Tertal - Bare Bones Part 1

As an artist, I find looking at other people's sketch books and working notes at time more interesting to look at than the final piece, which can look too refined and polished. It is fascinating to see how the ideas swirl around, the roads not necessarily taken by the person. Do you see something in an image that is the hook, but when you come to work on it. It defies you?

You reorder and re-do the drawing. You stop put it to one side and start again. Repetition in drawing an image has worked for me. Looking and changing certain aspects of the image. Taking it as far as it will go and then starting again, maybe using a different technique, either a charcoal mix media or a lot of pen and ink. You don't see much ink being used in pictures now. I used to use a lot of dipped nibs into 'proper' ink pots; they sit down in blue art tool box, buried at the bottom, properly dried and dusted. Waiting, waiting.....

Black ink was to give me a solid black line (which I thought) would straighten the image overall. Possibly I was too scared to let the image sit on its own without support. Something that comes from a personality trait and has taken a long time to shake off.

One of the things in this blog is to look at my work and I have started on a piece. This is meant to be one of the pieces for the Library of Metaphors. The starting point was taking one of the photos I have of a landscape taken near to Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. Silbury Hill is a man made hill, situated near to other prehistory monuments as the West Kennett Long Barrow and Avebury Stone circle. I had stopped to have a look at the 'hill', which you can not climb up any more, due to erosion by the walkers.

At that point I was fascinated by the interlinking of branches in a chain. A dance across the page, from side to side. There was an idea to have a series to link each image from one picture to another. This idea for these images never really took off. Perhaps it was where I was or the photos were buried in box somewhere. I have to retrieve them from the garden shed used for storage as I did not want any small creatures deciding to eat them or use them for making nests; as one was trying to do some letters I still had in the same place.

I took a page from an old copy of The Winter's Tale. I had kept saving this book for nearly 14 years waiting for the right time to use it. I felt that if I didn't do something with it, then nothing was going to happen, I had already used one book previous on other drawings as frames and texture within the image. I decide to paste the page straight into the image, as a reference back to my series of Dreams of Deucalion. These 26 images were based on a physical walk through a landscape and the alphabet. Yet they were framed within a frame, all the same size, same mount and same image area.

The page was to form one of the two central columns of the bush. This was why it was positioned on the left hand side (as you view the image) on the image. I will normally lay my images out using the paper sizes of the SRA or B sizes as they have been based on the Fibonacci numbers sequence. Then cutting both the verticals and horizontal into quarters and thirds. This gives me a framework to position pieces within my image, notice the green foreground and how that lies in below the line. If something needs to be changed then it should lie within the framework, only when I want to break the boundaries of a frame to emphasise an idea.

Yet this picture has a broken page on it a frame within a frame. That turn of phase, 'a broken page', is part of a duality that often features in my work. Perhaps 'torn' would be better word to describe the glued text page, but I like broken better as it signifies something lost or smashed. Can a page be broken from a book; you can break the spine of the book. It can link back to this title of Bare Bones as you might find broken bones in a burial site, but Silbury Hill was not a burial site.