Miss Hilary Jones was my art Teacher while I was at Howell's School Llandaff. I was at this school from the ages of 11 through to 18. I did Art "O" Level, in fact I failed it the first try and so retook it the following year. This was actually a great lesson for me about the stupidity of exams and also the ridiculousness of trying to grade art. I also did Art "A" Level and so got to know Miss Jones even better as a teacher. She was a tough teacher, very little praise given , in fact after getting an A for my Art "A" Level and winning the School Art Cup , all she said was "well done". She was a great teacher and I loved her, I feel very lucky that I had her as my teacher. I had a very difficult home life growing up and art and Miss Jones and the Art room at Howell's saved me. One of the many things I learned from her was wax resist, using a candle to make marks then a wash of a light color say yellow, then another layer of wax and red , then another layer of wax and blue. As I was in my studio today it struck me I am still doing this technique , just without the wax part, here is the drawing I just finished .
Copyright
This has become a difficult issue in this internet age. Since working on these images of the neurons in the brain I have discovered a wealth of imagery by Googling "neurons images", all sorts of stuff pops up. After getting so inspired by the drawings of Camillo Golgi from 1875 and thinking any copyright had probably run out on these images,I figured I would work from some more images I had found. The piece I have posted with this is the result, it is apparently neurons in a crab brain. I also did two more large drawings, one I have previously posted.
I went back to the internet to find out more about the image and discovered that a contemporary artist was responsible for the piece called Greg Dunn, here is the link to his website
http://www.gregadunn.com/
About the same time an old friend on Face Book asked if he could use this same image on his page. What to do? I didn't deliberately use this artists image. Should I just ignore this , as Picasso said "Good Artists copy , great Artists steal" . What do you think?
Brain drawings continue
The scope of trying to come to grips visually with the images of neurons in the brain is literally blowing my mind. I have started another batch of drawings. I feel like I have been presented with such an exciting path. I recently was contacted by an old friend that I knew in Bulmershe College of Higher Education. This was the first college I went to to do a Teacher Training degree , I lasted a year, he lasted a short time also, we both hated it. Amazingly almost 40 years later he found my website and made some lovely comments about my work. He said that the latest drawings of the "Inside the Brain " series reminded him of Aboriginal art. Well I did go to Australia last year and look at a lot of Aboriginal work and loved it. I also went to Uluru or Ayers rock , so maybe it seeped in somehow. I am struck by how amazing our brains are , there are more connections in our brains than there are elemental particles in the universe, I just read this somewhere. So who knows maybe going to Australia and seeing Aboriginal work has influenced my new drawings.
Another finished group
I have finished this group of drawings that developed when I cut a diptych that wasn't working into 8 pieces. Strangely I have now 10 drawings where there should be 8. I think that the two in the middle may have gotten mixed in. I have come to a period where I have documented all the work I have completed since 2007. I now have good photos of it all, I have dimensions and titles for everything. This is quite a feat of organization and hopefully I will be able to upload the ones I want to sell onto the Saachi Online site where I have created a profile. I must say this part of art making , the commerce side of art I do not especially enjoy. Of course its lovely to sell work , to feel that someone wants to live with a piece that I have created. Its the getting to the part where they can hang my work on their wall that I find troublesome. I must persevere with this however, otherwise what am I doing this for. My stack of finished work grows ever larger and my bank balance somewhat depleted. It costs a lot of money and time to make art.
The beauty of working on many different things at once
A while back I talked and showed a diptych that just wasn't working, in fact I over worked it to the point of no return. When I do this my solution is often to cut up the drawing. This time I had 8 pieces of paper. So while I was also working on other drawings I would have a smaller work to come to as well. I also made each piece of the original drawing into a diptych by adding another piece of paper. This reminds me of cell division and for some reason I find this very satisfying, I am not quite sure why. Well I have finished this series and have some things to say about it. My son Kyle was very keen for me to read "The Diamond Age " by Neal Stephenson, he said it made him want to major in physics in college and work in the nano tech industry. It was certainly an interesting book. I have been influenced by this idea of small microscopic pieces of technology entering our bodies to help with various medical issues. Who knows if these thoughts I carry around in my head make themselves visible in the work.
The Continium
Delving inside ones self to draw on and work is a constant surprise. As I mentioned in my last "Notes from the studio" I have started these drawings under the heading "Inside the Brain" I have been doing them in sets of four and am about to start another set , bringing the total up to four sets of four. I have come out of a period of struggle with my work, nothing happened easily. The piece called "Creation " took me about a year to complete and went through many different stages. So imagine my surprise when I started this new series, I began as I often do using pen and ink, then applied washes of color. I kept thinking that this was just the beginning, but after having all the drawings up , realize that they are in fact done. This is way too easy is my first thought, however on reflection I realize I have been here before, I must trust the gift, its time to receive. Life is a series of struggles and letting go, of clutching and then trusting.
Inside the brain
I have become very interested in the drawings of Camillo Golgi. He was working in 1875 when he did a drawing of a dogs olfactory bulb, using his new method of staining tissue.This study of nervous tissue marks the beginning of modern neuroscience. The original drawing Golgi did is so complex, I had to break it down and put less information on a larger drawing. This is just the beginning of the drawing and I have done 4 different layers so far. The first is the pen and ink marks on paper , the next is the matte medium painted over the ink marks. The third is a thin wash of yellow acrylic and the last a thin wash of magenta acrylic. Now what to do next? I have done 8 of these large scale drawings.
Back in the studio
Well I have started to do some work again, in fact I have finished two diptychs. They are the continuation of some smaller works I started ages ago, when I cut up a larger piece into 8 smaller pieces, with the addition of another piece of paper I have basically 8 diptychs. Sometimes I like to have a bunch of things on the go at the same time. I have started a series of now 8 larger drawings of the interior workings of the brain.
Also I have two pieces that have turned into triptychs , they almost remind me of altar pieces. They are two drawings about meditation and the removal of all the crap . Meditation has been likened to the process of washing, we wash and wash and the mind/body/soul gets filled up with stuff that bogs us down. These drawings are a way to describe this process that somehow also involves a lot of spinning, as though the process of spinning helps clear out the junk.
I will show the finished diptych , at first I wasn't sure it was finished, so I put it aside to consider now a couple of days later I am sure. The drawings below were working drawings to try and figure out what to do, in my sketch book. One think I like from the finished piece is the way ,that what could be a craft is flying towards the yellow circle, sun maybe. Anyway it has the look of another world which I love.
Burning Man- Cargo Cult 2013
Wow! Its been a week since we returned from Black Rock City, dusty and exhausted. My visual brain has been blasted with information, this year over 400 art projects on the playa. I did put up photographs of my drawings at center camp and also participated in a group art project called "Up the Garden Path". The group art project was interesting , it was an example of art by committee with a bunch of untrained artists, but very creative people. The process of putting the piece together was interesting.
Art , especially a sculptural piece is impossible to really see until its in the actual space. This requires a certain flexibility, as decisions are not always about the mathematics of how far something should be spaced, but also primarily about how it looks. We were a group of four couples. Three of the men found it very difficult to have to stop and change things, I kept having to say this is not like building a house. I worked very well on the decision making part with one of the women. The disappointing part was that the human sundial needed uniform pillars, we were only able to get different sized ones, the sundial part did work and was in fact very accurate. The bamboo stalks worked very well as they moved in the almost constant wind. Wind as an element in outdoor sculpture is very pleasing. My main fear was that the piece wouldn't work in terms of scale. It worked, partly because unlike many other outdoor venues there were no other natural elements like trees to distract.
I learned that by reducing my drawings to a small size , I could put up 10 drawings on a wall roughly the size of 4'x4' and it really took away the impact of my work. Next time I will try for one piece done in material that will survive the elements maybe specially made for Burning Man.
I did meet a women on the playa repairing her piece, the playa is hard on art. She had made a piece about the two halves of the brain. The viewer could walk between the halves and be inside the brain. She told me about a book called "Portraits of the Mind, visualizing the brain from antiquity to the 21st century", that inspired her. I got the book and the drawings and close up photographs are indeed inspiring. I may use this as a jumping off point to explore the inside of the brain. As I moved from outside the body to inside, now maybe its time to move from the outside of the brain to exploring inside ,to what makes up the mind of a human being.
Avebury Stone Circle ( Spiritual Heart of England)
I visited my family in England this July and had the opportunity to go to Avebury Stone Circle, in Wiltshire. I was visiting a friend I hadn't seen for 30 years who lives in Marlborough. Someone told me Avebury is the Spiritual Heart of England.
When I came back to California I was doing some drawings in my sketchbook overlaying a heart onto a plan of the stone circle by William Stukeley ( Drawn in mid- 1700's) As I was doing the drawings , I incorporated the roads that bisect the Stone circle into the heart, it looks a little like a roundabout with different exits.
This week I did a workshop about the 4th Chakra, the heart center, a continuation of a series about all the Chakra's. This was another amazing workshop led by my teacher Linda, where I learned many things about this center. One is that the heart center is the only center, where the energy can go both ways, both up and down. This center is a little like a roundabout with different exits.
One of the other interesting things about this center is that it is a center of Be-ing, the first three chakras are Do-ing . I am sure ,I am not explaining this well, however if the first three centers are instinct, sex by lust and power, this center is love. It is the time we get to be a human being and be in our hearts.
