Great day in Vanda's Class

Today we were working with found materials, using some of the work by artists selected in the Jerwood Drawing exhibition as inspiration.  I was also thinking about values, as this is my most recent reading.

My first drawing started life as an old charity shop framed picture of St Paul's Cathedral.  I took the image out of the frame, and used a palette knife to quickly draw my memory of The Gherkin on the reverse of the glass.  Then the glass was reinstated to the frame.

Modern view of Old St Paul's

Next I was inspired by Craig Fisher who juxtaposed message and medium. I cut a stencil of an mirror image spoon and placed it over an Artist Statement and image, so it could not be read as a literary piece.

Obscuring the message

Then I was inspired by a Jerwood drawing on a wooden batten, by Pennie Elfick.  I have created a cryptic crossword for Mrs Konieczny so I drew a section of the crossword on a dovetail section, and another on a wooden batten.  I was quite pleased with these - they were good first pieces, although I could see how they could be refined.  The batten needs to be splintered and broken down one side.   Later in the afternoon, I found other wood offcuts lying around outside the Shedio, which would be good raw materials in case I pluck up the courage to do a drawing and submit it to the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

When drawing a section of a crossword, look at what the letters spell out.
I did not mean it to spell out SNOT!  Which is how it reads to me!

This would be better if there were a splinter missing from the top word,
so it is slightly broken up with a wood coloured section

Daniel Crawshaw's drawing inspired by the sublime linked a longing for remote landscape with the mundane material world.  I took a mundane piece of sandpaper with holes to fit on a sander, cut it to form a mask (with eye holes to view the sublime landscape), and added a handle to make it into lorgnettes.

On the way home I thought about an artist statement to fit the crossword batten.  To me this artwork is about Values.  The juxtaposition of different values.  The rough nature of the wood symbolises manual work, the cryptic crossword symbolises the skills of the intellectual.  Both are essential.  But often one is valued less than the other.  The title should be "Cryptic Cross Wood".  I need to think about scale.  Do I scale up the size of the crossword grid to fit the cutout section?  Do I draw or burn the lettering?  Or do use a pedestal drill to finely pierce holes to 'cross-stitch' the pattern for lettering?  Also rather than drilling right the way through the wood, I would just make small holes and push the yarn in, using the tool I used when I did Touch Tapestry kits as a child.  Hmmm.  Food for Thought.

And just by-the-by, Vanda suggested I needed to set up a website (as it would be expected if I entered the Jerwood Prize and Loughborough University seminar).  

Not a lot to do then!