My history of art (1)

I didn't write much last week cos I'd spent most of it thinking.
It didn't get me anywhere so now I'm going to write it down in the hope that the writing will lead to some conclusion or at least closure.
It was all about line and surface.  I'm trying to do an etching of the printmaking group and they boil down to hands and faces and how to try and capture those.  I want to do solid people and it seems that after a term of working on David in lino that maybe etching will help me capture the surface of skin.  And skin has no edges so I didn't ought to use line, but it seems that it is lines that I see  (which is why my dresser has the newspaper hanging off it - to try and see what it is that I see.

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And that led onto what do I see - lines or surfaces - and how much of that is 'real' and how much is my 'art education'.  They are in ' ' because none of it is real, really, it is what my brain makes of it.  Not being able to remember back before 5, I don't know how I saw the world before I started seeing pictures of it.
Which is why this is my history of art.
Grandad and Dad both drew. Grandad drew in the margins of newspapers with whatever was to hand, Dad drew in pencil.  I have a memory of getting a paint by numbers one Christmas and trying to persuade Grandad to let me have a go with it. That's the only memory I have of using colour but the things that I remember - scarlet pimpernel, the wing feather of a jay that I found in Eckington wood, (Mum and Dad bought me the bird book), the way the light turned pink in Sitwell Street some evenings, were all about colour.
And somehow line v surface is linked with drawing v colour in my head.
I think that the eye sees line or at least the edges of things with rods and colour or surface with cones, so maybe there is some sense in the split.
 The first book I can remember for its illustrations is either Rudyard Kipling 'Just so stories' or A A Milne 'The Christopher Robin Verses', which I still have and got for my birthday in 1956, from Grandad. 

And then there was 'Wind in the Willows' a couple of years later, from Mummy and Daddy.
Then John Lennon, and I'm not sure where that went.






I remember being introduced to Bruegel in the Lower Sixth when we did Elliot, 'The Journey of the Maggi'.  That was Mr Brook. 








By then I'd long since given up on art at school, having had a report that said, 'Judith has the ideas but is incapable of putting them onto paper' - at least that is how I remember it.  My other memories of art lessons are of trying to mix powder paint so that it stood up on the paper in ridges and painting my eye - we were given a mirror - and it actually getting put up on the wall, upside down!

One of the books I got for my School prize was an illustrated 'Rubaiyat of Omar Kayam'.  I took it to Reading with me and made a picture out of poster paper, orange and pink that went up on my room wall. I used to lay on my bed staring at it and then at the ceiling and seeing the after image on the white. I had such an active life at University.














I got a book of Aubrey Beardsley pictures while I was there and one of Klee and they were my favourites for years.

When I lived in St Matthew's Court we had a huge Guernica print on the living room wall - Jude's, not mine, and I used to look at it and wonder what it was meant to be and why it was supposed to be so good.
And, of course, living in London meant the galleries, the Tate in particular, I didn't discover the National till much later. And wandering round the Tate showed me the pre-Raphaelites and what I remember of them now is the colour and detail and how getting all that onto a flat space seemed like magic to me.
I don't remember drawing again except for worksheets and they were pathetic, run off on a banda machine, until I started teaching in middle school and had to teach Art then I drew Sammy in pastels. And when we went to France with Susan and Pete I drew Abigail and a picture of the garden. 
At Beeston Primary, I did Mum in water colour pencils as well as whatever I was trying to do with the kids cos it seemed the only way to prepare for practical lessons for me was to try and do it myself - which is probably why lesson planning always took me so long.  And that was when I got the John Muafangejo book and got into printmaking. 

 'Health and safety' disallowed lino cutting after a couple of my years there (and batik) but I remember doing a huge monoprint (spreading the paint mixed with washing up liquid on the top of a trestle table) of the sea and sea creatures with the kids that covered my blackboard wall for a year, and a hot wax batik of the sea too.  We had to use polystyrene 'cut' with pencil for lino.
Linocutting is all about edges around planes.  I went on an in-service day on art when I was at Beeston and I remember being told not to look at a whole thing but to pick some part to concentrate on - I suppose that is a way of getting past looking at edges.
This is a bit of a tangent but it has taken me till this year to learn that abstract is a verb. I knew abstract nouns before I knew abstract art is the only excuse I've got for this. It's not so much of a tangent because I suppose the tutor on the course was talking about abstracting.
So, what do I want to abstract from the people I want to etch? - eyes and mouths, because the eyes show the focus and concentration and the mouths show their response to what they are doing; hands show the grip and pressure and tension of the making. I asked them what symbols they would choose (like in 18th century or so portraits when they had house and skull and globe) to represent their values and interests and I want them to go in too.
Back to eyes and mouths - they have to be set in something and that is where trying to make faces solid comes in.  But then I start thinking - do they have to be set in something?  Can I practise making solids at the same time as doing the rest or am I taking too much on?
KNOW YOUR OWN LIMITATIONS - not something I'm good at.  The thing is that I run out of steam too and that is why printmaking is important.  If I was just sat at home drawing then I would just draw it and when it didn't work I would give up, but the process of printmaking means that getting ready to make the print gives me an end, and then making the print gives me thinking time and producing it always has a surprise element - lino cutting was getting to the point where I knew what the paper image would look like, etching is still a long way from that and that surprise is important because it gives me, I don't know, 'insight' seems a bit pretentious but it does make me notice what I've done and rethink it and with etchings, apparently, you can rework the plate.  I say apparently because I didn't know that when I last did one.