I promised to blog! A rather shy and private sort, I’ve spent years avoiding the writing on that ‘wall’ but, for AA2A, I’ll have a go. A “bullet blog” to cover my first few weeks at Canterbury.
Peter Hofer, AA2A co-ordinator welcomed me and showed me around UCA – thank you Peter, good to meet you. Fantastic facilities – I could spend forever working away happily there.
Met Mike Fryer, fellow Canterbury artist – we had coffees and a long, very interesting and, for me, encouraging conversation. Talking to Mike made me realise just how privileged I feel to have an AA2A place – thank you people.
My first missions –
learn to use Final Cut Pro - well, just enough to try making the images I hope find;
shoot and get to grips with bigger still image files; and
try inkjet prints on different media.
A big THANK YOU to Matt, Paul and Terry – UCA’s extremely knowledgeable, helpful and patient technicians – for getting me started on all these.
Went to the cathedral, took lots of photos and found a great deal to think about – natural forms, structures, symmetrical spaces, repetition, pattern - but I won’t go into all that here. Also found a beautifully curated and lit David Begbie exhibition in the Chapter House - perfect in that space – so glad I saw it.
Work to date?
Larger prints than I’ve dared before – worked out pretty well:
on tracing paper – so I can experiment with adding lots of texture with water:
on cotton – promising - but all the magenta washed out! try again:
try silk too – more translucency, more fluidity, more expensive – but it has to be done.
Still-but-moving landscape images – this is what I’ve been hoping to find – but they’re much less co-operative than stills, so it’s a battle of wits. What I really need to do is crop the video - chop off and get rid of the bits I don’t want, but so far masking them is the best I’ve managed. Ideas?
Reasearch to do – who’s got an industrial printer that will ‘fait gicler’ onto a big lump of wood?
Recent ideas prompted by Alexis Rago’s work (AA2A), and David Attenborough’s fossil hunting: now I want to try making paper (perhaps using the fluff from the tumble dryer filter! and lots of chalk? – any advice re this process would be very welcome) and book binding.
Caitlin Griffiths (AA2A, ref main forum) got me thinking about how, why, when and the weather that made me think of myself as an artist. Very interesting to think through all that – thank you Caitlin. As I write it’s snowing again and already a foot deep outside the door, so now I’m off to point the camera at the winter.
