Hello again. Here is my last (I think) post in response to the Rorschach Test prompt from the Kick-About challenge hosted by Phil Gomm. This is my fully analogue response.
This inkblot looks EXACTLY like a lugubrious Long-nosed WhaleFish swimming across the surface of a lake carrying a weird, slightly menacing figure with a smaller figure on its lap.
It looks like that to you too, right?
So I tackled this one with Polychromos pencils and Posca pens. I really wanted it to be travelling left to right (English language picture book illustration is now in my bones), but when I was most of the way through, it looked better up the other way, mainly because of the colour in the water reflection.
I’ve refrained from ‘cleaning up’ the image in PhotoShop in order to remain true to its hand-made inkblottiness. All I did was dot a bit of white Posca pen to some of the more intrusively messy marks. So here it is.
Dogfish with Piebald Child riding a Long-nosed WhaleFish who is Really a Prince Under an Enchantment. If you want to rescue the prince, you’ll probably have to climb a mountain, wearing slippers made of prickly pears, and retrieve a plum from a magic tree that only fruits once every 50 years. Then come back and feed it to the fish… or something. I wish you luck. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be a nice prince when he is human again, so you’d better be on your toes, if you haven’t lost them to frostbite.
Below I’ve flipped the image so that you can compare it with the original ink blot.
Hello again. I’m not finished with ink blots for the Kick-About. And I‘m not finished with islands reflected in still water.
It’s not the first time I’ve gone down this road. I remember printing dozens and dozens of icebergs and islands for When You’re Older. In some illustrations I was conflicted because I liked the reflections on the water surface, but I was also enchanted by the creatures underneath the surface.
Question: How to have both in the one illustration? Answer: Not easily.
But back to the current time! Yes, I did produce something new for this Kick-About prompt. The theme makes me think of (self) reflection, and it seems the world is full of people who see themselves in different ways.
Some don’t like what they see. Some delight in it. Some refuse to look at themselves at all. Some see a version of themself that is invisible to others. And the opposite is also true.
I sketched 12 small characters with dip pen and ink, to place into a scene of self reflection. Here are a few of them. (below)
Then I printed a few ink blots. A couple really do look like very interesting moths, (I’m not sure what that means about my personality type) and they are begging to be used as collage materials for something else. But they don’t suggest islands to me, so I used the more solid results.
This ink blot on yellow paper is so evocative of a rocky island, that it didn’t need my interference at all. And the yellow just added to the atmosphere. But I wanted to use at least one of my characters, so I added some mist, and background islands, and then put my character in.
I was quite pleased with the result, and I feel for this little creature having an identity crisis, all alone. Although the text is at a scale that would work best on a full page illustration, and is probably illegible at this size.
And then I played with a second character with no background at all. I think this funny little creature is a cousin of the legendary Narcissus, but if you flip the image upside down, you have the more universal experience of looking in a mirror.
I was just clearing up my art equipment for the day’s activities, and I couldn’t resist one last little go with the Big Chungus, so here are some baby birds of paradise.
By the way, writing the plural for Bird-of-paradise reminded me of seeing the stage play Shadowlands about C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham. I remember laughing at the bit where Lewis debates whether he should be ordering gin and tonics or gins and tonic. This is just the sort of thing that delights my brain. But alas, I’m not sure these work so well as Bird-of-Paradises.
I forgot to give the Spotty-Pyjama-B-O-P a tail. By rights, there should be a stumpy one at least.
Hello Kick-About! I haven’t participated in the longest time. I’ve watched the posts flash by every two weeks. Some of them would have been a challenge indeed, but some of them were right up my alley. I nearly cried to miss ‘Kenojuak Ashevak’. But I haven’t been able to squeeze the Kick-About in.
I’m the Burrow in Adelaide on a writing fellowship during July so the demands on my time are fewer. Saturday seemed like a good day to take a break from the keyboard and play with mixed media. I’ve brought a limited selection of art equipment with me, focusing on dry media and collage to keep it cleaner. But I’ve still managed to make the kitchen table look a lot like my drawing board at home.
A shout out to Zoë Collins who sent me a packet of her gorgeous up-cycled crayons to use several months ago. This is the first chance I’ve had to play with them. They are really an upscaled version of what Ann James calls magic pencils, the multicoloured pencils she used to illustrate the Dirty Dinosaur series of books by Janeen Brian. (When she wasn’t using mud. See this video to watch that!)
On to the paradisaeidae! This is just the family name for the Bird-of-Paradise. And since I seem to have been drawing bird people for the longest time, it couldn’t be a more perfect prompt for a one day session using crayons, pencils and collage. It does occur to me that these pictures are equally suited to the previous Kick-About prompt ‘Chinelos’ and I seem to have blended the two in a sneaky way.
I started with the chungus crayons because I was very curious to use them. I had a ball with them. Part of their appeal is the letting go of control that goes with them. As you apply them, the colour changes, so it takes you to unexpected places. And letting go of control is about the best thing you can do if you are taking just one morning out to play with art materials. I started randomly colouring a bird shape and let it form itself as I went along. I soon felt the need of black, which wasn’t in my crayons, so I introduced soft pastels.
To give the bird a bit of dynamism I made it hurry forwards looking furtively over its shoulder. Apparently my subconscious was dwelling in the venal world of politics, elections, the patriarchy, and the progress of the Far Right, because my bird was evolving into a pompous creature, over-dressed, clutching at his medal of office whilst walking though a field of smoke and with blood on his feet! My subconscious has opinions, apparently. At least the Tories are out. Below is the unfinished collage, with pieces not yet glued down.
However, in terms of colour there was no focal point, so although I was enjoying the texture interactions, I started to overlay further collage pieces over sections of the bird, and ended up by cutting him away from his background. This is what he ended up looking like.
I think my subconscious was happy to have got him out of its system by this time, so I moved on to these little sketches that I had dashed off as soon as I read the Kick-About prompt earlier. My plan was to overlay digital collage on to them and to make them look like quirky dancers or mummers of some sort. They’re generally much more cheerful.
I made a bit of versatile colour and texture to clad them, using soft pastels and Posca pens. I made sure I had both light and dark areas. And then I simply dressed them up in PhotoShop without fussing too much. Mission completed!
The prompt for the 57th Kick-About is the drawings of painter, illustrator, author, poet and war artist, Mervyn Peake.
Peake was the author and illustrator of the Gormenghast series which has taken on cult status since the publication of the first book Titus Groan in 1946. But for some it’s too dark, daunting. It’s usually classified as a fantasy, but it contains no magic other than the magic of Peake’s imagination.
Peake was also a war artist. He was one of the first civilians to enter the German concentration camp at Belsen in 1945, an experience that had a profound effect upon him. His work was sometimes dark and grotesque. Other times his drawings expressed delicacy and softness, but they always emitted an intensity of personality and his use of light and shadow lifted even the prettiest of subjects far above anything that might be labeled saccharine. And then there are his drawings for his children. I have a copy of The Sunday Books, a collection of spontaneous creations he made on demand for his two small sons. In these, the images are flawed in the most lovely way. They are simply what flowed from his pen in the moment, with no polish, no corrections.
While thinking about Peake, I’ve been thinking about ’caricatures’. I’m not a fan of caricatures. Years ago, when a friend introduced me to someone who had no understanding of book illustration, the person said something along the lines of ’Oh you do caricatures! They are so clever!’ I confess I was horrified to be thought of as a caricaturist. (There’s something weird and fragile going on there, but we’ll leave that for now.) Some of Peake’s book illustrations are precariously close to caricatures if a caricature is something that depicts a person in a grotesque way by exaggerating their features. And yet the sophistication and delicacy of the rendering is undeniable.
illustration by Mervyn Peake
And what is the purpose of illustration? It’s not to depict the banal reality of what we can see every day with our own eyes. It’s about expressing a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere. Or sparking a feeling or mood in the reader. And so it follows that a certain amount of well considered exaggeration goes with the territory.
There’s much to explore in response to Peake’s work, and I don’t think I can do it on one hit, so let us see where it takes me. But to begin with, it has taken me back to two mediums I loved in earlier years but have neglected more recently.
Pen and ink. Obviously this is all about the line. But it’s also about embracing a medium that can’t or won’t be fully controlled. I worked pretty small with these and just enjoyed making lots of small doodles. Perhaps some more finished work will come later.
And charcoal or soft pastel. This is less about the line and more about the tone, but really it’s a delicate balance of both. And there’s an element of mystery that comes from the smudgy indistinctness. It feeds the imagination. I haven’t found my mojo again with this quite yet, but I have been enjoying the start of the journey.
These two are a bit obvious. I like this little guy.
Lastly, I did a couple of tiny wash drawings with a touch of pencil detail.
My daughter Remi at a fancy dress party a few years back. My son Hugo listening to music in my studio the other day. Another of Hugo.
Thanks again, Phil. It has been fun to provide the prompt this time around! x
The prompt for the 38th Kick-About is one of Matisse’s lovely cut-outs, titled White Alga on Orange and Red Background. I’m a big fan of drawing with scissors as Matisse described it. But I didn’t pick up the scissors. For one thing, the bees kept swarming! Three more times. I mean, crikey! We have managed to capture each of the swarms. (Today I noticed that the neighbour‘s bees are swarming. I‘m letting that lot go.)
We now have not one hive, but four. The smallest swarm was successfully reunited with the original hive. I have learned so much in a fortnight! Because I absolutely can’t help myself, I have begun the process of naming the four hives after fictional places. (Scott argues in favour of One, Two, Three and Four. *sigh*)
The original hive is three boxes high, was neglected for the last few years, and became overpopulated. It’s no longer neglected or overpopulated, but it’s still tall. It is going to be either Gormenghast, or Ankh–Morpork. Both are very appealing, so we will continue thinking about that.
The smallest new hive is called Dagobah. It’s getting supplementary feeding with sugar syrup. Some of those bees fell in the stormwater drain while we were bringing them down from an overhanging branch. I fished them out of the water with a net but things didn’t look good for the piles of cold, soggy bees on the ground and dark was falling, with rain forecast. (Told you we have been learning…) However, the next day when the sun reached them, they began to recover and almost all of them rose up in reincarnated glory and returned to the colony. After this swampy experience, the name seemed obvious. (There are several Star Wars fanatics in this household.)
The original swarm from my previous post is a Thing of Glory! It is buzzing and growing and brimming with pollen and nectar. Cells are filling with larvae as new bees are created. Hugo has named this hive Sanctaphrax. Perhaps he feels this new hive will be a home of intellectual pursuit and heroic deeds. At any rate, it’s a great opportunity to honour his favourite book series.
This only leaves one hive unnamed. It is middle sized and thriving. It has had a lucky beginning, in that we donated brood from the old city to help them build their new colony. I could name it Serendipity, but it has to be a fictional place. So we will think some more on that one.
Once again, I am talking more about bees than art! What is going on?
This is an accurate reflection of my world just at present, but it’s probably time to mention that as soon I saw the prompt for the Kick-About I thought of seaweed, (not bees) and in particular I thought of the seaweed I painted for When You’re Older by Sofie Laguna; the book I have just finished illustrating.
There are several pages featuring the sea in this book, and in three of them I took the opportunity to create underwater scenes full of colourful seaweed. So when I was working on ideas for the endpapers, one of them featured crabs and seaweed. I never finished this concept, because it didn’t seem as apt as some of the other ideas, but after spending a whole day painting tiny crabs, and working them into patterns, I did fall in love with the little guy at the top of this post, hiding behind his seaweed. He totally captured my heart. I made a few more little arrangements of crabs, but I wasn’t sure they worked as well when reduced in size.
Crabs. Are you confused? We’re on crabs now. Keep up!
Today I revisited the unfinished endpapers and played around a little bit more. They’re probably nicer on white, but hey.
And here are some small sections of this non-endpaper creation.
The prompt for the 37th Kick-About could hardly have been more suited to me and my natural inclinations. It’s inky and leafy and Australian. It’s Peter Mungkuri’s Punu Ngura (2019)
From the Yankunytjatjara, Southern Desert region comes this beautiful black and white ink drawing on paper by Peter Mungkuri. I’m glad this prompt was chosen because it has introduced me to Mungkuri’s work, which is perfectly balanced, sumptuously decorative and calmly natural all at the same time. It is well worth a visit to the Art Gallery of NSW website to see a collection of his work. Swoon!
What strikes me most is the combination of the loosest of ink splatters with far more careful and detailed patterning. I was going to explore some inkiness yesterday (Yep! Last minute again!) to see where an observation of Mungkuri’s work might take me, especially with regard to the use of white ink patterning over the top of the looser ink layers. But before I could begin something happened.
Our bees swarmed.
This happened last year and we weren’t prepared. The hive became overcrowded, and half the bees took off to find roomier accommodation. This time, we had not only added an extra box to our existing hive to give them extra space, but we had prepared a separate hive in case they swarmed, and had it ready for the new colony to use. Well, not perfectly ready. The frames were in, with wax and wire for the bees to build on. But I wasn’t completely finished with my exterior paint job.
This is the old hive with a new box added on top. But this colony is thriving and they needed more space than this. New hive, unfinished. Artist dissatisfied.
This is our new hive in the middle of my paint assault a couple of weeks ago. I had to stop when the paint was so thickly applied that it needed a few hours to dry before I could apply anything more with a brush. Alas, other tasks have called me since then. I hadn’t yet reached a satisfactory conclusion when the bees swarmed.
I should be annoyed. Pesky bees. They sent me no email, no letter and didn’t phone to say they were leaving that day. Just… buzzed off.
But I’m not annoyed. Far from it. My spring day with the bees was uplifting, empowering, mindful and full of joy. So I’m ok with the paint job. In fact, we have installed the bees in the brood box only, so I can tweak the top box before we put it in position. The roof and base are harder to alter… but who knows what might be stealthily achieved at night with a daylight bulb…
So here is what happened in pictures (and just a few words).
We were lucky with the location the bees chose to hang out. They congregated in the empty block next door, just by a storm water outlet, hanging from a conjunction of branches in a Desert Ash. It might have been over the storm water drain. It might have been up too high to reach without a ladder. But they chose a spot just reachable from the ground and just far enough away from the concrete drain that we didn’t risk falling into it. Phew! (I could have done without the blackberry canes though.)
First we suited up. Hugo, sorry about the shut-eye photo. It was you or me. (Blogger’s prerogative.)Then I sawed through the main branch in order to lift the swarm down to the box. It was a bit tricky because there were several branches tangled together and the bees were dangling lower with every jiggle. The blackberries bit me. They have no respect for bee suits. We gave the branch a firm shake and most of the bees dropped into the box. Hugo and I then gently scooped as many bees as we could up and dropped them into the box. Hugo worked out where the queen bees was (inside) and we gently placed the lid on the box, whilst blowing bees out of harm’s way in an undignified manner. With the tricky part over, we decided to sit in the sunshine (on the handy concrete drain) to watch the bees for a while. Some of the bees were fanning their wings near the entrance on the right. We guessed the queen was on the inside near that point and we were hopeful that all was well.
After this we stepped away and shook the bees off our suits. But then I had to go back to have another look. Just because.
This is what it looked like straight afterwards. The bees were slowly moving towards the entrance and going into the box. A couple of hours later, almost all were inside the box. We moved them into their proper location beside the other hive after dark and all seems well today.
That evening, I had a bit of a go at my inky exploration of Peter Mungkuri’s plant drawings, but my mind was full of bees. And joy. So it became an illustration of Hugo and me, arms uplifted to the swarming bees.
In painting it, I was tumbling three things together: what happened last year (they swarmed and disappeared) what happened this year (they swarmed and we were in the middle of it) and what happens every year (we have a dead tree stump that disgorges thousands of tiny moths once a year and they spiral upwards into the sky in the early evening attracting a feeding frenzy of bird life. It is quite the annual spectacle.)
Finished painting. Scanned in 6 parts and assembled.
Look at that! I’ve jumped seamlessly from Kick-About #28 to Kick-About #36 without a single kick!
I was busy there for a while. By putting just about every other thing to one side, I have finished my picture book project for Allen and Unwin, and I’m very excited that I will have an advance copy of When You’re Older in my hands in late November this year. So Hip hip hoorah! But more on that another day. This rather hasty post will be about surrealism and the language of dreams.
The theme is Sheila Legge, seen above in costume in 1936 as a ‘Surrealist Phantom’ in Trafalgar Square to promote the opening of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition … Should I call it a costume? Because she is a living work of art, the living embodiment of a Salvador Dali painting Printemps nécrophilique.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to be having vivid dreams and nightmares at the moment. Melbourne is currently still in lock-down while we wait for enough people to be vaccinated against Covid-19 to allow us to step out without swamping hospitals and losing many more lives. Unlike so many others around the world who are facing real danger and hardship, I am here, at home, living in a kind of paradise with a partner in full time work, a roof over my head, a vista of green outside my windows and the company of my family. For all this I am truly grateful. Nevertheless the night time world of my dreams is a wild one – a Rousseau Paradise, rather than a Fragonard. This was even before I started re-reading short stories by Angela Carter and Leonora Carrington… Ahem.
So there’s a coincidence! Just when I was reading the short stories of Leonora Carrington, who met Max Ernst and became involved with the surrealists in 1937 at the age of 20, the Kick-About veered into the very same territory with Sheila Legge.
This book beside my bed… Could it be influencing my dreams?
All I have to offer the Kick-About today is the beginnings of a… something… featuring some bird-headed, flower-headed women. They will possibly eat one another. I may add colour if there’s anything left of them by tomorrow. (growls softly)
The Kick-about #28 takes a film by Howard Sooley, as a jumping off point. The subject of the film is Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. I loved the film. It is beautifully peaceful. My image, a single one this time, is not very thrilling because it’s simply a rendition of Prospect Cottage, with the garden made even more minimalist, save for a few small creatures dotted about.
I’d love to do more but I haven’t time. However, this little exercise was a useful one for me, in that I was consciously dampening down my rather over-excitable palette, and also practising the careful placement of a few elements in a pared back landscape. Looking at it now, I can see that I haven’t gone far enough with either. But I’ll post it anyway.
And here is Howard Sooley’s lovely short film. Enjoy!
Time Out! For the twenty-sixth Kick-About Phil Gomm, blogger extraordinaire is celebrating a year of kicking about with artists from around the world.
This fortnight, Phil is doing all the work. He’s assembling a collection of everyone’s favourite kick from our year long kick-about. I participated in less than half of them, so that shouldn’t really be hard, but I’ve travelled down several dark, overgrown roads and I am fond of all of them. Those places of the imagination that are dripping, have hooting noises, and a buzz in the background; where a soft-looking plant will feel unnaturally firm to the touch, or a solid-looking branch will crumple in on itself as you brush by, or turn to look at you and hiss. The light is curious; dim and yet saturating the environment with too much colour.
Below are some of the places I’ve visited over the last year, and though they are dark, there is life. Pulsing with energy. Brimming with potential.
The Girl, the Snake and the Cicada. Girl meets snake. The Girl, the Snake and the Cicada. Girl meets snake in a full colour forest. More creepy fairytale imagery: a grotesque fairy, possibly involved in a kidnap. Part of the settlement at TRAPPIST-1e including some of the local flora and faunaMetropolis – the Eternal Gardens – the first version, before the women turned into bird people.Metropolis – the Eternal Gardens with bird people.
Phil, thanks for the kick-about. For some of us, making art is as natural as breathing, and sometimes almost as necessary to life. During a dark time in history, thanks for stimulating art prompts among creative friends, unfettered by constraints, rules or judgement. Freedom to make in any direction. It’s been a joy. And since you want one favourite, I’m selecting the last one. Those Bird Ladies. And I hope they sort themselves out soon and send that bureaucratic penguin back to Antarctica.
Judy Watson 