Big drawings. How to prepare? The tiny sketchbooks I carry, which I bind from offcuts and scrap are – well – tiny. So, my Tower Gallery residency project being about the building, bringing my love of appropriate materials from my design life I’ve made one big sketchbook from lining paper, reused grey board and duct tape and another with thin utility papers and linen-textured wallpaper.
My next plan was to experiment with colours. But preparing paper, I was distracted by a shadow of a leaded window. I nipped onto the landing, taped lining paper to the floor and crawled around it, tracing the shadow in loose water-soluble graphite, moving the paper with the light. Then I sponged on water for another layer of marks. Playful, yes; foolhardy, no: without really trying, it answered my question about whether I could scale up the lively line of my small sketchbook work for this project.
But I digress. Colour. There’s red brick in the building and there are terra cotta roof tiles, more of which in my talk during Open House. So I’ve tried painting on a variety of utility papers with terra cotta slip made from modelling clay. I used up the last of my slip on some tests for a panorama I want to draw of the unusual view from the studio across to the Royal Docks. It’s a mishmash of 21st century life and history – I’ve been researching what the view might have been in 1922, when the church opened.
Why all this experimentation? In times of stuff-on-demand, why not just do something? And where’s the value for my other work?
Well, the nuggets of gold in creative experiments are the diversions; the accidents; the things you’re not looking for. When I work with clients, if all I do is exactly what they’ve asked for, it doesn’t go well. When I’m trusted to delve into the project and think broader than the brief, we often find an answer to a question nobody has considered yet. And that’s interesting for everyone.
This, then, is that, only bigger and with no client.
What’s next? Pigments, possibly…
