Before and after - the blinds

 It gets too chaotic -

... so I thought to get some blinds and hide the shelves. Out of sight, out of mind?

Tom installed them -

If you're wondering where all the stuff from the worktop went ... "it's behind you!"

Looks like a glacier is sliding into the room! Behind it, the shelves are being reorganised to put the most-used materials in the most convenient places -

And there's room on the worktop for the continuing project of sorting and documenting and thinking about my woodblock prints (and other projects) -

Gradually the heaps are diminishing. Eating the elephant one bite at a time.

Mornings in the studio

If the sun shines, there are shadows slanting across the worktable. Some are easier to catch than others! 

The white eggs make a change from having brown eggs, not that it makes a difference to the egg inside the shells -

I thought the white ones looked a bit crowded - social distancing, you know -

Ah, that's better

 Taking the opportunity to clear just a few inches of shelves -

Before - the discoveries behind the scissors pot

Souvenirs of the Designer-Makers degree show at Camberwell, a few years back

Old notebooks and sketchbooks - the tree is from the 1970s

Drawing by young Tom at a lunchtime concert in Oxford, 1982

From different eras: a favourite postcard and a wine label

After - just a bit more spacious

My inspiration - she likes to know how things work, and then get them to work, but she doesn't quite have enough manual dexterity and strength yet. But she's showing strong signs of perseverance; some would call it stubborness -

More morning moments -

There's time for doodling

Double doings - painting and shadow

Just a timely coincidence

 More discoveries -

Diversity, for a reason

2008, art foundation course - I used a drawing done at the National Gallery
from a Piero Longhi painting for a printing plate. Still like it, but the others are in the bin

Studio Saturday - catching shadows

Three weeks have passed since the previous update and projects have progressed. Painting the shadows of the pencils on the window ledge got me into a routine of getting up early, taking a cup of coffee into the studio, and getting going with something or other. 

At an angle?

As the sun [earth, actually] moves and the shadows move, the colours change

With pen (worth a try!)

The first grouping

 

Closeup, showing changes in colour for each new layer

Found a good space on the wall

The blobs are an accident, and so is the running paint -
and they interact somehow

First layer; I hold a hairdryer in my left hand and mix
the next colour of paint with the right hand, by which
time the shadow has moved enough for the next layer of paint

Paint vs Pen

The more the merrier

At the top, painting on washed-off version

These two were washed off too - but in the photo I see
a strange beast, a plumed deer perhaps

Laid out in chronological order; the final one is still
to be painted, on the next sunny morning

What have I learned? 

1. Keep it simple, no need to tilt the paper, for instance. It's ok to do the same thing time after time, because each time will be different.

2. Accumulation is good. You could even say that it's enough. After a while the whole gets to be more than the sum of the parts.

3. An end-in-view isn't necessary, an important part of the process is seeing what develops.

Once that final paper is painted, is this finished? I have no more paper - these were about to be binned, they've been hanging around since the late 80s. I like the faded vintage-ness. It gives resonance, I think, that they are proofs or over-run from the printing of the Royal College of Art's cookbook (1988), bought for mere pence at an RCA degree show. I never did make any of the recipes that are printed and illustrated on the reverse of these, but another (now lost) lives on in that Gunpowder Cake is one of my signature dishes.

Studio Saturday - sketchbooks, sharpeners, shadows

An idea about colour seeping out round the edge of a hole in the darkness -

 and later I see this, at the edge of a large painting (detail shown) -

and hear a quote from Goethe, that colour is what happens at the intersection of light and dark.

Some digging deep under the workbench, to find an old sketchbook (the colourful one; 1993) -

 in which were collages that just sort of happened -

 and an outline of my favourite fairy tale, Mother Holle -

 The industrious girl gets her reward, and her lazy sister - well, she was not a pretty sight.

A flurry of pencila sharpening

 led to the imposition of order

 and the complete revamp of "the most used tools" that sit in mugs on the window ledge.

Another old sketchbook, 2017 - shadows drawn (no, traced) outside Tate Britain, with the only watersoluble pencils I possessed at the time -

 Early mornings find me sitting here, getting a dose of natural light and listening to podcasts (the newest discovery is Kitchen Sisters Presents) -

 Sunny mornings make it possible to draw the shadows of those jars of pencils -

 or to paint them -

 Two sunny mornings in a row and we have two renditions of the same scene -