Art, Writing and Research
Leading on from my last post about my son’s scribbled post-it notes, I looked again at the tracings I made and was reminded me of the work I did in the summer, painting shadows under the trees at Shotover.
Inspired of course by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, the ‘three little words’ copied from my son’s scribbles shared something with these shadow paintings and so, I traced the lines again, this time using a brush.
Iris created a treasure hunt for me and Eliot; a trail of post-it notes stuck around the flat, each containing a clue as to the location of the next. Once we’d completed the hunt and solved the puzzle (letters which formed the words ‘I am Amazing’), Eliot decided to do one of his own. He too stuck dozens of post-it notes around the flat, each with a scribbled line which he told me was writing.
It goes without saying that I thought it a very sweet thing to do and again I used the notes as a source for some play of my own, tracing the lines he’d drawn – written – on the post-its, and then drawing over them in felt-tip pen. I was immediately struck by the fact that they did indeed resemble a writing of sorts, albeit one as yet unknown and undeciphered.
Every now and then when I’m working on something – a drawing, video, piece of writing – I find a connection with something I’ve done in the past, something which, on the face of it, might appear quite unrelated. In these ‘notebook‘ blog entries, I will post those connections, along with random pages from past notebooks that I wish to re-examine.
The first connection came to mind whilst drawing one of my recent ‘tree’ pictures. The patterns I was making, called to mind an installation I made a number of years ago.
