Slowly the pressure mounts; time is ticking by and every preparatory sketch/proof fails.  Panic is close.

At times like this it’s just too easy to fall into the trap of imagining the response from the gallery and thinking “will they like/love this or not?”.  And this is exactly not what to do because this is the way to lose one’s authenticity, one’s voice.

The only way to get through this is to keep on working until you move from a conscious state to that beautiful space when the work takes over and slowly something surfaces and there’s a “Eureka” moment.

I think it might have happened with  my Nguni piece.  The theme of the exhibition is Nguni – Done and Dusted; and I’ve been struggling to come up with something personal.  It’s difficult because although Nguni’s are magnificent animals they just don’t fit into my style of work in either form or content – until now that is.

After spending days and even weeks drawing, cutting, etching, printing, embossing, sanding….. suddenly the active mark making process overcame the brain and the ego and stuff started to happen.  It was irrational and illogical and made complete sense.  At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Nguni parts

And this is how it happened:

I cut out one of my drypoint/monotype/embossed prints of an Nguni and pasted onto an bigger page with dozens of blind printed/embossed Nugunis.  then I drew over and around all this stuff.  Then I began to paint on top of that. And then (THIS IS THE INTERESTING PART) without thinking I began to write into that…. words for parts of beef such as rump, fillet, brisket etc and ways of cooking beef such as roast, grill, braise etc .  Suddenly at last I was starting to own the work.  It fits the title of the exhibition but it also sits well with me because it pulls in aspects of womanhood, a theme that runs through my work.

What I’d love to understand is how this unconscious/subconscious thing works.  How did my brain operate on it’s own to make the link between the actual (Nguni animal) and the personal (womanhood/cookery) and then bring it to consciousness by making my hand start writing into the wet paint?

All I know is that it is exciting, magical; intuitive maybe and it can’t be done while the ego is involved.

Hardground, aquatint, hand coloured and gold leaf

I’ve tried to use chine colle gold leaf on the halo about three times but wasn’t successful.  Each time there were patches of white surrounding the halo and it looked really ugly.  This may have been glue seeping out.  I used wall paper glue in powder form.  The gold leaf was applied to tissue paper using gold size.  So in the end I added gold leaf after printing.  I love the patchy streaks on the wings.

There’s a lot of detail in the hair but you have to look really closely to actually see it.  I’m nervous to burnish it more because I don’t want to overdo it and have it stand out too much.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours, it feels like a lifetime, messing around with carborundum, ink, paper and wax and something is starting to happen. I’m not sure what but I’ve got that trembly feeling when lots of little ideas, some years old, others more recent are starting to slowly combine into something new.

It is so tempting to talk about it all right now but I’m learning to be more discreet. The art world is a very different place to anything I ever imagined. It seems to me now that instead of a gregarious world of gentle generous people sharing beautiful ideas it’s more competitive and uglier than the worst of capitalist empire strategists. (with a few exceptions).

And so this new little fetus is going to stay in the warm nourishing darkness until it’s full term.
Like all new creations, there’s still lots to go wrong and it may be aborted although I’ve got an instinctive feeling that all is well.

But, oh, it’s killing me not to share the excitement of the process.

In all three I worked with hardground and aquatint.  But I want to do something more exciting… something that rips into the plate and the paper and is visceral in form if not in content.

Tonight I’ve started what will be the first multiple plate print.  The one plate will be hopefully blind embossed writing using words that most women use when talking about transforming their bodies… waist, hips, thighs etc.

The second plate will be an image of a “normal” woman as opposed to the kind of stick insect we’re encouraged to resemble.  At lease that’s how things stand at the moment.

We’ll see what happens.