Emblem 123

Information and materials

Methods/Materials:

Acrylic paint on card stock. One page of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘American Scholar’ that includes a Emerson’s citing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was photocopied onto off-white card stock. Black acrylic paint was applied onto the photocopy in a manner similar reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Asheville Citizen). The cardstock was then affixed to the page using double-sided tape.

Emblem 122

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No extra information.

Emblem 121

Information and materials

Purbeck Marble

(a marble in name only)

23 1/2 ct. gold leaf

& the right kind of light.

 

Emblem 120

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Button and threads

Title: 'Button Down'

Emblem 119

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Printed by Francis McKee

Photography by Francis McKee

Taken in June 2011 at Glasgow City Chambers

Emblem 118

Information and materials

Materials used: edding 55pen; laptop (MacBook pro); Venice and environs; memories of the pigmentation on my father’s hands; brains

(This Emblem is on two pages - the transcription beneath is of the second page)

7

Funny thing, humour.

In Sterne, we study it.
To find out why it was funny once.
The half-life of jokes.

3

The dictionary’s identity parade

of suspect suspects.

10

(For example, ‘fool’.
 Very deceptive.) 

8

Funny word, ‘funny’.

Pretty peculiar.
Peculiar word, ‘pretty’. Very.

9

My father’s hands before he died.
Cartographic. Boundaries. Edges.
Uncertain of the destination,
or what was sea
and which was land.
Or what the pigment meant.
He was the map.
And the map knew where it was going.            

Emblem 117

Information and materials

I have used a ‘wet on wet’ process, with intense liquid watercolour on 638 gsm Saunders Waterford.

The ink travels in a way that is controlled but random, wandering, meandering, diverting, returning – following but not following the direction of travel. 

For me, the marble page is already a journey, unpredictable, open and fluid. 

 

Emblem 116

Information and materials

This motley emblem has been marbled by hand in ways very similar to those used in Sterne's time. Gouache colours were floated on a tray containing prepared carragheen, a viscous liquid which supports the paints as they are thrown upon it. Wanting the pattern to be an integral part of the paper and not purely a tip-in, particular care was taken when transferring the image from the liquid size onto the paper. With just a single page there was no room for error & it was a relief to create what had been visualised, the marbled page perfectly fitted the printed frame. This particular marbled design is based upon a specific pattern of the later C18th known as 'Antique Spot'. Indeed it is an emblem of my work.

Emblem 115

Information and materials

Chinese ink and rice paper with an ancient Japanese technique called Suminagashi, which we can find a page in the collections of 36 Heian poets called “Hongannji-bon Sanjurokunin-kashu”. According to the reliable scholar the page contains Suminagashi is from circa 1,100. The technique is possibly the oldest surviving marbling. 

Upon returning to Tokyo from New York, that was 50 years ago, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono’s first husband, told me that George Maciunas was the guy who made paintings with floating oil paints on a water filled bath tub and by spreading a canvass on the tub, which enabled George to create a painting very quick and easily.

Suminagashi is similar but not exactly the same. However, both Suminagashi and Maciunas’s instant paintings are based on the spirit of DADA, complete reliance upon the aleatory.

 

Emblem 114

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Rubber stamp

Emblem 113

Information and materials

-       Pencil

-       Acrylic paint

-       2 dreams

Emblem 112

Information and materials


False Memory

Watercolour / customised foil sticker.

 

Emblem 111

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One clay marble

Emblem 110

Information and materials

Indian Ink

only

and a chance

slap!!

ALL IS ACCIDENT!

 

Emblem 109

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Voice, sound spectrograph and digital printer. The words ‘’Alas Poor Yorick’’ were transformed into this picture using a computer. Low frequencies are to the left, high to the right. Time is top to bottom. Intensity is blue-red-white. 

On close inspection you will notice the emphasis of the ‘SSSS’ from Alas, in the top event; the ‘P’ from poor, in the middle; and the broadband ‘K’ as a separate event from ‘Yorick’.

 

Emblem 108

Information and materials

pen & ink & watercolour


 

Emblem 107

Information and materials

Staedtler pigment liner 2.0

Quotation from King Lear IV.VI.55

This quotation guides my work as a lifelong learning practitioner working across the life course using philosophy and literature.

Emblem 106

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DEATH’S HEAD  HAWKMOTH

Acherontia atropos

(Linnaeus, 1758)

Photographed in the etymology room of Canna House by **** on the afternoon of 9/6/2011.

Canna House is on the Isle of Canna in the Scottish Inner Hebrides and is the home of John Lorne Campbell’s collection of Lepidoptera.

The Death’s Head Hawkmoth is very scarce in Scotland with only one or two sightings each year.

 

Emblem 105

Information and materials

Pen and blue-black ink

Pen and violet ink

Pen and royal blue ink

Pen and brown ink

Four pens, four inks –

My idea of modern alternative to marbling.

 

Emblem 104

Information and materials

Pen and Ink


 

Emblem 103

 Information and materials

Colour Xerox of the well-known painting Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman (1865), by William Powell Frith. Green, blue, orange, yellow and pink markers to ‘marble’ the painting, as it were.  The painting is incomplete here, for certain, as it would not have fit, in its entirety, in page 169, as it is.

Emblem 102

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 Gestural composition: ink and Letraset

Emblem 101

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Being a composer who uses traditional notation in my works, I decided to pick out the ‘blobs’ on the original plate that resembled most closely the size of note heads.

This gave me a rising pattern of dots, which I coloured in s gradually rising lightening colour ‘scale’. 

The dark passages on the original I intimated in order to give a slight feeling of depth.

I was recently in Paris, where I bought my materials. I used Faber-Castell colour pencils and Stabilo fineliners.

Emblem 100

Information and materials

‘as plainly as if every point of it was made up of sunbeams’

-       Tristram Shandy. Ch.20.

This pattern known as ‘TIGERS EYE’ is one of my favourites, partly because it is a very variable pattern to create & so more rewarding when it finally works!

It dates from the early nineteenth century. There are various old recipes for it some involving dried blood or creolin! I used potash with the paint to get this effect.

Pattern 2 (not on display)

This is an old historic pattern known as ‘stormont’, popular during the time Tristram Shandy was written.

The addition of oil to the water based paints breaks up the pattern to create a lacey effect.

 

Emblem 99

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The plot outline of my novel drawn with ashes left over from the draft I threw in the fire.

 

Emblem 98

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Bait Shed

Square-corrugated sheeting

they use for industrial estates

has been cut into a shed that stands out

like a sawn up caravan

among wooden improvisations.

This dwelling frames no view.

How you get into its dark matters:

a driftwood arbour,

with inflatable life-jackets

like large wine-skins

hung from stripped branches,

leads to a Romanesque

buffalo skull-arch over a door

horned with driftwood tusks.

The outside is dangerous with silence.

There are many people in there

and no one. Behind the shed

the shale cliff rises like a wave.

Bait Shed is part of a new collection of poems about the North Yorkshire coast between Filey Brigg in the South and Skinningrove in the North.  The poems were commissioned by Art Connections as part of their Extending Practice Celebrating Place series of commissions.  Bait Shed is part 3 of a three poem sequence of poems set at Port Mulgrave.

Emblem 97

Information and materials

Every one of Sterne’s marbled pages is different and unique, and yet they are all the same – a bit like days in our lives. This concept reminded me of the ‘find it’ game: a see-through plastic tube of about the size of a packet of Pringles. It does not open, and inside are thousands of little plastic bits like larger ‘hundreds & thousands’, mixed with a few bigger items. You have to turn and shake the tube to half-reveal the items and guess what they are, but you can never find all the ones that are supposed to be in there, as some are permanently buried. So, every time you shake & turn it looks different and cannot be reproduced in exactly the same way – and yet it is all the same….

I took a blurred close-up photo of a section of the game and added the ‘chrome’ photoshop filter. This turned it into a (sadly monochrome) marbled page. Like Sterne’s marbled pages it is double-sided.

Emblem 96

Information and materials

This b+w photo is an early test print for the photographic piece ‘Concrete Autumn (Phantom Tree)’ 2005.

It shows a ghostly image of a concrete tree made as 1 of 4 trees for a garden by Robert Mallet Stevens in 1925.  The concrete trees were made by the sculptors Jan and Joel Martel.

The photo piece was the first work that introduced the tree into my practice.  Since 2005 almost every work has made reference to the component shapes and forms of the original concrete tree.

Emblem 95

Information and material

My inspiration: marbles of Italy.

Marble is a ‘living stone’, a bit like alabaster.  It can be very dramatic in its expressiveness, always pleasing to the eye, mysterious.  It can be more noble, grander than what it is used for, in architecture or sculpture.  Marble quarries are mysterious places, where uniquely beautiful stone silently gives in to human lust, greed, desire, need.

Ideally, this marbled page should be white, as marble can be in its purest state.

For my image I used watercolours, water soluble pencils and gouache.  I then varnished it, as polished marble reveals its beauty to the full.

Emblem 94

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When I began to write I was prolix. One day the filmmaker, Bill Douglas, advised me to cut an entire scene. If you write something and take it out, he said, readers will know it (even if they haven’t read it) because your remaining words will be freighted with a sense of what you’ve cut; they’ll imply it. He was right, and I’ve followed his counsel ever since. That’s why I’ve drawn an iceberg. The tip above the surface suggests the greater bulk hidden below. That’s my emblem, at least of my practice when I write. I drew in pencil and coloured in with crayon. The fish in my first (draft) attempt doesn’t read. The fish in the finished one is better. I signed using the pen (a Mont Blanc) I write with.

Emblem 93

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This is a wood engraving.

Everything else is clear…

Emblem 92

 Information and materials

* (Footnote)

Too late (perhaps) for me to warn you

of these poems being irreverent or obscure,

but if the latter is true, do please refer

to the plentiful notes where you’ll find

(I can assure you) nothing

but facts (facts) and more facts.

There are also the pictures to compensate

or distract, and you have not (as yet)

committed yourself (financially at least)

to the inevitable sequel coming into view

from the aeroplane window (scratched

with stars): the ice floes’ marbled page

and tomorrow (fingers crossed)

from the hi-rise conference hotel, asterisks

waving in the clear Hawaiian sky. 

Emblem 91

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French sepia ink & pen

Marble page – marble mask

 

Emblem 90

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The only function of an envelope interior is to hide the contents of the envelope.

The mundane and ephemeral quality of these detailed patterns which are usually just thrown out without being noticed has interested me for more than 16 years now.  The highlights of my Envelope Interior Collection has been the Fast Disappearing Air Mail Envelope.  The patterning is seen both inside the envelope and through the envelope’s translucent lightweight paper.  Airmail envelopes always suggest the outside world.  Airmail envelopes always suggest the romance of the Far-Away.

This Interior, from the American Chamber of Commerce in Luxembourg is a prize piece in the collection.  This laser reproduction becomes an emblem of some of the things we are losing.

Emblem 89

Information and materials

Image-making of all kinds is often a result of some kind of pigment in suspension: the marbled page was created by a pattern of resistance by colours while suspended on a meniscus of water.

My work is primarily about the push and pull of tides and I have used watercolours and pigmented inks to create these opposing flows.  In my alternative life as a fish I variously resist or exploit these currents: hence the fish appearing in white gouache.

Emblem 88

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No further information.

Emblem 87

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Detail from a fabric design, 2011

Marker pens. Watercolour

Emblem 86

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No further information.

 

Emblem 85

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"Geometry existed before the Creation"  Plato

Pen and Ink

Pencil

Gouache

Emblem 84

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Paper marbling has taxed and absorbed me for many years, giving me great pleasure in its creation. I work with traditional Western and Oriental materials and techniques and am amazed at the ways in which ‘the truths which are seen beneath its dark veil’ are further developed by designer bookbinders. 

Cream paper is marbled with acrylics using the traditional ‘Stormont’ technique when turpentine is added to the last colour thrown onto the bath to create a speckled effect which pushes the previous colours into veins. 

Stone coloured paper is marbled with casein black, yellow and brown, feathered, then rippled when laying down the paper creating a three-dimensional appearance.

 

Emblem 83

Information and materials

"The Emblem of My Work"

2011

Ink on paper

21 x 15cm

Emblem 82

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The material is the English language; one starting-point being the excerpts garnered in the OED under the entry ‘translation, n.’ (Translation is the EMBLEM, if I must have one, of my poetics.) Other than that: a swap from Basil Bunting floated into my mind; there are obvious loans (o, all right, thefts) from other versions of Horace, Odes III. XXX – specifically by the Rev.H.P.Houghton, a former chief executive of Royal Doulton named Stuart Lyons, and a surprisingly poor version by Ezra Pound. There are some bad puns, and a couple of borrowings from R.G.M. Nisbet & Niall Rudd’s Commentary on Horace, Odes, Book III. I took a hint from Pushkin’s Russifying of the poem and lifted verbatim a line from Marx’s Capital, Vol.1, sat close by one of his many quotations from Horace.

The rest I just made up. (Ah! Inspiration…’)

The poem is for Gavin Selerie, lector.

 

Emblem 81

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-       red paper

-       black ink

-       blameless llamas



Emblem 80

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Black Ink

Emblem 79

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‘The game of common etymology makes of writing a cutting movement, a tear, a crisis…

The proper tool for writing was also proper to incising: the stylet… This incisive reminder still invokes a cutting operation, if not a butchery: a kind of violence…’

Maurice Blanchot (1907 - 2003)

 

Emblem 78

Information and materials

Photography.

Capturing a turning page of a library book, this photograph reveals two half pages opposing each other.

The right hand side, glances at a female portrait, her full identity is cut away.

The left-hand page interests me more.

This is my emblem – the ‘ghost-like’ mirror imprint.

Revealed by chance, under pressure, this reverse image draws the viewer in question, whilst offering up oblique clues to the woman’s identity, and the historical significance of her life.

Printed on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.

 

Emblem 77

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Title: ‘Interior. Uncertain’

text and digital drawing

5^th August 2011

Emblem 76

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Coloured pencil on paper.

2011

The drawing is based upon a comic strip by Charles M Shulz. It was taken from “Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life” that I first viewed at Shandy Hall several years ago.

A working title for this drawing is as follows: “Snoopy is a Fictional Character.”

 

Emblem 75

Information and materials

My work as of August 9, 2011

Emblem 74

Information and materials

Scalpel, ruler, cutting mat, craft mount, permanent adhesive, reappropriated magazine cutting, inkjet print, QR CODE GENERATOR via the internet, rapidograph pen with black ink, coloured pencils.

This ‘Emblem’ is constructed as a deliberate connection between past and future works: the goose, the dog and the lesser-spotted flying Turkish goosefish have all appeared in previous works and will be featured in a future digital artwork, to be published in October 2011.

The ‘QR CODE’ in this design takes the form of a tower block, as part of an urban landscape. The towerblock can be scanned, using a mobile device equipped with a ‘QR Reader’. This will lead the viewer to a wider panoramic landscape: 

‘H***’S SCROLL OF FROLICKING ANIMALS’

which can be examined on the same mobile device.