October (receiving and sending)

I received the sketchbook from Mary during September and responded to it in late October. This time Mary has added some suggestions of artists to look at alongside her own response to these. One of these was Tom Phillips and his work of art ‘A Humument’ which you can see for yourself at this link – A Humument a wonderful combination of words and art that I so glad Mary introduced me to. Looking back in our sketchbook I can see that Mary had referred to this in an earlier month but I hadn’t picked up on it, so I was glad she returned to it.

Here’s what I wrote in the sketchbook.

I tried to have a go myself at working onto a page of a book – its quite a challenge to choose some interesting words and phrases. I haven’t done a very exciting job here as I was too literal and descriptive but in doing this I learned something about how I might develop it in the future. I can see the possibilities for using the accidental positioning and relationships between words on the page. There is much inspiration to be gained by exploring The Humument website where all the pages can be seen.

Recently I had also been exploring letters and text as a neighbour had very kindly given me some woodblock letters to experiment with. When I first started playing with these I printed letters, and later single words onto newspaper. Initially this was just to have a go, but as I printed I began to find text, pictures pr a combination of these in the newspapers and print random or chosen words on to them.

The one to the right is one of my favourites – I didn’t really take in the three words at the top of the picture but I think these add to the overall image so much!There’s a few other examples in the sketchbook that I’m sending to Mary next week. One of the other things I did with the letters was to print them all over a sheet of newspaper to see what each one looked like and to get better at applying the printing ink and pressing the block down. After this sheet was dry I found the accidental words that you can see in the image on the left.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been going further with this idea by also adding lines of poetry that seem to fit the image and word.

Building on the use of words and phrases from newspapers and some collage / drawing I was working on last week inspired by imaginary skylines I also constructed a collage and drawn skyline with pieces cut from a newspaper – again looking for interesting words and combinations of words.

Mary also sent me  suggestions of two other artists – Ed Fairburn and Nigel Peake with some drawing added to a map. I’m looking forward to exploring them in the future!

So next week this sketchbook will be in the post to Mary and I hope to receive one from Karen.