More productively, when I started back at Sheffield Hallam in the studio, I found myself making 3d work again. I wasn’t intending to go back to 3d, but the opportunity to work in this way is too tempting for me to resist. It was instinctive. Having the space, not needing to worry if you make a mess of the wall, the experience of just being in a large group studio, somehow brings out the urge in me to work this way. It’s been distracting too, lots of people around, and the academic demands of the course; also having to spend more time on the computer setting up a webspace and blogging. But I think this has been a chance to be more visible too, which I ususally always resist. So there is now a blog specific to my Hallam studio work called Related Spaces, at http://majas-relatedspaces.blogspot.com/, and the website I’ve made of my course work is at http://majaartpages.wordpress.com. I’m making more new work at the moment in boxes, and itching to draw large scale and paint from them. I’ve also been getting ready to do more casting work… lots to juggle.
The shortest exhibition in town!
Alongside my paintings, I spent the whole summer making 6 large etchings for an exhibition due to go up in Derby Cathedral cafe in October until December. After Wirksworth festival, I started back on my degree course at Sheffield Hallam University. The first week of the new course I spent every day in the printroom, printing up these plates so they’d be framed and ready for exhibition. The frames made the work very heavy, but I didn’t think it would be a problem to hang them. Sadly… disastrously - it was. The hanging system wouldn’t take the weight. We hung them one day, and I took them down a day or so later. They have never been shown. I tried to find a gallery but no replies, and not enough time to follow up properly. It is one of the learning curve type failures that you have to put down to experience, but it floored me for weeks. I think I need to make a concerted effort to find a place and an interesting way, to show them… then it will not have all been totally in vain.
All the paintings ended up being shown at Wirksworth Festival, early September 2011. I ended up with a great little empty workshop as a venue all to myself. I thought it was too big, but managed to fill it upstairs and down. I sold some etchings and one painting - the one of the old man, John Butler - which I was delighted about. My workshop at home is still full of all these paintings though. It’s one of the things that stops me working, filling the world with STUFF that nobody really wants. I need someone to persuade people that they want some of it, or I will end up like those people that can’t find their way out of their houses, it’s so full of STUFF…
This is the other painting I still like that came out of the summer. It started off as a landscape. I turned it round and doodle it into a tree. Not happy, it became a face. Then the face changed and it grew out of multi colours into this one - it appeared, as if it was somehow there all the time. Nice feeling.
At this point, I have started to paint more intensively, as I signed up for Wirksworth Festival, and I proposed some painted heads. I set up a blog about my process of learning to paint, at http://majapaint.blogspot.com/, so most of my painted work is on there, and I am going to try not to repeat myself too much here. Just to say that this red painting is the thing to have come out of that year’s worth of painting that I am the most interested and excited about. The two drawings I have here were ‘discovered’ out of the the graphite, which I laid on all over the paper, and then rubbed back into with the eraser. Same with the painting, I discovered the face in the red paint. And I also tried to work in the same way on my large figure etchings, to follow….
Also during this mad month of June, I had the great good fortune to be introduced to a lovely man I’ve seen around town for a while. He looks like an old testament prophet, but kind faced, and cycles and spends a lot of time in the church, praying or meditating. I mentioned to someone that I’d always wished I could draw him, and the next day, he phoned me! So he came to sit for me a few times. During the course of these sittings we made friends, and discovered that we have some interesting things ‘in common’. These are my best pictures of him. The painting sold at Wirksworth festival and I sadly haven’t been able to show it to him.
June is always a very busy month, straight after the Open Studio, I start welldressing, designing, planning and then making. This year’s theme was the Sower. I had a friend from France staying for the month, so I was speaking French a lot, and she was helping the team on the welldressing. On top of the usual June activities, and the run-up to carnival, I was working weekly as a National Trust volunteer learning chopping out and repointing with lime mortar, I was starting work on a series of large etchings in Derby, and we had lots of other visitors. How did it all get done?
This is what happened to those paintings, they became the basis for these colour etchings. They were popular at my open studio in May. Colour printing is definitely the way to go for etchings, for me; it’s more exciting than single colour or b/w. It just needs plenty of space and patience to get the ink mixes right, as they have to be of exactly the right ‘viscosity’ in relation to each other in order to show up.
But I enjoyed myself so much painting this head. And I had more fun playing with the colours of this one in Photoshop. There were two more clear stages in the transformation of this painting, and I just couldn’t manage to stop and photograph it, I was so involved. I really don’t want to make that mistake again though - I love scrolling through the different versions of the image afterwards, finding out what I’ve done, without realising it. With oil particularly, everything can change. I’m loving the range and flexibility that these paints give you.
