Category: ART METHODS

Tangled Garden : Robin

From The Tangled Garden Series : Robin

I made The Tangled Garden Series as a reminder of the black and white illustrations in the children’s and botanical books of my childhood, and in some Japanese prints.

Apart from the fact that I love plants and many animals, what especially interests me is their patterns, which are brought out better in black and white, patterns such as the Branching Pattern of leaf veins and branching of tree-branches

These are not straight B/W photos, but were originally coloured ones, which I have worked on “by hand” so to speak, not just using pre-made filters, to produce the effect which I wanted. Time-consuming!

You can see more about this by clicking Art Methods here or in the top heading and scroll down to the robin , near the end.

Black Plate Mandala

Black Plate Mandala

This is a natural “mandala”: crystals which formed overnight from a salt on a wiped black dinner plate. (It’s a similar process to the “Perfectly Imperfect Mandala” explained in the Art Methods ), except that the photo of this one had only very slight editing, whereas the other one had a lot of cutting and pasting)

Best viewed larger to see the pattern on the counter.

In remembrance of places which no longer exist

In remembrance of places which no longer exist.

Have you ever gone back, many years later, to visit a building where you once lived, or simply a place which you loved, perhaps as a child or in your travels, only to find it has been demolished and you never knew?

Whenever you thought about it, maybe even decades after you left, it never occurred to you that maybe it no longer existed!

And people…. it’s a bit of a shock sometimes to find out, perhaps from an old friend, that someone you lost touch with over the years, maybe someone you went to school with or worked with, has been dead for many years, but if you thought of them, you imagined them going on just as they were in those days.

Such an experience really brings home the knowledge that the pictures we hold onto, in our minds, of people and places (or events) may be very much our own imagination and not fact!

More about the method in Art Methods, zoom down to this picture.

Why-Why

Why-why

This is a kind of digital “collage” of seven or more pieces, created by rubbing crayons over parts of various objects in my home, objects from my travels or family things. Each piece of paper on which a pattern appears is then saturated with water-colours around the crayon, and the whole thing assembled as a collage, sometimes physically, but in this case, digitally!

Why-why refers to Y-Y, the Ying Yang symbol in the centre! 🙂

Every exit is also an entrance

From the City Called Life series : Every Exit is also an Entrance

The saying, “When one door closes, another opens”, a similar way of putting it, often refers to stages of life, jobs, retirement, relationships, moving homes etc. Now in this Covid time, as so many of our usual “doors” are closed to us, we are, of necessity, learning to find new ways to satisfy our human needs.

I made this picture, a long time ago, of the entrance/exit of a nearby shopping mall, just as it was closing for the night. It is made from a juxtaposition of two photos, one of people entering, one of people exiting. Now I am reminded of that saying every time I go there!

For more about the Series: A City called Life

Abstract. Red.

Abstract. Red.

Here’s an abstract which I originally called “Message”. . . until it dawned on me that people might ask what the message was! And I had no message to share about this one ; it’s just an abstract!

No two people looking at someone or something will be seeing quite the same thing, nor all the history behind the person or object they think they are seeing.

If there is a “message” in this, it is: “As in art, so in life.” We all look at everything through our own personal “filters”: our own darkness, light, sharpness etc, and through our own life histories.

We name what we see, sometimes automatically without thought (red square!). Sometimes our naming is learnt, sometimes we just don’t know what to call that which we see or experience. But every thing and person holds so much more than is obvious at first sight. We know that, but sometimes we forget it.

To find out more about the technique, one of my main methods, and to see what this was made from, go to Art Methods.in the top menu on the Home page and zoom down to this picture.

Soundings

Soundings

“To take soundings” means, amongst other things, to drop a line down into the depths, to find out what is down there, below the surface, measuring how deep down the line will go.

In these Covid times, where very little is “normal”, we have been forced, willy nilly, to take stock of our situations and face ourselves to a degree which many of us may have rarely had to do before. In this pandemic, with mega-uncertainty about most things, with outcomes depending on many factors beyond our control and constantly having to make choices whether to do this or that without sufficient information, we are called on to look very deeply into ourselves, to “take soundings” to find out what is really important to us and each in our own way, to find in these depths the resources to cope with it all. All this as horrors play out on the world stage.

And then there are the lesser problems! We are learning that there is more than one way to do many things: work, shop, meet, eat, travel, etc.

This is one of my “Concrete Abstracts” . If interested in the method, go to the page on Art Methods and zoom down to this pic