What Does An Artist Do All Day?
DAY FOUR
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DAY FOUR 〰️
08/08/2022 11:51
I’ve taken to reading the book I am using as my current sketch book: The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes. I’m now at page 21. I’ve read and drawn on the Acknowledgements (ix). Two ‘eyes’ have appeared, one looking down and the other looking up. Both seem to be drawn to, or gazing towards, the word that has become visible within a word. Knowledge. Part of Acknowledgements. My tracing around the blister pack, twice, has produced a start and a stop line. One cross-over line begins the word Knowledge and the other cross-over line ends just after the second ‘e’. My artistic brain intuitively seeks out recurring patterns. And as I read through this book I’m noticing a pattern or several starting to develop. I think that an artist’s brain naturally opens itself out to intuitive processing of information. We don’t even have to consciously think. It just happens.
I’ve read the prologue. It tells me that the book in front of me is “about the history of the world as revealed by genetics.” I can’t remember being this enthused about the book before. I’ve had the book so long now that I cannot even remember where, or from whom, I got it.
Moving on, and into Chapter 1: ICEMAN’S RELATIVE FOUND IN DORSET, as I take my mug of coffee outside to sit in the warm shade in front of my Studio, I realise that this book has value. Not monetary value. More a sense of usefulness, beyond the idea of an alternative sketchbook. The DNA research mentioned in the Prologue is carried forward into this first chapter. The chapter starts with the tale of the Italian Alps archaeological find of The Iceman in 1991. This chapter takes us through the setting up of research in an Oxford laboratory and beyond. DNA is fascinating stuff. Old bones can be interesting too. I must say that I don’t really remember the archaeological dig in 1988 around Abingdon. I was living in Carterton at that time and had been since moving to RAF Brize Norton (husband’s posting) in 1975. Both towns were Oxfordshire, Abingdon having been taken out of Berkshire in 1974. In this chapter we are introduced to the Seven Daughters (as named by Bryan Sykes): Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine. We don’t hear much of these daughters in this chapter apart from their names. The chapter is all about setting the scene for DNA developments.
08/08/2022 15:17
I’ve done some ‘proper work’ as my mother would have said. I’ve tackled some business / admin tasks. Artists have been paid over the weekend and I’ve tidied up the paperwork from the Summer Show Exhibition. The filing can wait (it is like housework – leave it long enough and you don’t notice it anymore). I can have a couple of days of creativity if I am lucky. Never full days of creativity when you run a gallery. Par for the course I guess. But I have had a bit of a ‘play’ today. I have been back working on some mono-printing on the gel plates. Printings, drawings and painting inside the new sketchbook which happens to be my reading book too at the moment. I’m trying to read it before my painterly hands catch up with the eyes and brain. The Prologue has been adorned with prints taken from four spinach leaves (from my lunch box) and other artistic interpretations. Advice for other artists: paint what is in your environment, what is around you. It all adds up to the connectivity of seeing, feeling, hearing (do spinach leaves talk?) and just ‘being’ part of this world. Chapter 1 will be next for an artistic adventure …..
