Imagine you are an artist living between 1860 - 1910 - Produce artwork for each era.

1860 – 1870

 More and more factories are opening and it is becoming difficult to make ends meet as a designer with good drawing ability. Factory work is repetitive and each worker only completes a small part of the finished item. I feel strongly that I wish to be part of the whole process. In the late 1860’s I have been fortunate to gain employment with Morris and Co to design and create templates for their embroideries. The drawings shown give an example of coloured drawings from life of fruits and flowers as well as the templates for the embroiderers to work from.

1870 – 1880

I continue to be employed by Morris & Co and continue to do some of the drawings for embroideries but have also enhanced my skills as an embroiderer. This means that I work some of the silk embroideries for this increasingly popular company. We are receiving many commissions for wall hangings from owners of some of the large newly built houses which are being built by Philip Webb, one of Mr Morris' close friends and business associates. This piece is but a small example of my work.

1880 – 1890

We continue to live in fast changing times. Because of my association with William Morris, I have been able to visit many private houses and see other artists at work. I wish to return to drawing and painting and it seems that there is now a growing enthusiasm for photography which is now often used for portraiture. Artists no longer need to draw accurate representations but can be more impressionistic in their painting. I have experimented with this new genre to see how it suits me as an artist, although I believe that Monet is rather more accomplished that I will ever be.

1890 – 1900

I have had a modicum of success with my painting and decided that it would further my career if I spent some time in Paris.  I have been fortunate to spend time in the studio where Georges Seurat amongst others works. He has a rather different way of painting. He applies colour in tiny dots or small, isolated brushstrokes. This has been given the name ‘pointillisme’.  The form of the painting is visible only from a distance, when the viewer’s eye blends the colours to create the mass of the object. I have attempted this with some fruit I had in my home which I set on a checked tablecloth.

1900 – 1910

One of the many advantages of living in Paris is the opportunity to soak up the many new artistic ideas which seem to appear almost on a daily basis it would seem.  Impressionism has been replaced by Cubism. An artist who is gaining in respect is Georges Braque. His early style was Impressionistic(like mine), then the brilliant colours to represent emotional response of Fauvism took hold. After a retrospective exhibition in 1907 of work by Cezanne, Braque was much influenced by his work and began to work in the Cubist style(so named by one of the reviewers ‘bizarre cubiques’). I too have experimented with this interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective and the use of monochromatic colour.

I have had an interesting and varied life and have been fortunate to live in an age where it is possible and acceptable to try out new ideas. Who would have imagined in 1860 that within a period of 50 years, factories would be producing in days what it used to take a craftsman many weeks to make; photography is now common place and rail transport is the preferred means of travelling rather than a horse.

Pieces of eight

Close up of the Pieces of Eight.

Friday project

Remember the Friday Project that I mentioned in an earlier blog? Well here it is!!
Numbers 1 - 9 - can you work it all out I wonder!!
The book is obvious ; next are 2 Chinese ear muffs which I have remade in coloured paper; 3 is the scissors, paper, stone game; 4 is the Kanji sign for 4; 5 are 5 Olympic 2012 postcards; 6 is a rather battered 6 pack; 7 Up is pretty obvious; the pieces of 8 are stones that I found on a walk and have embellished a bit and 9 is a Cat o' 9 tails; the cat being a catalytic converter.
Quite fun and of course the tray in the middle represents zero without which we could not operate our number system.
have a nice day.

Art and design update

A quick update on some of the art work I have been producing in the past few weeks...the workshops were Textiles and Printmaking, both of which were interesting and fun. In Textiles I had to research Claire aka Grayson Perry and find a connection with trains.....?  so some way down the line...sorree....I decided on a screen print of a train( first time I have done screenprinting - great )so produced a stencil and printed it off in different colours on different materials.  I then embellished this with a cloud, a flowering tree and a signal with freehand embroidery,and the finished result is.......a cushion.

 The other item I made was a shoe - which looked a bit like the front of the Bullet train but was also embellished as Grayson Perry does with a lot of his art.  It was quite difficult to make and used quite a bit of ingenuity!

In Printmaking, we again did some research into people like Rauschenberg, Hokusai and others and had explained the fundamentals of lino cuts, dry etching and screen printing.  I tried all three - lino cuts of course print in reveerse so numbers and letters need careful consideration! After screen printing, I then dry etched a dragon onto these, and also cut up some of the original screen prints and created further artwork which could become prints in the future. All really interesting as I had never done this before.  What do you think?

 this is one of the screen prints onto which I have then printed a lino print of the number 5 in Chinese/Japanese kanji.

 Again one of the original screen prints onto which I have printed a dry etching of a dragon which came from a design on one of my mother's old dressing gowns!

 

This is a new design with elements of the original screen printing together with parts of a map of Tokyo and complementary colour strips.

Again original screen print plus Tokyo map plus kanji character...perhaps a mountain with a river flowing through it?








An ongoing project is the Friday probject - something to keep us out of mischief on Fridays when we are not in college but should be doing something art related.  The project is to be presented at our assessments in 10 days time - An idea popped into my head which was to do the numbers 1 - 9 (there being 9 Fridays) - so I have been racking my brains for different things to do for each number......more to follow on this one!