“Step into this experience with butterflies in your bones; with a nervous feeling so beautiful, you know you’re doing something right.”
Author janeafrancis
Quote, Louise Bourgeois
“An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”
Glimpses – course with Eleanor White
I recently took part in a two-day painting course entitled ‘Glimpses’, at Leith School of Art, led by tutor Eleanor White. The premis for the course was the idea of momentary glimpses of things seen – either momentary in time or in space. So a momentary glimpse in time might be a certain way light falls or an expression on someone’s face. A momentary glimpse in space might be a keek of something which catches your interest, such as a view between buildings or flashes of colour on different objects which dance together.
We worked on drawings to make ‘views’, by working with blocs and with windows, and then worked on a larger painting, mindful of the idea of ‘something glimpsed’.
The final act was to ‘kill your darlings’, and to bloc away parts of your painting, creating windows, with glimpses of what lay beneath. This glimpse could be a particular passage in the painting, or you could completely destroy your original glimpses, and recreate a new one, by adding and taking away, being bold, and working away at your surface.
I don’t think I was very bold, the original painting I made was quite strong, in colour and form, and my working over it to create glimpses didn’t do enough destroying. Still, it was a worthwhile exercise. Here is one of the paintings I made.
And here is the ‘glimpsed’ version
Song Lyric: Seven Bridges Road
There are stars in the southern sky
Southward as you go
There is moonlight and moss in the trees
Down the Seven Bridges Road
I have loved you like a baby
like some lonesome child
I have loved you in a tame way
And I have loved you a while
Sometimes there’s a part of me
has to turn from here and go
Running like a child from these warm stars
Down the Seven Bridges Road
There are stars in the southern sky
and if ever you decide you should go
there is the taste of thyme sweet and honey
down the Seven Bridges Road
The Eagles
Quote, Ijeoma Umebinyuo
“Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just….start.
Quote, Susan Sontag
“I know I’m not myself with people, (…) But am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.”
From Reborn: Journals & Notebooks (1947-1963)
Quote, George Eliot – Middlemarch
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
Quote, Hiroshi Sugimoto
“Art is a technique: a means by which to materialise the invisible realm of the mind.”
Quote, Rebecca Jane Bennett
“….The profound yet delightful weirdness of being in a body..” – ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’
Quote, Vincent Van Gogh
“I am an artist…It’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, ‘I know all about it. I’ve already found it.’ As far as I’m concerned, the word means, ‘I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.'”
JANE FRANCIS 