Adagio

Hi, Everyone, and welcome to August’s blog. I’ve been at a slower pace recently just through sorting life, going away and getting ready for a couple of events but I have been doing one or two things in the background, including thinking about how we do actually ‘walk with our work’ and learn from it when it’s a travelling companion.

Firstly, Huddersfield Art Society have their art exhibition starting in a couple of weeks. It’s the first time I’ve exhibited with them as I joined just under a year ago. If you are local, it’s in the town centre near the library. Huddersfield is undergoing a major change so there are a number of empty shops that have arts and cultural groups using the spaces. Do pop along if you can!

This is ‘Adagio’. It means ‘walking pace’ in music, and this is the field we walk through almost daily and stop and look through the grasses over to the moors of the Peak District. Connecting to place is important to me, and having walked and paused and noticed over and over, I can recall them easily. Also, I have to say up in the moors just now, the heather is out in vast blocks of amazing colour – it’s quite a spectacle.

I’ve also been playing around with collage as part of a little daily challenge with a friend. I know many artists use this as an exercise in supporting composition so I was curious to see what it offered in terms of how my own decision making, playfulness and intention worked together. I think whilst I enjoyed it, I’m not sure it offered me too much other that cementing some preferences that I’m aware of? Maybe I just didn’t push myself out of my comfort zone enough? – I love seeing other people’s collages on social media but I got a bit bored by my own! Anyway, my takeaways were:

It’s just as helpful to try something and learn it’s not for you

I like a landscape composition format

Keep it simple

I like scribble marks against plain colour

I like some repetition of marks or shapes at different scale

Really quite like yellow against black

Carry on exploring muted against saturated colours

I wanted to take some stitching away recently so I’ve started another #stitchpot cloth. After all that brightness on the table, I’ve returned to more muted colours. It’s struck me that I’ve never done a little set of pots about my love of stone so that’s what I’m in the middle of right now. It would be rude not to! They will probably be ready for September’s post.

If you haven’t seen the previous post, I’ve just been interviewed about my practice and obsession with stone and stone walls. You can hear it here

or better still, by going to the Authentic Obsessions podcast and mine is a recent episode. This way you can listen in chunks!

I thought it would be nice to finish with a quote from the latest episode:

If you really listen to people, you hear more. If you really look, you see more. If you care, you get more.

Joanne Olney