When Mum passed away recently a friend gave us some flowers which included poppies and seed heads – awesome! I have been fascinated with poppies since we visited Italy in 2010 and use them a lot in my artwork. Having the real thing on display in the kitchen inspired my to take a bunch of photos, do some drawings, and finally cut some stencils. Huge thanks to Michelle Ward for lessons learnt while doing the Crusades – without your lessons I doubt I would have managed it. I have now got stencils for two flowers, and two different heads plus the masks for all but the big poppy. I couldn’t work out the bridges to keep it in one piece but may have another shot at it yet.
I have had a quick play with them on newsprint and am happy, so tomorrow I’ll start playing in earnest. Earlier in the year I was given some lovely old, never used and in mint condition, prints of John Abbott’s The insects of Georgia produced by the Alexander Turnbull Library. I am going to be participating in Legato 2013 and have a vague plan in mind involving the prints, transfers of photos of Dad from the war, and the poppy stencils. We’ll see…
(the images are wrinkly because I am too impatient to wait for the ink to dry before scanning)
Our Italy trip has been on my mind a lot lately, for all kinds of obscure and tangential reasons. Things like the financial woes in Europe, the realization that Tony and I probably won’t be going overseas again, seeing some poppies growing locally, graffiti that reminds me of the trains in Italy…
I’ve been wanting to start a new series of paintings, using mainly black and white with a little red, and over the last few nights have dreamed these into existence. As I start painting Tony often asks, partly to wind me up, “what’s it going to be?”. He kept coming and looking at these three, a bit baffled. When I had finished he said “poppies”. Yup – but think of the viaduct, and the train tracks. Oh yeah, you have the graffiti underneath, and the old roman viaduct. Yes, Tony, I do!
A few posts back, here, I showed you a test piece I had done – thinking about ways of presenting information and photos from our Italy trip ready for an exhibition in Wellington in May. In that piece I used a couple of MM foam stamps. I am happy enough with the result but would really like to be using something more personal, something uniquely my own. When I was studying with the Learning Connexion I did some lino cuts and a lot of monoprints. Here’s a couple of examples:
I decided the answer was to take an image from our trip and cut a stencil or make a stamp and use that in the new artworks. The image needed to be something iconic enough that people here in New Zealand would still recognize it even after I had simplified it right down. I had a play with statues, the domes on top of churches, the bridge over the Tiber and the Colosseum. The Colosseum won easily, it is just *such* a recognizable structure. I scanned one of my photos into Photoshop and reduced the level of detail, then turned it to a negative so I could cut out the right parts. I transferred the image onto my lino and got cutting. My first attempt I really liked, but I had forgotten to flip the image and so in terms of my memories of the Colosseum, the building is running the wrong way. Okay. I flipped the image and started again. The end result is quite a different linocut to the first, because that’s the way I work, but I like it. It has energy and it’s mine, not someone else’s idea of the Colosseum.
I wanted to do some more linocuts but had run out of lino, hadn’t had time to get some more, and it’s quite expensive. Today I was watching ‘Acrylic materials and techniques for expressive art with Merle Rosen’ from North Light DVDs. It’s a great dvd by the way, fun to watch and Merle has an exciting art practice. Anyway, part way through I had a total “Aha!” moment. Merle uses old styrofoam packaging to make stamps; it’s cheap (free) and easy to make marks in with scissors, metal tools, old pens etc. How cool is that?
We tend to buy most of our meat from the local butcher. Grant’s old-fashioned, in the best sense of the word, and wraps the meat in brown paper. So no styrofoam meat packaging in our household, but we can always buy some muffins — just for my art practice you understand. In the meantime, here are my first attempts at the Colosseum – these are the linocuts themselves, not the printed images. The images are not perfect and I don’t want them to be; they’ll be used in the background of mixed media works I’m creating over the next month or two.
Back in May of this year Tony and I went to Italy where I exhibited at the LEGATO exhibition in Cassino, along with 40 or so other New Zealand artists. The exhibition featured paintings, mixed media, sculpture, textile works, glass and drawings; all around a theme of peace and remembrance. Organiser Kay de Latour has a blog where she is documenting the ongoing story of the exhibition.
I did quite a lot of fundraising in order for us to travel to Italy. One of the main things I did was offer $35 shares in my trip. In return each share holder got a share certificate, handmade postcard mailed back from Italy, a full colour newsletter after the trip and, by Christmas of this year, a 6×6″ painting around what we saw and learnt while away. In total I sold 57 shares, so took 60 or so handmade postcards in my suitcase and mailed them home from Cassino.
Once we got home and the dust had settled I wrote a newsletter and mailed off 57 copies. And then started on the process of creating 57 little works of art. I wanted them to have real meaning both for me and for the recipients, but at the same time I didn’t want to do something so complicated that my every waking moment was spent on them from now till Christmas Eve. I thought long and hard about what had most touched me, and how that could be represented. I came up with a work method that means each work is individual but part of a large series, so that I could create them in batches of 10 or so at a time. When each work goes out to its new owner it has a letter with it, and part of that letter says:
The enclosed mixed media work is based on more than 70 photos I took of poppies growing wild in the Lazio region, including around Monte Cassino Abbey. Many of the photos were blurred, taken from cars and trains as we sped through the landscape. For that reason the background is blurred; with a final large, in-focus poppy symbolising the way poppies became a focus for the artists. The large poppy is the same one used on the artwork I created for either my father or my best friend’s father, and so has special meaning to me. In addition, the poppies are important to me because they are such a strong symbol both in Italy and in New Zealand.
This weekend I put the finishing touches on work number 54; the final 3 works are going to be quite different and very individual for a number of reasons. This has been a huge journey for me. I am pleased to have fulfilled my obligations to all my shareholders with plenty of time to spare and continue to be amazed by how wonderfully generous people are. I also learnt a lot about how I create works by doing such a big number of works with one essential theme. Things I would not have discovered any other way I suspect. What a journey this has been…so, here are two of the final batch of ‘Italian Poppies’.
As part of my deal with shareholders in the trip we made to Italy for the LEGATO exhibition, I now have to make 56 6×6″ paintings. They all have their newsletter with its full colour photos, so that’s a good job done. I want the works to all be individual but at the same time do not want to create unnecessary work for myself. My intention is to work on the paintings in batches, probably six at a time. I have ideas for the first 3 or 4 batches and am mulling over the rest, making notes as I go. The first batch, which I am going to start on later today, involve digital art printed out on rice paper, glued down with gel medium and then worked over with more collage and probably some oil pastels.
Below is the digital work I have done so far. It’s made up of four photos initially. Then I have taken a photo of some poppies in the field and removed all the background so I have a field of floating poppies. I have layered this over the original digital collage for a sort of dreamy surreal effect. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I start adding a few more collaged poppies over the top, then working in with the oil pastels.
Cath Sheard Art 