Time-based Plumbago 1

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

I'm following a single flower-head in the garden (please excuse the bad photos). More to come ... .

Alladin and Carnival 2014 show at 101 Art Gallery

I

Some of my work will be in 101 Art Gallery's Carnival 2014 show from February 20 to March 13.

The main show at the gallery is 45 works by M. P. Alladin (1919 -- 1980), paintings and drawings from the 1940s that were in his studio when he died. I caught a glimpse of them last week and they are just beautiful, a rare experience. I hope the National Museum buys a good few so that the people of Trinidad and Tobago can enjoy them in perpetuity. Not to be missed. A print-on-demand book would be great too!

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Newsletter No. 4 will be going out this week. If you are not already a subscriber you can sign up here.

Improved screen drying box

Referring to the post Drying an emulsion-coated screen, the box described there worked well except for one thing: the front flaps need to be taped closed after the screen is put inside, before the box is covered with heavy cloth. The trouble is, the tape didn't stick to the cardboard for long. A good deal of new tape was needed each time. So I've modified the box, as follows:

Photo 1: Sticky Back Velcro

®

I cut some small tabs of canvas and glued them to the box with white glue and let it dry overnight. Then I cut a strip of self-adhesive Velcro (Photo 1) and applied one side to the canvas tab and the other side to the corresponding position on the box when the flap is closed. Photo 2 shows the tabs folded back, with one half of the Velcro adhered. Photo 3 shows the tabs closed. They secure the front flaps neatly and quickly. They don't exclude all light however so the front of the box still needs to be covered with a heavy dark cloth.

Photo 2: Tabs folded back showing Velcro strips in place

Photo 3: Showing how the tabs close the front flaps

Two journal pages

Continuing the "news" journal with photos clipped from the newspaper  --

January 2014, Intractable

January 2014, Pre-Carnival

This (20-page) journal is now full except for the last page. I haven't decided yet whether to continue in a new one, may well do so, in which case I would make up the book first. Other than that I'm clearing my studio, throwing some things out and shifting things around in preparation for a lot of work in the coming months.

Bog Cotton

A commissioned painting. Bog Cotton is a sedge which grows in marshy places in northern temperate climates -- the sort of place where I grew up, making this painting an extra-special undertaking.

Robert Adams on art and words

 

Have just watched the Robert Adams video above and found loads in it to share. I love his "ordinary" photographs, not so much the ones of deforested devastation (but I'm not a photographer). Among other things, what he says about writing about art resonates with today's art scene, where it often seems that artists' statements are as important as the art:

"You get to the point where you find something that's your own ... and if you don't find the audience for it you're going to burst. No publisher wants to touch just pictures. Publishers ... they've gotta have words. People ... it's something very primal. Most people are terrified in front of visual things ... they want to talk. Say something! Just say anything to let the air out. You can't talk about it [your own work?] -- if you could talk about it that's what you'd do. Robert Frost ... somebody came up to him and said, tell me what you said in this poem. He said, you want me to say it worse? [LOL] Hopper was known to spend days to come up with a tiny paragraph because it has such a potential for screwing things up. Every once in a while somebody will help. And that's what John Szarkowski did, he wrote the introduction to 'The New West'. I'm so grateful, even now, all these years later, that he did it. "

Also found the full text of an interview with Art21 which begins as follows:

ART21: What would you say making art is about, for you?
ADAMS: Recently I saw someone—I can’t remember who it was—who said that the essence of the creative act is determining what the question is. Once you have the question, then it’s all pretty much in the can. I believe if your list of questions is long, that shows you’re on top of this.

The link for the rest is
http://www.art21.org/texts/robert-adams/interview-robert-adams-photography-life-and-beauty 

On another note, here's a link to Part 1 of an excellent tutorial on Airbrushing, beginning with what kind of equipment to buy:  http://syntheticskystudios.blogspot.com/2014/01/airbrushing-101.html
It's something I'd like to do but doubt I'd take it on at this stage, I have enough on my hands with printmaking and painting issues to sort out.

A journal page

A page from a type of small journal I've been keeping recently (the page is half letter-size). I did it in 2012 for a few days when doing a short online workshop in Journaling and afterwards put it aside. Looking back at last year's pages, there were ideas which I didn't realize at the time. Now I can see a way of using it that will fit in with the other things I do. The idea is to clip things from the daily paper and make random notes while at the same time thinking about design. It can be a multi-purpose occasional armchair activity in the evenings to keep aware of what's going on in the world. 

Mangoes and stats

Mangoes, acrylic on canvas, (c) Mary Adam

Mangoes was painted between May and September this year. 

 

End of year figures 2013

No proper statistics  since I didn't do an end of year post this time last year and am no longer using a hit counter except for Blogger's own minimal Stats.

Subscribers, email and RSS:  115 (about the same as 2011) (from Feedburner)
Posts in 2013:  35, up from 16 in 2012 (34 in 2011).
Page views -- the total is now 99,205 and is averaging about 2400 2200 page views/month.

ASTT Art Market 2013

The ASTT Art Market was a great success. It’s the second art market I’ve done, the first was last Christmas at a different venue. I’ve gained experience from it and have made notes of things to do for the next one. One of the things I will do is: take less stuff! I had 35 pieces, enough for a solo show in a small gallery and I had left all the bigger pieces at home. On the wall, the work was grouped into small oil paintings, linocuts and silkscreens, miniatures, and small acrylic paintings.

Traffic was steady all day. There were old friends and new ones. It was great for networking with fellow-artists. My mailing list has expanded and I sold a few pieces.

One odd thing happened. One of the visitors was a friend who had bought one of my pieces in 2004, which was before I started on the degree. I had thought that my work hadn’t changed all that much. In subjects it’s pretty much the same as before (Plumbago and Impatiens still appear frequently). The degree opened me up to more media and new approaches and that is where the main changes have taken place. But this friend said they didn’t recognise my work at all, that “this is someone I don’t know”. I was taken aback at first. It made me think. My palette has changed in that I haven’t used earth colours (umber and ochre) for a while now. I’ve been getting a good range and purer colour out of fewer pigments. This wasn’t something required by the degree, it just evolved from a decision I made to tackle colour in a systematic way.

I’ve heard artists who are more advanced than me say that collectors and galleries don’t like you to change. They want you to have and keep a signature style -- like a shrub that grows to a certain height and stays there. I can understand that. But . . . maybe my shrub hasn’t reached where it’s supposed to be yet, or something like that. I’ve also found that I make very different work in printmaking and painting, and it's different again in collage. For now I’m happy to observe and reflect on what happens and keep on growing for a while yet. 

Plumbago paintings pre-2006

Plumbago, 2011 onwards (four paintings plus silkscreen on right, collage second from right)

Drying an emulsion-coated screen

After coating a screen with light-sensitive emulsion, the next thing is to let it dry which can take a few hours or overnight. The place where it dries needs to be pitch dark. Any pinpoint of light getting in will send all the timings off and will make the screen much harder to wash out after exposure. My solution is a cardboard box with the chinks well sealed off. I put my head into the box and hold it towards the light to ensure I've got all the chinks. However you can't seal the front in this way, so after closing the flaps with tape, I put a heavy dark cloth over the box, making sure the front is well covered.

Another thing is that the screen should be dried with the screen side down. Therefore it needs to be raised so that the wet emulsion doesn't touch the floor of the box. You could put some blocks at the sides, but that's unsatisfactory because they can be pushed out of place as you are putting the screen in. So I add "risers" made out of cardboard and glued to the box, as shown in the photo below. It's rough and ready method but very effective.

A box for drying screens with "risers" on two sides

Christmas shows

Left to right: White, Maracas Bay, Peppers (c) Mary Adam

• Some of my work including those shown above will be at 101 Art Gallery @ Holder's Studio this Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th December,  10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

 

• I will have a table at the Art Market at the Art Society in Federation Park, Saturday December 21st, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with small paintings, linocuts and silkscreens. Hope to see you there.

James Kalm's video reviews

James Kalm is an artist who does video walk-through reviews of New York shows. Here are a few:


Raoul de Keyser at David Zwirner -- http://youtu.be/GH1sKh4vtQw

Agnes Martin, the 80s and the Grey Painitngs at Pace -- http://youtu.be/kPHiRu5FRVo

The 2013 Armory Show --  http://youtu.be/RCNW96PfRaQ

 

Philosophy course

Just finished the last quiz in the Introduction to Philosophy course I've been doing, and watched the last lecture earlier today. There's an optional essay as well. I learned a lot from it, including what philosophy is, which (it turns out) is not quite what I had thought. I'm glad I did it, wish I'd done something along those lines years ago. It's like necessary orientation in any field of study. I will take some time to assimilate it. Meanwhile, I've signed up for another Coursera/University of Edinburgh course next year in the Philosophy of Science which was by far the most interesting section for me and I'd like to follow it up (aesthetics was not covered).

I think we had the same professor with steam punk goggles as A.J. Jacobs in the article linked below (from the New York Times, 21/4/13), an opinion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). My previous experience of online learning in my art degree resembled his in many ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?hp&_r=0

A new mother

This is nice ...

http://video.pbs.org/video/2165688049/


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Newsletter

Newsletter #3 went out yesterday. If you are subscribed and you haven't received it, it may have gone into your spam folder or the "Promotions" tab in gmail. Feedback welcome.

Notes on a small caterpillar

Notes about the frangipani flower
and the caterpillar (c) Mary Adam

On an afternoon a few months ago, I brought a sprig of frangipani inside to look at it more closely. I used a loupe placed over it which gave me approx 3-4X magnification. That's when I saw a little caterpillar which had been carried in on the stem of the flower. It was no more than 1 cm long. It was walking along the stem towards the flower. I looked at it through the loupe -- it was still just a little caterpillar except the loupe made it bigger and easier to see. Suddenly the stem shook slightly. The little caterpillar drew back in alarm, startled, just as I might jump at an unexpected sound. There was something extraordinary about that movement. It could have been any animal. In some ways it was uncannily like a human reaction. Maybe it was the fact of witnessing it through the loupe that made it so vivid and human-like. Just a little 1 cm caterpillar. A while later it munched through the yellow pollen of the frangipani flower and after that I put it back in the garden. 

I have tried to estimate the approximate relative sizes of a small caterpillar and a human being. I can't guarantee the following calculation is correct as maths is not my best subject so please let me know if there's a mistake:

Calculation

Caterpillar weighs  0.3 gm

Human being weighs 60 kg = 60,000 gm

60,000 divided by 0.3 = 200,000

Therefore a human being is about 200,000 times bigger than a caterpillar.

What would be 200,000 times the size of a human being?

60 Kg x 200,000

= 12,000,000 Kg -- twelve million Kg = 12,000 tons -- a large liner?

(10,000 tons = 10 million kg)

Therefore, 1 ton = 1000 kg

A ton is 2000 lbs (1000 kg).

A car weighs a ton, also an elephant.

12000 tons = 12000 cars.

Or 12000 elephants.

It's difficult to imagine that size difference.

From http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Caterpillar 

Caterpillars have about 4,000 muscles (the human being has only 629). They move through contraction of the muscles in the rear segments, pushing the blood forward into the front segments elongating the torso. The average caterpillar has 248 muscles in the head segment alone.
Caterpillars do not have good vision. They have a series of six tiny eyelets or 'stemmata' on each side of the lower portion of their head. These can probably form well focused, but poorly resolved images (Scoble 1995). They move their heads from side to side probably as a means of judging distance of objects, particularly plants. They rely on their short antennae to help them locate food.
Some caterpillars are able to detect vibrations, usually at a highly specific frequency. Caterpillars of the common hook-tip moth, Drepana arcuata (Drepanoidea), produce sounds to defend their silk nests from members of their own species, by scraping against the leaf in a ritualized acoustic duel (Yack et al. 2001). They detect the vibrations conducted by the plant and not air-borne sounds. (New World Encyclopedia)

I should have mentioned that the Frangipani is the host plant for the Frangipani Horn Moth. I don't think the small caterpillar was one of those because the Horn Moth caterpillars are orange and black with yellow stripes and are very fierce looking. I have a photo somewhere...

Caterpillar of Pseudosphinx tetrio, the Frangipani Hornworm Moth,
my not-very-good photo 

There are better photos of both caterpillar and moth in the Wikipedia article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudosphinx_tetrio

Incidentals

White, acrylic on deep-edge canvas, 10 x 8" (c) Mary Adam

One of my paintings has received an award in an international online art exhibition. "White", a still life (above), received a "Special Recognition" award in the Light Space & Time Open Exhibition November 2013 in the "Painting and Other" category. I didn't expect it and am thrilled.

The ASTT Art Market 2013

The Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago is hosting an art market on Saturday 21 December, 2013 at their headquarters in Federation Park. This is the first time they're doing it. I will have a space (a table) and will have small paintings, linocuts and silkscreens on offer. It should be a pleasant affair amid all the pre-Christmas hustle and bustle so do please drop in.

Click to enlarge

Newsletter #3

My next newsletter will be going out within the next two weeks. If you are not already a subscriber and would like to be, please click here.

Introduction to Philosophy

A free 7-week course by the University of Edinburgh via Coursera. It's something of an eye-opener, not what I expected. So far am glad I signed up. It has changed my thinking in some ways. More when it finishes (it's just over half-way through).