Happy Lupercalia!
In my house we are enjoying substituting pagan festivals for contemporary ones, so this week we’ve been busy reading up on Lupercalia and deciding if we want to swop in any customs instead of Valentines day ones. The options seemed to be sacrificing goats, eating salted meat-cakes or running naked in an anticlockwise direction around a hill. So we decided to just go with dinner and pints instead.
Art
I had an epiphany last weekend which had me losing the run of myself until 3 in the morning. A collage volcano of discovery.
I hate collage. I hate the feeling of paper (it makes me cringe). Dry paper becoming wet. Cutting at your skin. Sticking to your hair. I hate the way the collaged paper sticks out when it’s stuck on a surface, and doesn’t look integrated into the whole thing. I just bloody hate it.
UNTIL NOW! I recently bought a gel press printing plate and some wet strength tissue. The gel-plate is great and lots of fun - but it’s the wet strength tissue that is an absolute game changer for me.
It doesn’t feel like paper - it’s soft and silky and like rubbing the pelt of a well groomed dog.
It’s delicate and semi transparent - when I saturate it with gloss medium the translucent parts magically disappears into the painting making everything look integrated - like nothing was ever stuck on. It’s amazing.
This discovery set me off on a 3 day frenzy of mono-printing and collage that ended up with a massive box of amazing collage material and 3 more unfinished paintings to add to the growing pile.
Life
I really love taking notes and writing and doodling and scribbling. But I have a growing (teetering) mountain of notebooks and enough is enough. So I saved my bobs, mega splurged, and got myself a fancy Samsung tablet. I’ve been putting it off for ages, because I like the tactile feeling of pen on paper. But a powerful tablet with the silky S-Pen - it’s like the digital version of wet strength tissue paper of life - game changer.
I’m still figuring out how to best use it and will probably do a specific blog post on it in the next month or so. So far I’ve been writing in it for writing Morning Pages, brainstorming ideas for studio projects, editing paintings digitally to figure out next steps but I can see so many ways it will be useful as an artist. Oh and I’ve also been staying up way too late every night following along with Kenzo’s still life tutorials using the Sketchbook app. Simply beautiful.
In Between
Here are some things that have been keeping me company this week:
Podcast: The Great Stink, BBC 4’s In our time by Melvin Bragg. A bedside story of the impact of the terrible stench of sewage in the Thames in central London in the hot summer of 1858 and how they fixed it.
Audiobook: Austin Kleon’s Steal Like and Artist trilogy audiobook - it’s a great little pick me up when I want to fling my paintings over the fence
Tv Show: Derry Girls - the hilarious brain child of Lisa McGee, filled with absurdities, nostalgia and teen angst amidst the political unrest and cultural division of Northern Ireland in the 90’s.
And in the spirit of Lupercalia/Valentine’s day here’s something to listen to while running anticlockwise around a hill:
xx Aoife