Art class

I have been thinking about women whose skills I respect.  My friend, Sharon's Mum died recently.  Ann Evans was very kind to me when I was at Junior School.  Sharon was very worried about joining a swimming club to learn to swim, so Mrs Evans suggested to my parents that she took me along too.  I would not have had the chance to go to swimming club without this.  For about 3 or 4 years, Mrs Evans took us to swimming club and this has led to swimming being my exercise of choice ever since.  So for the next few weeks at art class, I will be exploring objects that remind me of people who have been kind to me.

This week we were making our own sketchbooks.  We took a selection of papers, and joined them using glue, staples, threading, stitch etc, stitched down the centre and folded in half, so we ended up with a sketchbook, c7" square.  The object I chose to work from this week was a pair of swimming goggles.  I also had an image of Fullwell Cross pool and a swimmer.  We created various pages of our sketchbooks - then were instructed to chop them in half, and put one book into the centre of the other.  This meant we had a partly completed sketchbook, 7" c3.5".  We then worked into them again.  We had a great day.

Stitch drawing of goggles with unthreaded sewing machine

Fold out page - Collage swimmer, cut-out swimmer

Cutout swimmer

Line drawing of swimmer.  Lovely high elbow!

Goggles drawn large, with fluid medium (ink)

With stitched line

Reverse of page

Image of pool with stitched name of pool. 

Serendipitious swimmer.  Ink from other side has seeped through newsprint.
So the straps of the goggles have become the swimmer.

Line drawing of goggles, plus watery ink drawing of lane ropes

Fullwell Cross swimming pool collage with lane ropes

The windows at the pool.

Large scale goggles