Failure is always an (entertaining) option

I don’t mind sharing failures as such, except for a lingering worry that they’ll be the last thing I ever post. They’re part of the process; like doing scales, they get the feeling of the materials into your fingers, etc, etc, resilience, you can’t fix what doesn’t exist, and so forth.

There are, however, some failures I persist with in order to remind myself of the boundaries of what I should (or want to) attempt. There are workshops I go to with the primary intention of remembering not to try this at home. Screen printing, for example, and letterpress.

From a Print Gocco workshop at Avid Reader

I love what everyone else does with them, but they don’t work with my style, my patience, my back, my set-up of sinks, my preference for not being entirely filmed with oil-based inks, and so on (weirdly I love lino printing, so everything has its exception).

Inking things, mwahahaha

I always meet great people, learn new textures, observe how people interact with the tools, find techniques to borrow, get out of the house, etc. But mostly, it’s a form of walking the bounds of what I do want to do.

Then there are the failures I pursue because failing is funny, but once I (re)gain some competency it stops being entertaining. This was the origin of the whole cooking experiment on Twitter (thread begins here), which, incidentally, also contains the reason for the bandaid on my hand in the Border Keeper process video.

Signing up for a trial meal kit service in a frantic effort to see whether I can make myself care about cooking again. This could cause hilarity and fire. I will report back.

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) August 16, 2018

Collage is becoming both for me. I admire what actual collage artists do with it. But it doesn’t resonate with me as a process. I get cranky and covered with glue and drop words and think the end result is both too weird and too simple, and yet keeping flipping back to look at it, shake my head, and laugh.

It started with attempting to record collage without any glue. Then I had glue, but couldn’t cut up the paper with the overheard notes on it (and forgot there was a photocopier just there I had just used it).

A line from an amazing conversation overheard at a training session

My resistance to it doesn’t make obvious sense, because I like weird and simple and glue and scissors and words. It’s just that this is the outer edge of my preferred territory, and its good for me to visit it, but there’s a reason I choose not to live here.

I also like limitations, and recombinations, and juxtapositions. I just prefer them to happen before the final piece gets formed, not as the final piece. Or at least, to be cleverly veiled.

How do you do, fellow humans?

For instance, what I want this to be is a story about Fashion Spies who are possibly robots, and also about a kidnapper who starts glueing together a ransom note but is limited by the words available on the few pieces of paper available to him and ends up plunging sideways into an wild conspiracy, sort of Foucault’s Pendulum meets that one science fiction Father Brown story by way of O. Henry.

 

The Bayeux Tapestry Is Not A Collage

Photo pinched from Peter’s blog

Peter M. Ball has been streamlining book production processes and is bringing some chapbooks into the world as part of the process (if you like following processes, see the Brain Jar newsletter).

I’m in the middle of a lot of big projects lately, and occasionally stalling, so I am currently fascinated by how people can get quickly from an Idea to a Thing, especially when they can reduce it to the minimum number of steps.

I was making some notes on this (I’ll post more about these journals in due course!), thinking about the difference between collage as a metaphor for the process of ideas, and the actual practice of collage, which is a lot more immediate but less universal as an analogy.

Conclusion (apparently): The Bayeux tapestry is not a collage.

I meant to do a collage, because I found some clippings in an old notebook, but I was disgruntled and headachey and didn’t have a glue stick and the a/c was too breezy but I didn’t want to move. So I just took all the bits I was going to use and drew them into a collage.

• Photo of a macaw from an unknown magazine. (I used to live on a street with a vet surgery at the bottom of it; the vet had two macaws he’d bring to work with him. Sometimes I’d see them out on the weekend, eating icecream together. The macaws had blue tongues.)
• Hat from a battered Richard Scarry book (possibly, evidence suggests, Busy, Busy Town).
• Thought balloon from a Judy Horacek cartoon — the only place I can find it online is here. Some of you may know Horacek’s work primarily from (Where is the Green Sheep (written by Mem Fox), the sheep in which have been ranked here: All of the Sheep in My Son’s Picture Book Ranked by How Much I Hate Them.

What was learned – Part 5 of my travels with a sketchbook

1. I had an epiphany at a Turner exhibit – the importance of boldness. This was the biggest lesson: to be bold in terms of time, line and materials. I have always tended to pale, tentative sketches. The limitations of time and materials forced me to far less subtlety, and I think that is a good thing. You can get away with a lot more if you do it with confidence and flair. I’m still working on both of these, but I am aware of the difference now.
2. To appreciate markers and coloured pencils. Not always like, but appreciate.
3. The joy of having the book constantly up to date.
4. Paying attention to little scenes. I remember places keenly because of a knitting girl or a moldy pumpkin.
5. People complicate travel sketching. I am conscious of their possible reaction (both to my sketching and to others’ reactions), time constraints, the need to move at a joint pace rather than individual, the vagueness it lends my half of conversations. I need to practice drawing in company and to stop being rritated by conversations which on drawing time.
6. I have become much more comfortable with drawing/sketching from life and have continued this in other sketchbooks since returning.
7. I like having a visual record. It is more legible than handwriting alone, I look back at it more frequently than a written journal, and I think it is more self-contained and interesting than a photo album alone.
8. I feel less self-conscious about inviting people to look at sketchbook than at photo albums. This is partly vanity and partly because I am never convinced people actually want to look at photos (and I have to sit there and explain them).

Next time I will:

1. Take less.
2. Ignore perfection – better at all than never.
3. Draw more.
4. Be bold.
5. Make hi-res scans the first time around (still, better at all than never).

The other parts:

• Part 1: What was lugged.
• Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: What was stuck.
• Part 4: What was organised.
• Part 5: You are here.

And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.

What was organised – Part 4 of my travels with a sketchbook

In the grand tradition of not making up my mind until the last possible moment (as usual, some time after take-off) I browsed through travel journals in newsagencies and online trying to determine an optimum combination of categories – should I include expenditure? an itinerary? what about an address book? How much space should be allotted for each day? How did artists organise their travel sketchbooks, if at all? Were journal, diary and sketchbook incompatible?

I settled on the winning combination on the flight over: The debden notebook would retain its usual structure – infodump with index. I put all postcard addresses in there (indexed under “contacts”). Otherwise, it was used for directions, reminders and a futuristic science fiction story involving cryogenic sleep and prosthetic limbs and lawyers on motorcycles and mafia connections and the rule of law (the true hero) and consisting only of the bits in between the action.

The sketchbook was divided into two sections.

Section one was a planner: each page featured four hand-drawn boxes with the date (a sticker), month and day of the week. In these I jotted down a very minimal account of the day, and only missed the last four or so. For a random example, 17 October – Wednesday reads:

Up 9-ish.
Watched part of the Waltons and Little House (guest starring a very young James Cromwell)
Breakfast @ Free Port (“Good food, legal drinks”): cinnamon scrolls.
To North East to wait for Martha to get off work.
Lunch at Bova’s.
Back to Martha’s to drop off a sub for Nick.
Through Eyrie to Presque Isle.
Drove around Presque Isle, monument, lighthouses.
Stopped at visitor centre.
Back to Martha’s for pie. Spoke to C.O. on phone.
Back to farm.
Downloaded photos. Kathy & Mommy organised for me to go to Pittsburgh.

Section two was everything else (I micromanage content, as you can see). The date headers went in as each day came along. I sketched as I could through the day, wrote only a little, and at the end of the day added in any cartoons or drawings (often from photos on my camera or phone) or bits-and-pieces that remained.

I had an idea that if I wanted a list of expenditures I could start from the back, or keep lists of Things to Eat on the index cards in the back pocket, but none of these were necessary.

• Part 1: What was lugged.
• Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: What was stuck.
• Part 4: You Are Here.
• Part 5: What was learned.

And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.

What was stuck – Part 3 of my travels with a sketchbook

I did not want to repeat the pattern of previous holidays which resulted in collections (envelopes, packages, bags, boxes) of papers, brochures, tickets, advertisements, envelopes, squashed pennies, packaging, cards and labels.

This time, I implemented a policy I referred to as Cut Things Out and Stick Them In.

Every night, before bed, I had to cut up the papers collected through the day, cut them up, stick the relevant sections into my sketchbook-journal and Throw The Rest Away.

There were a few late nights, but it was not generally an onerous task and tiredness could make me brutally selective. As I carted the glue stick with me, dead time in airports (“the planes in America have never been so safe or so late”) and planes and trains or while other people were in bed could be used productively.

My bags were lighter, there were no folders to sort or store when I arrived home, and I don’t regret throwing out anything I did.

Best of all, the journal was always up to date. I could not show photographs to people, but I could show them scraps and sketches, and when I arrived home, the journal was almost complete: pictures drawn, scraps stuck in, observations made at the time. All that remained was to add in the few pieces that had fallen through the cracks and into the back pocket of the sketchbook: a menu, some currency, a greeting card.

Scraps, however, were not the only things that were stuck in. Before I left, I treated myself to one of the unsung treasures of the stationer’s: numbered stickers. I took a package of black-on-white to label the days in the planner at the start of my sketchbook, and white-on-black to label each day as I progressed through the sketchbook. It was unnecessary but fun, with some of the mild excitement of an advent calendar, and knowing that as each day was sketched and written and pasted, I could mark it off and start a new one with a fresh new sticker.

The sketchbook is here: USA 2007 Moleskine.

Other parts:

• Part 1: What was lugged.
  Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: This is it.
• Part 4: What was organised.
• Part 5: What was learned.