Doodling

We had the first Splinter Group meeting of the year on Friday. We’ve been struggling to start our next wood engraving project, a calendar for this year’s Fortingall Art, so we did some drawing in search for inspiration. We took turns to describe a painting for the others to draw. We mostly chose pictures with strong narratives or with a dreamlike quality, I guess because they were easier to describe. There were some peculiar pictures like the four unicorns and a naked lady in Charles Bowen Davies’ otherworldly painting Unicorns and a medieval scene from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries. To loosen up we drew with our non-dominant hand, with our eyes shut, without taking the pen off the paper and various combinations of all three. It felt like directed doodling, a strange combination of concentration and letting the hand go where it will and it helped take the mind far away from all the hang ups about drawing we all had to some extent. I never went to art school but I managed to keep drawing, occasionally and not as much as I should. Even those amongst us who were art-school trained didn’t do as much drawing as they felt they should. I don’t know where that sadly common belief comes from that you can either draw or not draw and most likely not so best not try. Wherever it comes from we needed to play tricks on ourselves to get drawing on Friday but they worked. I can’t say my drawings were useable for anything but they were fun to do. We finished by drawing images from a couple of poems, both by Susanne Knowles, Fox Dancing and Tails and Heads. To me that was the most visual exercise of all. She managed to create amazing images, and we didn’t have to think how to describe them, her poetry did it for us. A liberating day.

Press Here

I went to visit John Easson in Coupar Angus last week. John runs a museum of printmaking, displaying presses, type, typecasting machines and many sundries that he has collected over a lifetime’s interest in printmaking and through a career that covered the transition from traditional letterpress through to desk top publishing and laser jets. He also published poetry books and pamphlets through his Quarto Press.

See www.coupar-angus.org/Groupshtm/presshere.htm

I’m planning to produce an edition of prints combining a poem with a linocut illustration and I wanted to talk to John about how to do it. I want the text to be printed ‘properly’ with type and through a press. John took me through his font book so I could choose the right font to suit my work. He has an impressive collection of fonts but you need a lot of type to set a page of text, not to mention all the spacers and packing that ensures the text sits in the right place on the page.

All those type trays take up space, if you can get them, which is not so easy nowadays. I guess there are still old printers with sheds full of type and type bits but there aren’t as many as there were. Ebay has done its bit to create a market but you can’t predict what’ll come up, or how much it’ll cost. Specialist makers of all the fiddly bits traditional typesetting needs are a rare breed now and there are so many bits that it’s probably impossible to get everything now. It’s sad to see such an important industry die so completely but, as John pointed out, it’s all those fiddly bits and specialised, often tedious, jobs that have helped kill it. John told me about someone he knew in Coupar Angus who’d spent a career setting up lines for accounts ledgers. There must be plenty of former printers who don’t have much nostalgia for jobs like that. Modern letterpress may be printed in the old way with inked blocks in a press but the blocks can be cast from computer generated designs. In that way the need for fiddling about with all those bits is much reduced. But some fiddly work is fine if you like that sort of thing. Thankfully for me, John is happy to typeset my fourteen lines of poetry, so I can go back to Coupar Angus and print my linocut, once I’ve cut it.

Persistence Works, hopefully

I went to visit my friend Heather Dewick in her workshop in Sheffield in the Persistence Works, aka The Art Space. It’s very Heather, full of interesting looking clutter and useful stuff for bookbinders, presses, a guillotine, trays of type, all kinds of paper, leather and fabrics, and a great view over Sheffield city centre. I was at school with Heather and she was interested in old books and poking about in thrift shops for treasures even then, and she would always find stuff I’d miss. She puts her treasures to good use. Many of her books are bound with re-used materials including Ladybird books, tea towels (from kitsch kittens to a present from Chester) and old maps. I’ve always coveted Heather’s books, they’re beautifully made, witty and she has a great sense of colour and design so they are lovely to look at and to hold for writing and reading.

Like most craftspeople she’s not rich from what she does, despite her great skill and commitment to it. In an age of stuff, much of it mass produced in China, the onus is on makers to sell themselves as part of the things they make. That’s a lot to ask I think so one of the things I’d like to do with this blog is to help them plug their skills and products, because we need people who can make things, however unassuming they may seem.