Valentine's Day

I have been making occasion cards since I was a child as they were always class art projects -- something to do for our parents -- by teachers who were not artists and had to come up with something to keep kids occupied! I continue the practice, however, enjoying hoarding bits of interesting paper, and then as an occasion comes up seeing how I can vary the annual theme. Since I have recently photographed all the cards from my Mum's archive, that she has kept over the years, I can easily compare them. Here is a sample of Valentine's Day cards I made for my Mum, starting with this one from 2002, using bits of wrapping paper and coloured construction paper as a base.

This one is from 2008, the base card being white corrugated cardboard and the hearts and other elements are made of a spongey material with an adhesive backing. 

This card from 2010 uses white card stock as a base, some wrapping paper scraps, and various coloured paper scraps. I also made use of a silver pen!

I used some heavy green card stock for the base of this 2013 card, The white paper with white and gold bits threaded through it is specialised wrapping paper. The red heart is a bit of an envelope I think, and the red background is simple coloured photocopy stock.

The card for 2016 made use of red card stock as a base, and several bits of coloured paper scraps to make the hearts. Goes to show how one symbol, a heart, can be used repeatedly to create a different card. There were many more variations in the archive, but I thought these provided a good example.

Christmas tree!

The xmas tree was picked up this morning, and we'll be decorating it on the weekend, so we are definitely feeling like the season is in full swing. I didn't take any photos of the tree selection process, but thought I would celebrate "tree-ness" by sharing some pix of cards I made in previous years which included a tree in them. I mentioned in previous posts that I had re-discovered a grey box full of small artworks and cards earlier this year, and also a huge selection of cards that my Mum had held on to over the years were returned to me. So these images are from the Grey Box and my Mum's archive. 

This was my card from 1986. The lino print image was printed on different coloured papers. At the time I was living in a bachelor apartment in Toronto, and the image depicts my hanging planter disguised as a xmas tree, my favourite armchair (from my family home) and a squiggle of lights that I had hanging across the window in my room.

Originally I was going to do this as a lino print, but then decided I wanted to use specific colours (gold & green) so made stencils. This card is from 1989 and at the time I was basing a number of paintings on dreams, in which dolphins featured. I stylised the dolphin pair such that their combined inner outlines formed the shape of a tree.

In 2000 I simplified the card by using collage and stencilled elements in my very stylised triangular trees.

In 1994 I was living at Darby's Bridge, Kells Bay, Co. Kerry, and decided to feature the nearby humpback bridge, which gave me my address. It was a Christmas card so I added a tree to my lino block design!

Collage Cards - recently aquired archive

Many years ago, when discussing my Mum's Will with her, I suggested that she specify that all artworks from her artist children (there are several painters & writers in the family) be returned to them. Among items returned to me, after my Mum's very sad death at the end of this summer, were an abundance of special occasion cards that I had made for my parents over the years. My Mum had already returned some to me, while she was living, so I was surprised at the amount of cards that she still held onto. Making cards has always been an adjunct to my work - the cards are usually either ideas that I am thinking about for the future or ideas related to works in progress.

In memory of my Mum, I will post a few of the Mother's Day cards I made for her. This one has no date, but is probably from around 1986.

This one is from 2001. My Mum's sister had given me a big bag of pears from her garden and I did a lot of dawings and paintings based on them. I became pregnant that year, and pears became a symbol of fecundity for me.

This card is from 2005. I love blooming rhododendrons, though by many they are considered a weed tree.

This abstracted 3D bouquet is from 2007.

I have come across so many different types of daffodils/narcissi in Ireland and they often appear in cards. This one from 2009 makes use of different types of paper and specialised tape.

These roses are from 2012. There are plenty more Mother's Day cards, all different, but I thought I would just show a few that I particularly like.

The Skipping Project - Postcard 1916

I have mentioned before that I often use card making (for birthdays, special occasions) as sketches to help me work out ideas. Since one of my themes for The Skipping Project deals with the transformation of trauma into children's games I decided to submit a piece when I heard about Postcard 1916. This exhibition, curated by Eileen Ferguson, is of postcards created in response to any word in The Proclamation or The Proclamation itself. I chose the word "children".

The image I have been working with is from a photograph of children collecting wood in the rubble heaps that was Dublin after the Easter Uprising in 1916. The relevant writing in the background of the collage is excerpted from my paternal grandfather's Witness Statement, made for the government in 1950, describing his involvement in the Uprising and other activities leading to the foundation of the state.

I repeated the theme for some recent cards I made.

The Postcard 1916 exhibition will be displayed again in La Vielle Poste, Larroque, France in August and  The General Post Office (GPO), Dublin - which was the HQ of the rebels in 1916 -is interested in acquiring digital images of the works for their archives.

Collage Cards 2

I have been trying to process everything from the Grey Box find of last year, and make some sense of all the various items found in it. There were so many miscellaneous sketches and cards - the cards often acting like sketches. Sometimes the card came first - as in this abstract xmas card from 1982 (I think). For a series of individual cards I painstakingly attached tiny strips of gold tape and silver paper ovals (that for me were a development from my stem-less tulip paintings); the colour was added with wax crayon and burnished. I made about 30 of them of them I think, taking care of my xmas card list...

Continuing the theme from the xmas cards, I created small works in the following year on wood blocks that I had readily available (off cuts from various projects). As I gave a number of them away as gifts a few small pieces survive, along with this piece that I kept for myself. I did a couple of larger paintings on sheets of plywood while at university, but these are no longer in existence.

From 1983 (and for several years) I had many watery dreams of figures and dolphins and this imagery made its way into many drawings and paintings. Though undated, I think this oilstick drawing dates from 1983 or 1984 and is probably one of the earliest appearances of the gold tumbling figures in the water.

I had been on holiday in Ireland in 1987, visiting my parents, and became enamoured by watching individual rainclouds in the distance over the sea and images of these clouds made their way into my watery paintings, like this one "Meeting", oil on canvas.

In 1988 I used the image of the gold figure tumbling above the water as a design on a St. Patrick's Day card for my new boyfriend (now my husband). I found stripey paper to use as gold rain and I added the green stars as a reference to a line in William Carlos Williams poem "Our Stars Come from Ireland". 

As well as making an appearance with other elements in numerous paintings and drawings, the rainclouds also appeared in their own right on a birthday card for my Dad in 1989.

The rain became a little more menacing I guess in this postcard from 1989.

I moved to Ireland in 1988 and started work on a completely new body of work as I had left all my dream paintings in Toronto. This new work consisted of a large group of figurative drawings where I covered the paper in graphite and used an eraser to draw. Later works in this series got more colourful as I drew with large oilsticks. This body of work became my first solo show, at Temple Bar Galley & Studios, Dublin in 1989. 

In February 1989 I used the theme in a Valentine postcard sent to my boyfriend in Toronto.

I have always loved the stone walls and stonework ruins found everywhere in Ireland, totally different architecture than I had grown up with in Canada. I was back in Toronto when I sent this Mother's Day card to my Mum in Ireland in 1990.

At the time, although I was back in Canada, I started work on a series of paintings based on windows from ruins which were part of my life in Ireland. I exhibited a number of these paintings in a group show at Cedar Ridge Creative Centre in Scarborough in 1992. I brought the series with me to Ireland when I returned in 1993, completed more in the series and started a tour of the large group under the exhibition title "My Tower of Strength". The exhibition opened at Siamsa Tire arts centre in Tralee, Co. Kerry and its last stop was The Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely, Co. Wicklow in 1998 taking in a number of galleries in between. This painting, "The Holly & the Oak", is acrylic on canvas, 122 cm x 91.5 cm (4' x 3'), 1992 is in the collection of the Office of Public Works, Ireland. The window is structurally based on Raheenacluig - the church of the little bell - a ruin on the side of Bray Head, in the town where I live.

Collage Cards

With Valentine's Day just a few days after my wedding anniversary, my husband  & I celebrate the days together. As artists, both of us have been making cards for years. Sometimes I go with the simple and obvious -- like this year's card of hearts:

Whereas last year, at this time, I was working on my large painting, Fractured City, so the cityscape / sunrise mostifs kept appearing in my collage cards.

Before xmas I had been working on some video footage of people jumping and skipping, for my current work research. So the white tights and black shoes of one of my niece subjects appeared in a few cards (several family birthdays around that time).

 Here are several collage cards from last year that again utilised the cityscape / sunrise imagery. I have a box of various colours and types of paper that I use for my ripped-paper collages. I am always saving or finding bits of paper that I think are interesting. The paper for the background "sunrise" in this birthday card was a pre-painted silver-leaf square on thin rice paper; I bought a stack of this paper in Toronto's Chinatown nearly 20 years ago for $1! The "lit window" squares are ripped from green tissue saved from a xmas cracker party hat. I think both the dark blue and purple might also be tissue from party hats too.

At Easter time last year I was being more literal with my portrayal of the sun as circular -- it made me think of an egg yolk. The sky is again that Chinese paper, but an "error" as it was not prepainted. The purple stripey paper and the purple "windows" are from bits of pseudo stained glass craft paper, leftovers from my daughter's childhood supplies. They are a tough paper and I like ripping them to create a natural white ripped edge.

Grey Box Archive 3 - Dreams

I thought I would post some more pix from the so-called Grey Box Archive -- the box of small scale drawings & sketches that I re-discovered a few months ago. All the work in the box I had completely forgotten about, or if I had remembered any of it I thought I had destroyed ages ago. The following sketches are all based on dreams, all of which I remember having while in Ireland, except perhaps the last one, based on several dreams I had in Toronto in the summer of 1983.

Sketches above and below are from the same dream, about the house I grew up in Toronto. I remember having this dream while visiting my parents in Ireland during the summer of 1984.

I remember this being a very bright and chaotic dream -- moons and pink balloons seemed to be having an attic party, I came upon the party via a trap door in the floor (apparent on the left middle side of the drawing). This was another dream I had during that summer visit to Ireland in 1984.

Another moon dream, with a temple and journey to boot. Who knows. I think this was from either the 1984 holiday in Ireland or a later visit to my parents in 1987.

I know I did the next two dream collages while in Ireland, possible when I had moved over in 1988. 

The plane crash on the island did not refer to the Lockerbie disaster, though that event might have prevented me from sending this in the post as it was around that time.

In 1983 I had a series of dreams about dolphins, one of which was a group of dolphins leaping in turbulent waters. I then had a dream where figures were bouncing, foetally, in turbulent waters as an exact echo to the dolphin dream. I used these images of dolphins and foetal figures in water for many years in paintings and drawings. I started using the separated raining clouds after viewing clouds like this over the sea in Ireland in the late 80s and continued with that imagery (as gold rain) in many paintings and drawings between 1988 and 1992.

Happy Anniversary!

Yesterday was my 20th wedding anniversary! It has been a great 20 years, and has just flown by. Our wedding date was chosen haphazardly as a day to correspond with a party my husband had in the 1980s, which was also close to Valentine's Day. So making a card for our anniversary doubles as a Valentine's Day card. Am I lazy or what? For this year's card I used some paper that I had picked up in Chinatown in Toronto on my first visit back there in 1995 (I moved to Ireland in 1993). The bundle of Chinese paper squares already had applied metal leaf and some paint on them; I used a piece as a backdrop for my abstract cityscape of ripped blue card. The additional heart and gold leaf is like a sunrise. 

In the spring of 1988, I started going out with this young man (the host of the above-mentioned party!). This portrait is from one of my sketchbooks of that year.

In 1991 we were living together in Toronto, and my job at the time allowed my spouse, including common-law spouse, to avail of my dental plan. It was a good time to get needed work done, including the removal of wisdom teeth. He was very smart, taking all the dental surgeon's advice seriously. My partner James is not holding a heart to his face, but ice packs to ease the swelling after surgery, and he is smartly wearing gloves so that his hands don't get cold!

In this portrait from a 1994 sketchbook, I suspect James was reading as he is looking down. Because of the colouring, I think I was using a conté pencil to do this sketch.

This drawing of James is from a 2001 sketchbook and I know he was reading because I have written "James reading" on the left page!

In this painting, Daddy Kiss, from 2012 from the Moments series, I have painted James with our new-born baby. Our baby is now heading for 13 years old so it is high time I did some new sketches of my husband!

Eureka!

After spending all last week with blue painter's tape experimenting with various compositions before starting my final Fever Afterimages painting on the composite textured canvas, I woke up on Sunday morning with a lightning bolt inspiration. The textured canvas would be ideal for a cityscape painting that has been hibernating for more than 30 years!

In my minds eye I saw the starting point for this painting as a tiny doodle in a tiny sketchbook. The doodle was from a period of time where I was temping at an office in Toronto. I worked "staggered" hours so that I started before 7 am and finished by 3.30 pm. In the winter it was very dark in the morning when I came to work, the office was empty and I got a view from the windows of buildings gradually appearing as daylight took its time dawning. I was searching through my box of old sketchbooks and couldn't find the doodle of my mind's eye, but found this tiny doodle (about 2.5 inches high) taped into the tiniest imaginable sketchbook. The doodle is from 1981, view from one of the office windows, so it is most likely the doodle I had in mind even if my memory had changed it's appearance!

From that same period, I found a number of tiny doodles taped into a half-size sketchbook (imperial equivalent to A5). I know I was looking out a different window in the same office; the vertical lines represented the lines made by open vertical blinds.

In a larger 8.5"  x 11" sketchbook from 1981 I found some ink sketches of sunrise through this second window which I obviously thought was more interesting!

Was I thinking of a shaped canvas?

The whites scratches were drawn in chalk, sometimes on wet ink.

 In another full-size sketchbook (8.5" x 11") I was working on the same cityscape theme with pastel.

By 1982  I seemed to have more plans to make paintings. These two ink & wash sketches are from a full size sketchbook that year.

This painted and scratched sketch is also from a 1982 full size sketchbook.

This sketch, from the same 1982 sketchbook, only covers about half the page. I used some silver paper and gold tape that I had found in a factory dumpster; the black is burnished crayon. It is this sketch that I am probably most thinking of as suitable for a starting point on the textured composite canvas. Time to get to work1