Geometry of 12

A five-day course at Princes School of Traditional Arts, tutor Ameet Hindocha, who aimed to teach us how to look at the pattern and see what's going on, rather than give us instructions to follow. He demonstrated the construction of 12 patterns, and guided us through combining two into "our own" pattern, and gave us handouts for them all. 

I'll start with "my own" pattern, which looks unfunished  - that's deliberate. The finished section can be "rubbed off" onto watercolour paper and painted, and the unfinished section (at top) shows some basic structure. 

However the main structure is on the sheet underneath, and it's derived from a design exercise using square and triangular tiles, with sides of the same length so they can be combined. My own design is utterly useless for this (too much white space!) but I enjoyed seeing how different shapes of white space emerged

Here's another that I got to a "finished" state -

Over the five days, time, effort, and concentration produced at least 12 patterns. The square versions laid out for overview -

First and last patterns, hexagonal and square format -

Short slide shows summed up key concepts -

I was sitting a long way from the ongoing demonstation and had to zoom the phone camera to the max to see what was going on. It didn't help that the green used for construction lines wasn't high contrast (sometimes a pale blue was used as well, indistinguishable to me), and when small-scale operations were carried out ("draw the next line from here to here") I was totally lost. But eventually all became clear, and I benefited from quite a few one-to-one instructions.

If you think this looks complicated - it is!

Several finished works were dotted around the room - beautiful work -

I itched to do some painting, however simple, and on the weekend I traced some sections of pattern, transferred them to strips of leftover paper, and tried out a few colourways -

Geometry

During lockdown I happened on an online course taught by Tom Bree via West Dean. Loved it, and have been doing other online, and in-person, courses at the Prince's School of Traditional Arts, and following a few tutorials available on youtube and via websites. 

Most recent was a week-long course on five-fold geometry, taught by Mohammed Aziz. For four days we followed instructions to make ever more difficult patterns, and on the fifth daydid a less complicated one, and had time to add colour to the pattern. Ten-pointed stars are built up from a circle divided into five - using just compass and ruler, no numbers of any kind -

Colouring in -

Drawing a section of the pattern, which was then traced and transferred ten times to make the entire pattern -

Here are some I prepared earlier - the first is based on a pattern known as "pajaritos", little birds -

My workspace in Cheltenham is very like my workspace in London

An experiment in painting

Basic pattern (with stars instead of hexagons)

Inspiration - a tiled wall in the Alhambra

Variations on a starry theme -

Something a little more complicated

Finished

Evolving

Trying out colour schemes on patterns -

From a series of online lessons taught by Lisa DeLong

From the eight-fold symmetry online course taught by Tom Bree

Also from Tom Bree's course

Another early course was based on the windows of Ibn Tulun mosque, taught by Katya Nosyreva. These are works-in-progress from that series -

Some patterns have found their way into (onto?) woodblocks -

Some of these "flowers" received stitching to bring out the pattern

Woodblock printing, Chinese style

On Thursday morning, starting this post, I wrote: 'The week-long course at Prince's School is rather "stretching"!'  At the end of the course, we all proved we had risen to the occasion, and enjoyed it very much.

On the Monday we were given some traditional prints, carved by people who knew what they were doing, and set to work with ink and brush and very thin paper to copy them. Then the design was pasted onto the block, which was 14cm wide, and we started cutting - very fine lines - the room was very quiet as we concentrated!

At the end of the third quiet, concentrated day, I had done lots of practice carving around the design and was almost done with clearing the background away -

 This is the original, from the Diamond Sutra, published in 868 -

I moved the elements of altar and beast around to make "a picture", and changed the pattern on the cloth to something that was less fiddly and confusing to carve.

There's another lion in the original - he's very hard to make out - we were set to doing some further drawing and this is my freehand drawing -

If there turned out to be time after printing the first block, I rather hoped to put him on the back of the block, in a refined version, but events got in the way...

The printing setup is very different from japanese woodblock methods - the paper is clamped in the frame, which is itself clamped to the table. Putty (or blutack) holds the block.

The block is secured, then inked with a big brush made of palm bark (ink goes into the saucer, little by little as needed, and thinned to the right consistency).

A sheet of paper is taken from the stack and rubbed with the baren, which is elongated and (these days) covered with heavy plastic -

then the print is dropped down into the "well" so that the next sheet is ready for printing. Note the position of the papers - they have been moved forward so that our second print would fit beside the first one. We took them home like that, to cut apart.

Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to see or do any colour printing - I asked about how subsequent blocks would be registered, and was told it involved a bit of guesswork and adjustment of position of the block. 

A closeup of my not-very-finely cut block, ready to print -

 In place and inked up -

 Printed - with a few of the lines missing, alas -

 Some adjustments ...

More prints followed, cleaner this time. I found the printing very difficult - the paper is thin, the ink is tricky to adjust, and the baren works in quite a different way than the round japanese baren.

While researching the motifs for that altar cloth, I found one from a woven silk that would be quite quick to do for a second block -

A block holding three of them could be reprinted to make a larger design (seems like I'm still "thinking textiles"...) -

In designing, many small adjustments were needed - and when it came to carving, even more....

In response to interest in the Japanese method of printing, I brought in a block and some prints to show the registration system and how, given the nuances of inking up, each print could be a separate work -

 Then back to the block. Note the tools - the big knife with the curved blade is a quan dao, the square gouges are ping kou dao, and the big curved gouge used to remove the background is chan dao.

Inked up - I wanted the gouge-lines of the background to show, in order to make the process somewhat visible -

Getting the ink right and applying just enough pressure to the paper is tricky. Most of my prints are pale, and several have holes rubbed into the paper -

Master Wei Lizhong painted these shrimp (or crayfish?), in different configurations, for each of us to take home -

Throughout the week various people came to talk with Master Wei, including an administrator of the Muban Educational Trust and Frances Wood, formerly curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library. This meant that there was a hum of conversation in Chinese, some of which (words and phrases rather than complete sentences!) I could just about understand - especially after Lia had supplied a translation. As well as getting out my books on Chinese art for browsing, I got out my Mandarin textbooks for a bit of revision. This course has fed both the right brain (visual) and left brain (language) - what a great combination!

Will I do more of this technique? Probably - there's that other lion... and I have another design ready to carve: its thin outlines will be perfect for "the chinese method" - but I'll print with "the japanese method" when adding other blocks. 

I was able to buy a set of tools at the end of the course -

 in a roll with the Ten Bamboo Studio logo -