blackfisharts ABOUT my art

  back to these again .... well, unpacking a bag ful and these two are both 'finished' ... as i have been musing over the past two years of journals and painting and art making i am back to considering mark making ... very obvious in the stitch, i think. Again, intuitive, no thinking apart from maybe shapes and colour but otherwise exploring 'my' stitch and some technique. the spiral is a 'rope' made from a hanky torn into strips ... the square it is on is a rusted bit of cloth, against a bit of light muslin all on wool blanket piece.

  Going through sketchbooks from the last two years looking at pages that I like for various reasons - I find it difficult to step into non objective abstraction so the idea of landscape is currently prevalent in my sketchbooks. This, even when it is abstract there is still a horizon line and the idea of sky and land. I am thinking its because #getaways are important to me and my sense of attachment to landscape/ocean. My works are always done in the studio taken from memory and emotion. In the landscape itself I walk, photograph, collecting, some quick sketches if i am organised. Photographs are mostly macro, seeing the small things, patterns, shapes, colours ... abstractions of landscape. I 'work' every day, slow stitch at night and these things I have learnt - I love what i do love colour I am not afraid of colour I am a messy painter I am not a planner; I dive in and wait to see where it takes me I love texture and layering, a pallimpsest My interest in 'mapping...

  Inspired by these artists, Hockney and Warhol I have been playing with images i have taken on my #getaways. These are on the road, in Hobart and Coles Beach Devonport. Photographs are pulled into pixelmator pro and the hues of the actual image taken is 'muted' somewhat and then sent to my ipad where highly saturated colours are layered over aspects of the image. David Hockney , well into his 80s, plays with an ipad doing daily drawings. I like the saturated flat colours that he and Andy Warhol use which sparked my 'what if' regarding my photographic images. I have been painting over black and white photography for a few years now so it didn't seem a biggie to do so with the ipad. I will post these painted photo prints and ipad drawings of pears, life drawing, landscapes etc in future posts.

  a couple of hours walk along the foreshore in Devonport. Muted with colour enhancements. The bird was added later :) .... Pulled together from my photos

  playing with ideas - using the scanner and pulling the image into pixelmator pro. as always i like to explore how much information can you lose before the image is no longer what it is. sometimes though losing even more image can provide a perfectly cool abstract image. might try that next.

New place, new space, settling into ways of working and after many months concentrating on setting up the house, gardens and studio spaces I have finally got back to slow stitching at night. Picked this one up again and started that crazy fill-in stitch i do. I plan to blog a lot about sections of art i do, including stitching. lots to do, lots to talk about and lots to discover and explore.

one of my favourite activities is contour drawing. I have taken these two self portraits and translated it using backstitch on prepared cloth. The top one (not quite finished) is a shibori style scrunch cotton hanky dipped in tea and the bottom one is commercially dyed shibori style cotton.

started these a while ago - using photos as the basis and exploring the tools, brushes and colours available on my ipad - along with the pencil. i love the potential. they become prints as ink media on watercolour paper

T his skink (it is a skink?) on my studio floor today - I picked him up and before putting him outside i took a photograph. And then i googled - yes its a skink .. a common garden skink ... common? - soooo subjective. but if it means there are many then yes, this skink is common. fascinating to explore colour, shape, texture, those feet ...and i have seen one or two running around without that pointy end of the tail. I believe they drop off when 'caught' and later regrow. i have also seen a blue-tongued lizard here at our new place but didnt have my camera with me. hope to find him/her some day and show you. New place new discoveries having moved recently to the country, regional Tasmania, yet on the very outskirts of towns. also found ... this nest - no idea what type of bird but love the fragility yet strength of this home for birds. so much to appreciate in delicacy, shadow, form, texture, tone. And that touch of greenery. i found it on the floor after a particularly...

  part 2. is it important to know? or is the image alone enough?   musing about abstraction here

  A typical beach walk with no-one around and the light catching shadows rippling across the edges. Plover at #Penguin Beach.

ABSTRACTION - i love it ... it excites me ... one aspect of my 'playtime' in the studio is to investigate this premise - how much can i take away from the original object/landscape and is it important to know what it is, or does the image just appeal to you. isn't that enough ? another image here There are many genre of 'abstraction' - this excerpt taken from this site - The term 'abstract art' - also called " non-objective art ", "non-figurative", "non-representational", "geometric abstraction", or " concrete art " - is a rather vague umbrella term for any painting or sculpture which does not portray recognizable objects or scenes. However, as we shall see, there is no clear consensus on the definition, types or aesthetic significance of abstract art. Picasso thought that there was no such thing, while some art critics take the view that all art is abstract - because, for instance, no painting can hope to ...

Many years ago when holidaying with my daughter and her young family in Sydney I caught up with exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW and i loved this image i took of my reflection in a Dale Frank painting. loved the painting/assemblage. The image, to me, speaks of a self portrait - artist looking and admiring the art. I usually walk through the gallery room quickly, scanning each one as i move through and then return to the ones that speak to me. This artwork was one of them - the image itself that you see here made an impression upon me once i got home and downloaded all the holiday photos. this other one is more like the day to day snapshot that is taken ... its still a self portrait but much less emphatic or meaningful, i think. It kind of tells all whilst the one above is mysterious and encapsulates the premise of 'self portrait with Dale Frank'. Whilst revisiting this memory I realise, in retrospect, i was drawn very much to this piece as i was experimenting with ...

  one technique. I wish to take away from a spoon fed image of landscape, still life and other, to explore what is left, what it might offer.  an abstraction. Though my contention is that 'an image is an image is an image' it must still come down to "but is it a 'good' image" ? whatever that means to you, to me.

  A fun exercise to get to know your friends and yourself. Check out the books in your library and start to build a portrait of who you are. Let a friend look through your bookshelves and come up with who they think you are. Build the books up with titles facing you, creating a portrait of a kind and take a photograph of it. first image for me, reads: Collage: a new approach  from here to there the bandaged image cut & paste, 21st Century  collage weeds altered curiosities building a picture. The second one - reading : handmade books and cards eco books you are here drawing water painting abstracts pockets and corners I would love to see some of yours

  Last night i picked up this cloth again and continued .... its a reverse-dyed cloth (bleached) of black 100% cotton open weave. I love bleaching cloth where it removes the original colour leaving you with shades of the underdyed colour which can be anything from gold through to reds and sometimes greens. The nuances of colours come from the length of time its left in the bleach. too long and it can strip it right back and sometimes rot the cloth. Stitching is an intuitive response to the marks created by the dye and the torn cloth stitched onto the original cloth. love that ragged edge created from tearing the strip cloth. Musing on the piece as i look at it i am getting shades of landscape. This may be, in part, because i am continually looking and walking within the landscape and the mapping project is high in my thoughts and daily doings. There is, to me, definitely a mapping aspect going on here. I akin it to an internal mapping and an external mapping ... perhaps an internal...

  My studio practice involves the five key stages :  explore, develop, refine, resolve and present. You will 'hear' me speak often about the need for 'play' in the studio. The value of 'play'. PLAY is a state of mind and an important part of the explore stage.. It frees you up and things do not seem so precious. You have no fear or worry about being right or wrong, making a mistake or creating a mess. It is a time for exploration, asking 'what if' and a time to listen to your intuition. What if I splash paint on instead of using a brush, what if I use a sponge to paint with. The piece above is a play piece. Using sumi ink and a ruling pen, the marks were created an A1 size sheet of cartridge paper and was 'a start' for an acrylic painting. As the sun moved across the skylights in my studio and cast these lines of shadow I took a photograph of the drawing with shadow lines. The snail: while playing on my Ipad I took a photo of a snail and a photo ...