ABCD: Tracks
I missed last week’s meeting due to a clash of dates, but Jane has sent me some photos and captions. Thank you Jane!
Invitation to a first performance
This is a sonnet sequence by a very fine poet. It will be performed in full as a half-hour play.
Oaks for remembrance
Last October we planted two young oak trees in memory of my lovely aunt who died a year ago today. Twelve family members were there, including two of her great-great nephews.
The trees worried me by coming into leaf later than most of the oaks nearby, but now they are looking healthy and happy.
“An Emergency Room for the Mind”
The surprising history of Bethnal Green Library.
At his bookstore in Amman, Hamzeh AlMaaytah administers life-affirming literature.
And there is a mobile bookshop in Baghdad.
Dove Summer Courses 2017
This year we are running two studio-based courses and one mainly outdoor-based course: details as follows:
Landscape into Etching
July 18, 19, 20
Tutor: Jenny Graham
Fee: £175
Times: 10 – 4
Further details to be announced: briefly, this course is a marriage between getting out in the landscape to draw, and coming back into the studio to make prints, so it is designed for both painters and printmakers, or people wanting to develop either of those and the links between them. Suitable for all levels of ability.
Mokuhanga – Japanese Water-based Woodcut and Monoprint
August 15, 16, 17
Tutor: Robin Frood
Fee: £175
Times: 10 – 4
Further details to be announced; briefly, you will learn a technique that uses the free flowing water-based inks of Mokuhanga to create work that either has structure and can be repeated, using woodcut, or the one-off approach of monoprint, or a…
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ABCD “Repetition”
We gathered at the Dove last Saturday in warm sunshine. Some of us had visited BABE – the biennial Bristol Artists Book Event. My finds included a large and jolly picture book with a blackly humorous message (from OttoGraphic), a lovely little hand-painted floppy zigzag from Andrew Law, and some simply beautiful, but hard-to photograph, books from Pauline Lamont-Fisher and Julie Johnstone.
I had finished two more books on this year’s themes – Backwards and Winged. The former opens into a series of little rooms, each of which contains a mirror-poem. The latter is made of cardboard from the recycling box, painted with home-made indigo paint, with added collage and words. The central raven image is a separate revolving piece.
Jane’s take on this month’s theme, Repetition, is a set of boxes with part of a Peruvian-inspired design on each face. When finished, they will be able to be assembled in endless variations on a repetitive theme. The soft colours are remarkably zingy.
Jane is part of an Oxford University project, Redesigning the Mediaeval Book. She has been to the Bodleiean Library for a day of close encounters with a range of mediaeval books, large and small, sacred and secular. We look forward to seeing the book that she will make. There will be an exhibition in December of selected books by the participants.
Judy showed a zig-zag of Rhenalon prints in a box, and some interesting calligraphic experiments with ink on selectively dampened paper.
Carol counts butterflies for the Avon Wildlife Trust. For “Winged” she brought a box of marbled paper butterflies, each on a tiny hand-made spring. They tremble in the slightest movement of air. One of her books on “Repetition” also makes use of movement. Its single page is cut into horizontal slits that spread out when the book is opened. The other is a zigzag of drawn twigs.
Pauline’s “Winged” is a hanging book, and her “Repetition” can be opened either side to reveal repeated folds. The cover is printed with a lino-cut title.
Karen has made a little book about repeater pocket-watches. It has its own velvet pocket.
Clare has made a slip-case for the book she showed last month, and has started on “Repetition” a wavy book of short poems inspired by her many visits to the sea. Photos next time, I hope.
Bron showed us a sample-book she has recently acquired, of Sandersons 1950s designs of wallpaper and fabric. Wonderful! Below: Dandelion Clocks, a classic design by Fiona Howard. And, of course, an instance of repetition.
Judith was recently in Singapore, where she was given a Coptic-sewn notebook and a length of printed cloth cleverly folded and transformed with a couple of stitches into a book. Another instance of repetition.
In the afternoon we went for a walk over some of the land – part of “Butleigh East Field” where in mediaeval times each family had a strip of land to cultivate – that is the subject of this year’s “Amazing Space” exhibition during Somerset Art Weeks.
White Field was covered in cowslips.
Excavations by badgers show that the soil is actually white. It is tufa, a porous calcareous rock, in this case quite soft and crumbly.
Many fruiting trees were in flower – here are a crab-apple and a quince.
Below: Wych-elm flowers, a Speckled Wood butterfly and one of the local dryads.
Next month the theme will be “Tracks”.
April Dove-droppings
butterflies are on my mind
the pages rise to meet you
they do not strike on demand
back to the sea
torn edges and indigo
speckled wood
trees made of date-stamps
bright green parrot feathers
run by Mormons apparently
found poem: in the time
Source: found poem: in the time
