Life is defined by membranes.
When the storm smashed a window
and shouldered its way into the house
I stopped thinking I was safe.
* * *
Waking early into silence
after the big storm
the starry sky seemed like a gift
I couldn't close my eyes on.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Love letters dissolving in the rain
It’s raining again. It seems to have been raining every day for weeks. I am particularly sensitive to rain this winter because I am writing fragments of poetry in chalk around Whangarei, and they last only until the next rain, though a sheltered spot might remain legible through a swift shower.
Officially, my chalk poem fragments are teasers for Love Letters at Your Feet which will involve about 15 of my love poems written in chalk along the hidden paths and quirky concrete structures of Cafler Park, as part of the Mid Winter Art Festival. Unofficially, I am practicing chalk legibility, training my thighs for extended squatting, indulging my poet’s ego, healing the bruises on my heart, meditating on non-attachment, playing at transgression and offering gifts to friends and strangers.
Sometimes I pay attention to the weather forecast and their usually spurious promises of sun or showers, and sometimes I try to interpret the arcane code of scudding clouds, and sometimes I go out with my chalk even though the pavement is wet, the sky is grey and I know it will be raining again soon.
When I am organised enough to be responding to the forecast I’ll usually have some fresh text prepared to copy onto suitable surfaces. When a spontaneous urge to write in a rare dry spell coincides with having enough chalk with me, I usually end up adapting something from memory or making it up on the spot. It has turned out to be very freeing to know that what I am writing is ephemeral. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just legible (and spelled right). And if the rain washes it away over night or in the next hour, well, that just means the surfaces are being cleared for me to write on again.
If the weather is too dire on 20-21 July then my alternate day for Love Letters at Your Feet is the following Friday the 27th, which just happens to be Montana Poetry Day. And whether or not it is raining during the Mid Winter Arts Festival, I welcome visitors at Te Kowhai Print Trust, at the Quarry, where I will be setting type and printing on the Arab press from 9-4 on Sunday 22nd. Examples of my letterpress prints and artist’s books will be on view and available to buy.
A rare moment of sunshine in Whangarei, at the Quarry entrance.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Washing away the meaning
I am constantly experimenting with printing. I never seem to be content to develop my next project in a way that will consolidate the new skills I have learned, but rather I keep wanting to jostle up against the boundaries of what is possible. Inevitably, this is as frustrating as it is interesting- long stretches of faffing about without much to show for it in the way of satisfactory finished product. But every once in a while it all comes together and seems worth doing the hard way.
My latest exhilarating reward follows a long, tedious engagement with setting type in vertical lines, instead of the horizontal that everything in letterpress is designed around. I've seen pictures of others' vertical work so I knew it must be possible. A more experienced printer might not have taken three days of trying and being disappointed, trying and failing, trying a different way, failing again and almost giving up, getting violently ill and while immobile figuring out yet another, ultimately successful, way to spend another day on it once back in the studio. But then, I console myself, a more experienced printer might not have even bothered to do something so damn weird.
The goal was to print covers for Love Falls, the vertical flag book I've been working on for a while. I wanted the covers to give an impression of water falling. For some reason that I no longer remember I decided to set it in a galley (a tray open at one end) instead of the chase (a closed frame), possibly because the area I wanted to print was almost as big as the chase leaving not much room for furniture, and the one hint of 'how to' I had gleaned in relation to vertical type was that I wouldn't be able to lock the type in anyway.
Taking proofs of the first few lines confirmed that I was going to get the look I wanted so I persisted with the infinitely slower and more fiddly type setting. It's slower and fiddlier because even though 18pt is all exactly 18points high, to line up in a perfect row, every letter is a different width and so doesn't come close to lining up in a perfect column. See what I mean:
m
e
l
i
o
r
s
It's not easy to get the l and the i to not slide around in the big space that the m is holding open. My technique involved using up all the little spacers I could find and then screwing up tiny pieces of paper to wedge around the letters. Not elegant. Not quick. But eventually it did work.
Because the type, even wedged with hundreds of bits of screwed up paper, could not be locked tight enough to sit in the vertical bed of the Arab press I ended up printing on the flat bed of the trusty proofing press (after some disastrous experiments on the etching press). Once I finally got everything to behave, it all worked like a dream and I printed my twenty or so cover sheets (pictured below) in about an hour.
Way back weeks ago when I started setting this vertical type I was setting the words of the
poem to be contained in the covers, and when I ran out of those words I was making up new lines as I set them. There were no gaps between the words but in the manner of a 'find-a-word' puzzle, it was possible to read sense into the lines. However, my repeated disastrous attempts at printing kept dislodging the type. Often visitors were chatting to me as I was wedging the letters into place again and very quickly I lost any attachment to maintaining the meaning of the words. I was just trying to get type to stand up straight in columns and not move around on their own account.
But in parallel with my line setting activities at TKPT I have been meditating on Buddhist concepts of non-attachment, particularly in the context of romantic love- the subject of Love Falls. The printing process washed most of the sense out letters, leaving the waterfall-like pattern unattached to meaning and thus providing a conceptual continuity between what I was thinking about love when I wrote the text on the pages (years ago) and what I was thinking about love as I was making the covers.
The problem with the putting all this effort into the outside of Love Falls is that when the book is displayed, the covers won't be visible. Yes, I invested all that time and effort for an subordinate element of the book. Which is typical of book making- often the most time consuming elements are invisible.
But as a printer I was all fired up from my hard won success and wasn't about to just take my three days of typesetting apart and disperse those letters back into their compartments and move on, nope, not quite yet. Not to mention I had mixed up a big old puddle of blue-grey ink too good to waste. So I kept on printing and experimenting. I printed the pattern repeatedly on long strips of paper and big wide pieces of paper: learning something aligning the edges of the pattern. I printed on little strips used to mask out chunks of the pattern on bigger paper. I overprinted multiple layers, experimenting with density. I printed on old paper bags. I printed on shiny, matt, thick, thin, light and dark. I printed more in one day than I ever have before.
Some the printing was pretty ho hum and some of the prints made me dance around the room because my delight was too great to be contained. The beauty of the letter-forms and their unconventional, mostly non-sense arrangement on the page is quite seductive and having so much patterned paper at my disposal seems to have unleashed a new wave of inspiration.
My latest exhilarating reward follows a long, tedious engagement with setting type in vertical lines, instead of the horizontal that everything in letterpress is designed around. I've seen pictures of others' vertical work so I knew it must be possible. A more experienced printer might not have taken three days of trying and being disappointed, trying and failing, trying a different way, failing again and almost giving up, getting violently ill and while immobile figuring out yet another, ultimately successful, way to spend another day on it once back in the studio. But then, I console myself, a more experienced printer might not have even bothered to do something so damn weird.
The goal was to print covers for Love Falls, the vertical flag book I've been working on for a while. I wanted the covers to give an impression of water falling. For some reason that I no longer remember I decided to set it in a galley (a tray open at one end) instead of the chase (a closed frame), possibly because the area I wanted to print was almost as big as the chase leaving not much room for furniture, and the one hint of 'how to' I had gleaned in relation to vertical type was that I wouldn't be able to lock the type in anyway.
Taking proofs of the first few lines confirmed that I was going to get the look I wanted so I persisted with the infinitely slower and more fiddly type setting. It's slower and fiddlier because even though 18pt is all exactly 18points high, to line up in a perfect row, every letter is a different width and so doesn't come close to lining up in a perfect column. See what I mean:
m
e
l
i
o
r
s
It's not easy to get the l and the i to not slide around in the big space that the m is holding open. My technique involved using up all the little spacers I could find and then screwing up tiny pieces of paper to wedge around the letters. Not elegant. Not quick. But eventually it did work.
Because the type, even wedged with hundreds of bits of screwed up paper, could not be locked tight enough to sit in the vertical bed of the Arab press I ended up printing on the flat bed of the trusty proofing press (after some disastrous experiments on the etching press). Once I finally got everything to behave, it all worked like a dream and I printed my twenty or so cover sheets (pictured below) in about an hour.
Way back weeks ago when I started setting this vertical type I was setting the words of the
poem to be contained in the covers, and when I ran out of those words I was making up new lines as I set them. There were no gaps between the words but in the manner of a 'find-a-word' puzzle, it was possible to read sense into the lines. However, my repeated disastrous attempts at printing kept dislodging the type. Often visitors were chatting to me as I was wedging the letters into place again and very quickly I lost any attachment to maintaining the meaning of the words. I was just trying to get type to stand up straight in columns and not move around on their own account.But in parallel with my line setting activities at TKPT I have been meditating on Buddhist concepts of non-attachment, particularly in the context of romantic love- the subject of Love Falls. The printing process washed most of the sense out letters, leaving the waterfall-like pattern unattached to meaning and thus providing a conceptual continuity between what I was thinking about love when I wrote the text on the pages (years ago) and what I was thinking about love as I was making the covers.
The problem with the putting all this effort into the outside of Love Falls is that when the book is displayed, the covers won't be visible. Yes, I invested all that time and effort for an subordinate element of the book. Which is typical of book making- often the most time consuming elements are invisible.
But as a printer I was all fired up from my hard won success and wasn't about to just take my three days of typesetting apart and disperse those letters back into their compartments and move on, nope, not quite yet. Not to mention I had mixed up a big old puddle of blue-grey ink too good to waste. So I kept on printing and experimenting. I printed the pattern repeatedly on long strips of paper and big wide pieces of paper: learning something aligning the edges of the pattern. I printed on little strips used to mask out chunks of the pattern on bigger paper. I overprinted multiple layers, experimenting with density. I printed on old paper bags. I printed on shiny, matt, thick, thin, light and dark. I printed more in one day than I ever have before.
Some the printing was pretty ho hum and some of the prints made me dance around the room because my delight was too great to be contained. The beauty of the letter-forms and their unconventional, mostly non-sense arrangement on the page is quite seductive and having so much patterned paper at my disposal seems to have unleashed a new wave of inspiration.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Pathetic
You know how good it feels to be not very sick anymore? That's me right now, revelling in the joys of eating chewy food with actual flavour and crossing a floor plowed clear of crumpled tissues. But I am also playing catch up because while I was in survival mode for most of the last week, moving house and starting a new job in a zombie state of phlegm and chest spasms, everything else fell by the wayside. Not only paying bills and responding to emails but the blog and any activities worth writing about on the blog. So sadly this is nothing more than one of my all too frequent 'pathetic excuses' posts. But I plan to go printing tomorrow and love bombing the town with chalk poems this weekend so I will have lots to write about soon- tune back in in a few days.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Feelin' Frisky!
The frisket works! I went to the hardware store and bought my best guess at a new bolt and suddenly the Arab is getting frisky with the frisket. It just looks like it belongs there, swinging from edge of the platen, and so far in my brief experiments, it appears to do the job which I need it to. Some fine tuning from one of the helpful amateur engineers in my life might help it to work better, as the way it's sitting right now is going make printing paper more slow and fiddly than it should be. But at least slow and fiddly printing is better than inevitable inky paper jams.
Another happy printing development yesterday was the discovery that I can print vinyl stickers i.e. bumper stickers. A friend suggested making 'Addicted to Capitalism' bumper stickers and my mind ran off with the other possibilities afforded by printing sturdy waterproof labels. Experiments involving both white and transparent sticky-backed vinyl are extremely encouraging.
Another happy printing development yesterday was the discovery that I can print vinyl stickers i.e. bumper stickers. A friend suggested making 'Addicted to Capitalism' bumper stickers and my mind ran off with the other possibilities afforded by printing sturdy waterproof labels. Experiments involving both white and transparent sticky-backed vinyl are extremely encouraging.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
So, Meliors, how's the letterpress?
Well, thanks for asking. It's ok, but I am frustrated by a few technical challenges. Mostly by the lack of a fitted frisket, which appears to be to blame for the Arab's annoying tendency to suck up into the rollers any paper bigger or floppier than a postcard.
A frisket has entered the building but it looks nothing like the one illustrated here, which was previously my sole source of frisket-identification. I, and everyone else who I accost at TKPT on the subject, have never seen a frisket in action, so we aren't exactly sure how to attach it to the Arab and what to do with it once it's on there.
But I know that you don't want to hear about my frisket problems, and I won't even start in on my money-down-the-drain tympan paper story. However I do think you should know that my card printing (and remember card is all I can print without a frisket) is in hiatus while the guillotines are being sharpened.
So printing, yes, I am doing some. Today I finished printing delicate little strips of Japanese tissue paper on the proofing press. The proofing press is not as reliably sharp as the Arab but expresses no desire to suck paper into an inky paper jam, for which I am grateful. I am making a flag book edition called Love Falls. It's an exhibition book, by which I mean that I have designed it for display rather than for handling. It hangs vertically on the wall and the flags fall down like a waterfall. I expect that people will be just as likely to read it from the middle outwards as from top to bottom, and for once, this poem is resilient enough for any kind of idiosyncratic reading.
Now that the flags are all printed, I'm going to set type for the covers, and by the time those are done the guillotines should be back and I can make some business cards. So I'm happily dividing my TKPT time between technical problem-solving and actual printing and it's all good.
A frisket has entered the building but it looks nothing like the one illustrated here, which was previously my sole source of frisket-identification. I, and everyone else who I accost at TKPT on the subject, have never seen a frisket in action, so we aren't exactly sure how to attach it to the Arab and what to do with it once it's on there.
But I know that you don't want to hear about my frisket problems, and I won't even start in on my money-down-the-drain tympan paper story. However I do think you should know that my card printing (and remember card is all I can print without a frisket) is in hiatus while the guillotines are being sharpened.
So printing, yes, I am doing some. Today I finished printing delicate little strips of Japanese tissue paper on the proofing press. The proofing press is not as reliably sharp as the Arab but expresses no desire to suck paper into an inky paper jam, for which I am grateful. I am making a flag book edition called Love Falls. It's an exhibition book, by which I mean that I have designed it for display rather than for handling. It hangs vertically on the wall and the flags fall down like a waterfall. I expect that people will be just as likely to read it from the middle outwards as from top to bottom, and for once, this poem is resilient enough for any kind of idiosyncratic reading.
Now that the flags are all printed, I'm going to set type for the covers, and by the time those are done the guillotines should be back and I can make some business cards. So I'm happily dividing my TKPT time between technical problem-solving and actual printing and it's all good.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Insomnia
Some people claim to thrive on next to no sleep. I am not one of them. I rarely have a problem with sleeping and I can rarely think of anything I'd rather do between 10pm and 6 am than sleep. So the past six weeks has been an interesting challenge to me, averaging 4 hours a night, and never more than 5.5. It's the kind of insomnia where you fall asleep like a cat (not like a baby, anyone using that cliche obviously wasn't a parent) but you wake up in a surge of adrenalin in the very smallest hours of the night and don't fall back to sleep.
Perhaps because of it's unfamiliarity, this pattern of insomnia was an exhilarating novelty for the first couple of weeks as I discovered that those hours of darkness are incredibly fertile for generating and developing creative ideas. Over the second couple of weeks the exhilarating creativeness took on a slightly manic tinge and I discovered that the middle of the night is also a suitable space for facing one's own dark shadows. In the last couple of weeks my creativity and self-reflection have begun to be overwhelmed by chronic exhaustion, and sleeping through the night has become my unswerving (but as yet, unmet) goal.
Everyone has tips about how to sleep and I am trying almost every suggestion except hot milk, as dairy doesn't agree with me. So far nothing has made me stay asleep, but with all the vitamins, minerals, herbs and flower essences I pop every day plus plenty of exercise, massage and meditation I'm continuing to function without physical or emotional meltdown. Readers may feel free to offer additional sleep-inducing advice through the comments function.
My favourite suggestion was from Silke, who's acupuncturist recommends singing to help the chi flow where its supposed to. It doesn't help me sleep, but singing Ka Waiata over and over in the middle of the night is a much more pleasant a way to pass the time than tossing and turning and cursing my whacked-out adrenal glands.
Oh, you might be wondering why am I not sleeping? Well, my last solid sleep was the night before Brad's funeral which happened to be the first night in a new housesit in town, and a couple days before I resigned from my job. I've experienced massive transitions on a number of fronts during this period of grieving for my beloved, brilliant, inspiring friend. I reckon I probably needed 20 hours a day of consciousness to process everything at first, but now it is just a bad habit. So today I'm off to seek professional help to ensure that I start my new job next week fully rested and ready to go.
Perhaps because of it's unfamiliarity, this pattern of insomnia was an exhilarating novelty for the first couple of weeks as I discovered that those hours of darkness are incredibly fertile for generating and developing creative ideas. Over the second couple of weeks the exhilarating creativeness took on a slightly manic tinge and I discovered that the middle of the night is also a suitable space for facing one's own dark shadows. In the last couple of weeks my creativity and self-reflection have begun to be overwhelmed by chronic exhaustion, and sleeping through the night has become my unswerving (but as yet, unmet) goal.
Everyone has tips about how to sleep and I am trying almost every suggestion except hot milk, as dairy doesn't agree with me. So far nothing has made me stay asleep, but with all the vitamins, minerals, herbs and flower essences I pop every day plus plenty of exercise, massage and meditation I'm continuing to function without physical or emotional meltdown. Readers may feel free to offer additional sleep-inducing advice through the comments function.
My favourite suggestion was from Silke, who's acupuncturist recommends singing to help the chi flow where its supposed to. It doesn't help me sleep, but singing Ka Waiata over and over in the middle of the night is a much more pleasant a way to pass the time than tossing and turning and cursing my whacked-out adrenal glands.
Oh, you might be wondering why am I not sleeping? Well, my last solid sleep was the night before Brad's funeral which happened to be the first night in a new housesit in town, and a couple days before I resigned from my job. I've experienced massive transitions on a number of fronts during this period of grieving for my beloved, brilliant, inspiring friend. I reckon I probably needed 20 hours a day of consciousness to process everything at first, but now it is just a bad habit. So today I'm off to seek professional help to ensure that I start my new job next week fully rested and ready to go.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Picture Postcards
Thanks to Liz and her gorgeous camera we have images! Here is the Addicted to Capitalism collector's edition (including envelope).
Read all about it below...
This one has my favourite text...
And this one has my favourite ornament...
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Gift Economy
You too can be an Addicted to Capitalism collector! Remember those powerful pink cards I was making a couple of weeks ago? Well, the whole set of postcards has been launched and are yours to discover, collect, swap, buy, sell, give, trade, display, send, use as bookmarks or greeting cards, and otherwise enjoy.
Each card has one of the following phrases:
Drink Coffee- Capitalism's drug of choice.
Go Shopping - Capitalism needs your addiction
Sell Art- Capitalism values your creativity
Use Pornography - Let capitalism commodify* all your desires
Watch Television - A capitalist occupation.
The aphorisms on the cards came to me as I mused on how to price the books I plan to create with letterpress and how the work I want to make might fit into the art and book marketplaces. As I printed the cards I continued to wrestle with ideas about how to value my work appropriately and yet also share it widely. Finally I decided that I really want to give away most of these Addicted to Capitalism cards.
I thought about lots of possible methods to give them out and but settled on slipping them into library books because I love libraries and I hope that library users might be more likely to appreciate the gift of a thought-provoking, letterpress, kitchy-looking postcard.
And so, with the help of seven enthusiastic collaborators in four different countries, eight libraries around the world have been infiltrated and 160 Addicted to Capitalism postcards are secreted in books for lucky readers to find. Most will be found by random chance but a determined searcher could enhance their letterpress/art print/Meliors Simms book arts collection. There are plenty of clues to be found in past and future posts of this blog and those of my collaborators (e.g. Courtneyspondence) leading you to the libraries and the books where the postcards can be found.
I hope to hear from some of the folks who find the cards, whether by chance or otherwise. If one of the cards has come into your life, please share your story in the comments section.
For those who miss out on the library cards, or who particularly value the trappings of the art/fine press worlds, I have put aside 15 sets of cards as a limited 'collector's edition' which are signed and numbered, and housed in printed origami envelopes. These sets can be purchased for $NZ50 by contacting me through the comments function of this blog.
BTW I promise photos of the cards just as soon as I can borrow a decent camera...
*a thing that can be bought and sold or exploited within a market
Each card has one of the following phrases:
Drink Coffee- Capitalism's drug of choice.
Go Shopping - Capitalism needs your addiction
Sell Art- Capitalism values your creativity
Use Pornography - Let capitalism commodify* all your desires
Watch Television - A capitalist occupation.
The aphorisms on the cards came to me as I mused on how to price the books I plan to create with letterpress and how the work I want to make might fit into the art and book marketplaces. As I printed the cards I continued to wrestle with ideas about how to value my work appropriately and yet also share it widely. Finally I decided that I really want to give away most of these Addicted to Capitalism cards.
I thought about lots of possible methods to give them out and but settled on slipping them into library books because I love libraries and I hope that library users might be more likely to appreciate the gift of a thought-provoking, letterpress, kitchy-looking postcard.
And so, with the help of seven enthusiastic collaborators in four different countries, eight libraries around the world have been infiltrated and 160 Addicted to Capitalism postcards are secreted in books for lucky readers to find. Most will be found by random chance but a determined searcher could enhance their letterpress/art print/Meliors Simms book arts collection. There are plenty of clues to be found in past and future posts of this blog and those of my collaborators (e.g. Courtneyspondence) leading you to the libraries and the books where the postcards can be found.
I hope to hear from some of the folks who find the cards, whether by chance or otherwise. If one of the cards has come into your life, please share your story in the comments section.
For those who miss out on the library cards, or who particularly value the trappings of the art/fine press worlds, I have put aside 15 sets of cards as a limited 'collector's edition' which are signed and numbered, and housed in printed origami envelopes. These sets can be purchased for $NZ50 by contacting me through the comments function of this blog.
BTW I promise photos of the cards just as soon as I can borrow a decent camera...
*a thing that can be bought and sold or exploited within a market
Monday, May 28, 2007
Luncheon Under the Ash Tree
From the lunch room windows at my work place we look down on the orange tile roof of a small brick building. From its architecture and location you might think it one of the ubiquitous Plunket rooms that were built all over New Zealand last century for women and babies (to match the war memorials and Masonic lodges built for the blokes). However, this funny little civic building with an entrance that looks like a back door facing the Cafler Park Wishing Well, is the Whangarei Art Museum.
I had the galleries to myself on Saturday afternoon (the only time I have ever seen another human other than the desk-minder at the Museum was at an opening). Until then my peripheral awareness of the travelling exhibition, Luncheon Under the Ash Tree: The Ian & Elespie Prior Collection, had stalled on the Evelyn Page paintings and her pretty, impressionistic, domestic style doesn't interest me so much these days as they would have a few years ago. That's why it's taken me two months to get round to checking out this show, despite the proximity of the Museum to the building where I spend most days. Silly, silly me.
The exhibition is diverse; an idiosyncratic showcase of mid-late 20th century New Zealand art, including lots of prints (my special interest at the moment). The collection developed in the context of a network of friends and family which includes many of the 'big names' of NZ art and literature.
The networking aspect is what hooked me actually as the first piece to catch my eye was a name and a face I thought I recognised: an Douglas McDiarmid portrait of Charles Brasch who looked uncannily like my friend Ian McDiarmid- note to self, find out if Ian is related to Charles or Douglas or both. From that moment of (imagined?) personal connection I was swept along by a series of pieces that delighted and stimulated me.
A colourful monoprint by Stanley Palmer of a windswept Southern landscape in a long narrow format that made me want to know how it was made. With my limited knowledge of printing I measured the monoprint against the various plates and presses at TKPT and realised how Palmer must have (literally) stretched the boundaries of normal processes.
Pat Hanly's 1967 drypoint, Invention of Area, was a lovely composition but looked to have been printed on acidic paper as I'm sure the surface wouldn't have been the colour of old tea bags back in the 1960s (though I could be wrong). I took it as a caution to myself creating works on paper that I would really like to look just as good in 40 years as they do when they are made. But since I am also engaged in a stimulating exploration of what it means to print and create ephemera, I appreciated Invention of Area's deterioration as an intrinsic quality of the piece, perhaps unintentional but nonetheless dynamic and interesting.
It's probably result of the intense self-imposed contemporary-art-education-reading programme I am engaged in, but I finally saw a Ralph Hotere work that I really really like. I didn't write down the name but it was something about anenomes at night with a Charles Brasch poem (him again! See what I mean about the network?). What I liked about it most was the way that Hotere wrote the poem in ink onto wet watercolour paper, so the letters seemed to glow softly like sparkler writing, which really suited the poem which compared stars in the sky with anenomes in the water. Half the page was the text on white paper and the other half was a typical Hotere field of dark dull colour but enlivened with splurts of rich red exploding in that way that watercolours do when you drop them on wet paper.
But the highlight, the absolute highlight of the exhibition for me, were two of the three works by John Drawbridge, whose name I remembered from the Mervyn E Tayl0r book. There was an abstract watercolour with stunning, rich, sumptuous colours in broad vertical stripes overdrawn with graphite on a dark background. How can I describe these colours? They weren't clear and they weren't bright but they were vivid and deep and intense and made me think of velvet curtains and red wine and autumn leaves and candlelight. And then later, I was captivated by the composition of John Drawbridge's black and white print, Big Scape which frames a mountain range in a proscenium arch, like a beautiful brain-teasing optical illusion.
So, it's a great exhibition, go see it if you are in Whangarei and you haven't been yet. Maybe you will like the pretty Page paintings more than the abstracts, or be captivated by something quite different that just didn't happen to sing to me like the ones I've described here. But there will be something, I promise, that you will be glad to have seen. Don't miss out.
I had the galleries to myself on Saturday afternoon (the only time I have ever seen another human other than the desk-minder at the Museum was at an opening). Until then my peripheral awareness of the travelling exhibition, Luncheon Under the Ash Tree: The Ian & Elespie Prior Collection, had stalled on the Evelyn Page paintings and her pretty, impressionistic, domestic style doesn't interest me so much these days as they would have a few years ago. That's why it's taken me two months to get round to checking out this show, despite the proximity of the Museum to the building where I spend most days. Silly, silly me.
The exhibition is diverse; an idiosyncratic showcase of mid-late 20th century New Zealand art, including lots of prints (my special interest at the moment). The collection developed in the context of a network of friends and family which includes many of the 'big names' of NZ art and literature.
The networking aspect is what hooked me actually as the first piece to catch my eye was a name and a face I thought I recognised: an Douglas McDiarmid portrait of Charles Brasch who looked uncannily like my friend Ian McDiarmid- note to self, find out if Ian is related to Charles or Douglas or both. From that moment of (imagined?) personal connection I was swept along by a series of pieces that delighted and stimulated me.
A colourful monoprint by Stanley Palmer of a windswept Southern landscape in a long narrow format that made me want to know how it was made. With my limited knowledge of printing I measured the monoprint against the various plates and presses at TKPT and realised how Palmer must have (literally) stretched the boundaries of normal processes.
Pat Hanly's 1967 drypoint, Invention of Area, was a lovely composition but looked to have been printed on acidic paper as I'm sure the surface wouldn't have been the colour of old tea bags back in the 1960s (though I could be wrong). I took it as a caution to myself creating works on paper that I would really like to look just as good in 40 years as they do when they are made. But since I am also engaged in a stimulating exploration of what it means to print and create ephemera, I appreciated Invention of Area's deterioration as an intrinsic quality of the piece, perhaps unintentional but nonetheless dynamic and interesting.
It's probably result of the intense self-imposed contemporary-art-education-reading programme I am engaged in, but I finally saw a Ralph Hotere work that I really really like. I didn't write down the name but it was something about anenomes at night with a Charles Brasch poem (him again! See what I mean about the network?). What I liked about it most was the way that Hotere wrote the poem in ink onto wet watercolour paper, so the letters seemed to glow softly like sparkler writing, which really suited the poem which compared stars in the sky with anenomes in the water. Half the page was the text on white paper and the other half was a typical Hotere field of dark dull colour but enlivened with splurts of rich red exploding in that way that watercolours do when you drop them on wet paper.
But the highlight, the absolute highlight of the exhibition for me, were two of the three works by John Drawbridge, whose name I remembered from the Mervyn E Tayl0r book. There was an abstract watercolour with stunning, rich, sumptuous colours in broad vertical stripes overdrawn with graphite on a dark background. How can I describe these colours? They weren't clear and they weren't bright but they were vivid and deep and intense and made me think of velvet curtains and red wine and autumn leaves and candlelight. And then later, I was captivated by the composition of John Drawbridge's black and white print, Big Scape which frames a mountain range in a proscenium arch, like a beautiful brain-teasing optical illusion.
So, it's a great exhibition, go see it if you are in Whangarei and you haven't been yet. Maybe you will like the pretty Page paintings more than the abstracts, or be captivated by something quite different that just didn't happen to sing to me like the ones I've described here. But there will be something, I promise, that you will be glad to have seen. Don't miss out.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Press Calls
I was walking home from the farmer's market early yesterday morning, laden with bags of produce, pockets stuffed full of ATM card, change, glasses case, keys, hanky, chalk and cellphone. This last item chimed to let me know a text had arrived so I juggled my bags around and groped through my pockets to find the phone.
Delightfully, and disconcertingly, instead of the screen telling me 'you have a message from...' there was this photograph of the Arab press:
At that moment, immersed in the mundane pleasures of my daily life beyond printing, it felt like a siren call from a sweetheart.
Obviously the crowded pocket environment had pushed buttons at random, setting up the phone to send the photo (taken a while ago) as a message, which I wasn't aware of until a friend sent me a text.
But on the other hand, if I can use my imagination to create the reality I want and use reality to manifest my creative vision, why wouldn't the press be calling me?
Delightfully, and disconcertingly, instead of the screen telling me 'you have a message from...' there was this photograph of the Arab press:
At that moment, immersed in the mundane pleasures of my daily life beyond printing, it felt like a siren call from a sweetheart. Obviously the crowded pocket environment had pushed buttons at random, setting up the phone to send the photo (taken a while ago) as a message, which I wasn't aware of until a friend sent me a text.
But on the other hand, if I can use my imagination to create the reality I want and use reality to manifest my creative vision, why wouldn't the press be calling me?
Monday, May 21, 2007
Dream poem
In my dream:
offcuts of precious paper,
creamy, thick, luscious scraps
follow me around the Quarry
like a flock of tiny lambs.
In the night:
type chatter in the cases,
shivering with anticipation.
Inside the door:
the Arab squats patiently,
inscrutably relaxed and
eager to work.
Me and the sweet Arab press,
we are mother and father,
raising an orphanage
of talented children,
teaching them to dance and sing:
songs of freedom, redemption songs.
offcuts of precious paper,
creamy, thick, luscious scraps
follow me around the Quarry
like a flock of tiny lambs.
In the night:
type chatter in the cases,
shivering with anticipation.
Inside the door:
the Arab squats patiently,
inscrutably relaxed and
eager to work.
Me and the sweet Arab press,
we are mother and father,
raising an orphanage
of talented children,
teaching them to dance and sing:
songs of freedom, redemption songs.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Fascinating Phenomenon
Along with a big carton of leftover inks Murray gave me two boxes of old fashioned invitation cards, the kind with the scalloped edges, some edged in gold, some in silver and some in lolly pink. They are irresistible, especially arriving just as I was planning to print a series of postcards.I do like the invitational resonance for the series which is called Addicted to Capitalism and consists of a collection of 5 aphorisms I made up in the middle of the night recently. Sample text: Drink Coffee- Capitalism's drug of choice.
Anyway, with these cards I am indulging the Arab's capacity for mass production- though my runs of 50 at a time are just a warm up for this enthusiastic machine. Thus on Friday afternoon I had a table top at TPKP covered in 150 postcards drying their ink. A third of them were the lolly-pink cards printed with Use Pornography - Let capitalism commodify all your desires.
I've noticed that the couple of men who encountered this aphorism prior to the print-run had misheard or misread the phrase (none of the other cards seem to have this problem for either gender). My nascent theory, that the word pornography has the power to make men's brains stall, was reinforced by the reaction of a visitor to the word in wet pink multiplicity.
This guy came in, as many people do, but instead of a quick look and a quick chat like most, he lingered. And lingered. He did run home for his portfolio to show me some of his (impressively realistic) drawings but then there was no getting rid of him. I just kept printing as he told me about his life in jail, drawing superheroes on commission for gang members (fee: two joints for a small drawing). Finally the conversation petered out and after a long pause he asked, "So what made you decide to use pornography as your gag?"
Of course I've been just dying for someone to ask me something like that, so as I continued to pump the treadle and print Watch Television - A capitalist occupation, I launched into a cheerful exposition on how I want the whole series to provoke consideration of personal preferences in a socio-economic context and how pornography is an example of a market-driven mass addiction pervading public spaces with compelling, fascinating images, how it conditions (especially, but not only) men to perceive (especially, but not only) women as a product-line of body parts to be consumed, and co-opts fetishes into a niche-marketing paradigm channeling intimate relationships into pre-determined narratives of desire and gratification...
Well! That got rid of the malinger. I don't think I had really understood the phrase 'slunk out' until yesterday when I paused in my monologue. Perhaps he had thought I was a pornographic enthusiast and hoped that we could bond over a shared appreciation of the genre. Anyway, whatever he was anticipating, he looked utterly crestfallen when he slunk out of the building in the wake of my feminist rant.
Luckily the porno cards will never be seen en masse again so their apparent brain-numbing powers will be diluted by isolation or in the context of the other, slightly less provocative, cards.
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