, focus on accessing new areas (the hard part) and increasing my skills. Continuing to work on my critical evaluation. I can’t help feeling I’m failing though. What about using the girls more, doing more drawing of Cléa.
However, pulling together the symposium power point is really helping me stay on topic in my mind. I have just drawn and painted a lot of terrible work recently, I know it’s good to keep doing that, but I can feel like a pretty shit artist by the end of a week of horrible drawing.
Such tough days, between good ones. Friends and family with so many worries and sadnesses to cope with at the moment. I’m full of creative drive one moment and wanting to cry the next. Through this I’m trying to maintain some focus and write notes on my reflective journal and critical evaluation. While the next minute making lunch or breaking up the latest argument between the girls.
I am also trying to see being in lockdown with the girls and this interference in my practice as a part of the life of an mother-artist (I’ve never viewed my art and my children to be in anyway related, I keep the two things very compartmentalised). This is mainly inspired through Leo’s wise words. Jo also suggested thinking of how I might present my work in future shows. This is hard to get my head around, but having seen Chrissie’s plates cast in plaster it came to me that my small portraits would look really great presented as small sculptures, standing on a plinth. A play on the female being an object/objectified in art and culture and my “objects” being viewed are feisty females returning the gaze with intensity.
Yesterday I got up early and did a larger pastel drawing. This was mean to be bolder than it is but intended for the bin, however it has feeling and immediacy that I’m longing for and won’t be going in the bin. I approached it with the intention to stop at anytime and definitely not take it into the following day, getting uptight about the angle of the eye or the corner of the mouth. I am painting and drawing whatever I need to right now. Lockdown has made it necessary to go with the creative flow, I crack if I put myself under too much pressure to follow through too rigidly with my MA. I stop doing anything, which I cannot bear. The frustration drives me nuts and makes me very stressed. To just let those pastels do the work yesterday was so good.
Whether it’s good or bad I don’t know, but I actually think the pastels seem to be suiting me as a halfway house between drawing and painting. I used black charcoal as my starting point and much of the shadow is black, a real no no to some artists. Screw that, it worked for me! It has a ghostly quality, so I must have been imbuing Celia Paul that day.
Chrissie really was the one to inspire me to make these. They have come out as I imagined, which is a rare feat for me. I want to make ‘a small army of slightly angry women’, that’s what I wrote on my Instagram post. This is how I want to curate the small portraits in the final show (the one that will not happen), but maybe if it wasn’t for lockdown I’d never have considered spending the time on these and I’m really so happy I did. Forget miniatures, these are miniatures for the modern era.
I’m still sanding them down, but it was all pretty straight forward, made to measure casings made from foamcore, glued and sealed with a hot glue gun. Inked the plates, poured the plaster of paris in and left over night. They feel so lovely in the hand. The are beautiful objects, which I hope is juxtaposed with the faces. Having over thought the small portraits, this final resolution has actually come together very naturally. I need to have faith in what I have learnt and am still learning about myself and contemporary practice.
I need to start pulling my reflective journal together, but I’m still so immersed in the process of learning about myself as an artist it’s hard to start drawing conclusions about it all.
Reading Ninth Street Women is really inspiring me, there’s so much in there about what motivates these artists to do what they do. How they work and how they think about their work. It really challenges me to do the same. It also highlights the push and pull I experience with the art of needing to control my mark making on one hand and wanting to tap into that very unconscious immediate feeling of drawing on the other.
I read the extract below last night. I think the bit about self-doubt and the demands of life snuffing out the great art we may have in us is so true. Graham is actually talking about genius but I think it’s a relevant thought for all people with creative drive and talent.
John Graham speaking to Lee and Jackson. Gabriel, M. (2018, p.97) ‘Ninth Street Women: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art’. Back Bay Books.
And the idea of fear closing the inner chambers of the unconscious is something I can relate to. And perhaps what Picasso was talking about when he talked about drawing as if he were a child (or something along those lines!). No fear, no impediment. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that fear and impediment. Maybe it’s normal and we all do. But I can also sense that if I could rid myself of the fear then the unconscious, naive, daring artist would have a chance to make an appearance and do something amazing. Or at least do something with the force of emotion that I’ve always contained. Force of emotion can be unexpected and exciting. But this abandonment of fear is something you have to work towards and can only be done with dedication, otherwise it’s just a load of crap.
And here I am having to write a critical evaluation, in lockdown. Certainly challenging times.
I am finding it really hard to draw, or make sense of the small portraits I planned to work on in the holidays. It’s lockdown out there and lockdown in my head.
However, I’m still reading and I came across Ronnie Cay (left) and Cherry Pickles (below) while looking at Grace Hartigan’s paintings. I don’t want to emulate their work at all, but I would like to work at bringing out the more expressive side of myself. It’s an area that I’ve barely managed to touch. My creativity it so tied up with the past and keeping my creative-self protected from the environment I was living in when I was growing up. so it’s incredibly difficult to prise this expressive quality out of me when I buried it all for so long. I want to though, badly! These are examples of work that I feel are super expressive and have moved away from concerns over likeness. They have freed themselves from that shackle.
The lockdown has continued to throw up so many feelings and reminders of how trapped I felt in the “family” home as a teenager. How I took all my creativity and buried it deep inside of myself, I kept it safe from harm and in doing so removed it from my own grasp. The result was I felt incredibly creatively frustrated growing up and again when I was trapped at home with small children with no creative vent. I just didn’t make the connection back then between the physical and mental walls that drove me so crazy as an adolescent to those as a mother.
I’ve finally located and brought this hidden thing to the surface, I can risk bringing it into the daylight, I can nurture it for myself now and risk it taking a bashing without it breaking me completely. Then Covid hits.
This creative pearl, hidden gem, which is actually ME-my creative identity-is malformed, it’s been fed on books and thinking, but it doesn’t know how to fully perform and I’m having to learn how to be expressive and free as though from new, but with all the baggage of being 37. And I have this constant frustration of being in lockdown. Wanting to be a good, present mum but also desperately wanting to be down in my studio.
It’s been a few weeks of real lows and some moderate highs. I feel steeled to deal with CV-19 and manage what’s thrown at us as a family, but I wobble when I think of what I’m going to be missing out on at college with the final show, the group tutorials, the curation of two years of work. I’ve accepted things are what they are and we will make the best of it as a year group (I hope), but it’s an emotional rollercoaster. One minute I’m focused and ready to complete what I started and the next I’m overwhelmed with the distractions all around me and my work becomes meaningless.
Both girls are at home needing help with home learning and I want to give them a sense of structure in their day and be present for them. I’m not sure how I can be present for the girls, meet their needs and still have the head space and time to create work to any sort of standard, it’s not how it works for me. I have realised as a result of lockdown that I need quiet concentrated time to make work. A bit like Celia Paul!
Then there’s the fact that we’re all at home ALL day EVERY day. I’m lucky to have my “shed” at the end of the garden, it gives me some opportunity to get away and concentrate, but concentration is hard under these conditions. A new reality has hit me and I’m fighting to maintain my optimism. Most successful female artists either didn’t have kids or off loaded them onto someone else (I’m thinking of Celia Paul again).
I am determined though. This is a test of character and creative perseverance. Having felt some confusion after my amazing tutorial with Fay Ballard, I’ve been put back on course by Jo and Leo. I feel very thankful for their calm presence, even if it has to be via online tutorials. The search for this link between my small and large portraits and my self-portraits and portraits of the family goes on. I got blinded by other ideas around the “interrogation of ideas” when I spoke with Fay, but it’s not for now, there will be time for other projects and research in the future.
Both Leo and Fay mentioned the psychology of what I’m doing and Leo questioned how my self-portraits and the ones of the girls speak to one another. I find this very interesting, the power I feel is in my large self-portrait and the almost unsettling images of the girls that I’ve tacked to my studio walls could make an interesting and unusual dynamic. I’m keeping it in my mind as I keep working on the small plates.
I have found some quiet inspiration in Celia Paul’s autobiography. I don’t like all of her work, but the huge portrait of her four sisters and mother after their father died is really powerful and it puts me in mind of both Freud and Rego. There is a story being told in her portraits, but there’s a subtly which appeals to me. There is also a slight distortion and exaggeration of the figures in all three of these artists work, which I find really evocative.
Paul, C. () Family Group
Within all this CV-19 upset and being in such close proximity with my girls it’s inspired me to use this elongated moment and create something within it. I might not finish it until we come out of this social isolation, but I do need to harness the energy I feel around me.
Celia Paul’s book has been a catalyst, maybe one of those moments that unexpectedly changes your course and has given me clarity. It’s hard producing anything in this environment, but maybe I’ve found a way I can manage to and in direct response to Covid-19.
Freud, L. (1981-83) Large Interior W11 (After Watteau).
This painting by Lucien Freud and the one Paul painted of her family in bereavement has made me decide to do a series of drawings, an etching or two, and possibly a painting, of my two girls seated impossibly close together, turned away from each other , but clearly very dependent upon one another in ways they may not even recognise. I was drawing Cléa on a small armchair a few days ago and it’s partly where the idea came from. Like Paul and Freud I can set a scene, the girls and I are here for the duration, there is time for this! Maybe never again will life be quite this closed and constrained and in a way completely free. This is part fantasy, expressing what I need to express and part reality; two sisters sharing close proximity at an extraordinary moment in our lives. Playing on how this also effects my life as a mother and artist. There’s still the experience of the female gaze, between sisters, between sitter and mother painter and between sitters and the viewer.
I am excited to start expressing our experience of CV-19 through the portraits of the girls. Written in their bodies and expression I will work to convey not only these current feelings, but an accumulation of what I’ve been grappling with when I’m drawing the girls. It’s touching on the abject. Artists such as Chantel Joffe and Freud didn’t worry about the portrayal of children as small adults.
Here I’ve found the opportunity to tell a story, in my own way. Using this moment in time, using these emotions, which I want to mark down through the portrayal of my girls trapped at home for reasons far beyond our control.
I had some time in my studio yesterday and decided to use pastels, a material I’ve never used before. The subject is of course myself, I’d had a bit of a meltdown the night before and felt exhausted by life. I’ve been wanting to use some colour, I’ve been missing it and it felt like the best thing to do. I think I like pastel! I’m not as scared of it as I thought I was.
05/04/20
Having felt excited by my new vision for what I can achieve while being at home, with limited time, I’ve had a panic. I wasn’t sure if throwing myself in this direction, abandoning the small portraits and focusing elsewhere would be a negative thing for my MA. I tried to spend time once again with the small portraits and felt frustrated and confined by them. I can’t easily be thinking of how to present and curate these little beings when I’m confined to Brenchley and my house and know that the show will not be on anyway. Those portraits were somewhat reliant on their final presentation.
I emailed Leo and her kind and wise words have reassured me that this new direction feels natural and right. It’s not really such a departure, it’s responding to what is an extreme situation and trying to make art that is wholly relevant to me, but also the world around me. I’m going to keep a little journal of the girls and my thoughts and feelings specifically during this time as a record that I can refer back to in time.
I feel like a huge weight has shed off my shoulders. Thank you Leo!
Marigold Plunkett 