Heads and Tails

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a while! Spring and early summer were pretty busy with the residency, family visits and a painting course for myself down in our Peak District at Bullcough Art School. I absolutely loved my few days there and would recommend it, my course was a retirement treat to self 🙂

More recently we’ve had to cancel a holiday unfortunately and the weather hasn’t been great so it’s given me some unexpected time in the studio.

We have a major annual art event here called Holmfirth Art Week which we are usually away for so it was such a treat to go and see the huge exhibition with so much diverse and interesting work. Happily, my friend and I both sold a painting.

Rocking backwards and forwards with textiles and painting, I’m starting to feel a sense of them influencing each other more and more which I’ve been wanting for a while and am loving. I feel like a spinning coin some days and have the freedom to see what I fancy doing, although often my pattern is paint in a morning when I have more energy and stitch later in a day. I’ve often described myself as a ‘both/and’ sort of a girl and I think having different things to focus on keeps me fresh – new ideas connect in a way they might not otherwise. It’s heads and tails.

I’ve been creating a few workshop samples based on Van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace At Night’. I know I’m enjoying more and more colour in paintings and it’s slowly spilling into textile work although I don’t think I will ever lose my delight in more muted palettes.

I’ve started some others based on colour – here are a couple with and without a complimentary pairing, both containing paint marks and stitched responses. As always, tiny designs present themselves when cut up. Here are just a couple…

I’ve been inching towards more gestural, painterly mark-making both in paint and stitch for some time now and it feels really good to scratch the itch a little although I feel there’s a way to go. It’s odd that making change seems to require such due diligence when you tell yourself it’s just doing something a bit differently, but the journey is all the more interesting and rewarding for it.

I have made almost all the bottoms for my collection of tiny pots – 98 and counting! They had wobbly ones all year but I eventually decided they needed to stand better. I’m hoping to display them sometime as a collection and then let some fly to new homes..

My table and shelves have some sketches of my favourite field down the road. I spent a gorgeous Spring morning with a bag of materials, a flask and cake.

We have the most amazing views on the edge of Huddersfield and I love looking across to the Pennines (Peak District National Park), yet I’m most often drawn to the things nearer me such as found natural objects, textures on stone, twigs and flora etc.

I was interested in the old brambles and scrub of the field but could have done without sitting on a few!

I’m seeing more personal mark-marking and visual ‘shorthand’, it just takes time. I have a very fledgling practice of creating thumbnails as starting points for painting – this seems to work for me as I find I need some intention as I begin. Pulling away from them happens more often than not as paintings change into what they want to be, frequently bearing no resemblance to the initial sketches.

For me, embracing this unfolding is where magic often lies, but the thumbnails and sketches are there to return to as a reference when lost – heads, intention and tails, intuition! The recent courses have helped to improve techniques and a better understanding of paint. And all the time, I’m thinking ‘I wonder what that would be like on cloth, or clay?’ So there’s a bit of that on the table, too… for next time.