Clownery at Ollaberry.

I'm pleased with the way Lisa at Ollaberry has displayed the clowns. You can see how they stand out from the wall a little in this shot, that's the little balsa frames I made on the back.

Oh, it is nice to have exhibited some of the clownery at last.

little tower block pin

little tower block pin, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

I was making balsa wood frames for the backs of the clown collages, to make them nice and sturdy and stable and hangable. And I was ending up with random little off-cuts, not much use for anything, but a shame to throw away. I'd been thinking of making badges for ages, and I started whiting up the off-cuts with ink and drawing words and stuff on them. Rather fun to make, and wear. Indeed, I did wear this one for a few days, just to road test it. I thought I'd stick this one on etsy for a couple of months and see what happened. If no-one buys it, I'll just wear it myself again.

unespied

unespied, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

Five of my clown collages, NOW showing, live, in Ollaberry!

Please feel free to go see, if you're in the area:-
Ollaberry Interior Design Studio,
146 Busby Road
Clarkston
Glasgow
G76 8BH

Exciting times!

Wear the Mask

Someone pointed me in the direction of the RedBubble site, and it seems pretty attractive with all that affordable printing of my stuff without me having to organize it. I'll need to obtain some pennies soon though to do the old quality control check and perhaps some photography...

Wear the Mask was a drawing from an All the Young Nudes night. The model wore a welding mask; props are de rigueur some nights. It's never dull to draw at the Flying Duck!

ibis

ibis, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

I love the ibis shaped egyptian ibis casket in the Burrell Collection. It has such balance and poise.
I've drawn it a few times now, but this is the first one with colour.

In fact, I don't tend towards colour much at all, and this is a bit of a deviation for me. A lot of the time I can 'see' the colours in a drawing without having to manually add them. If that makes any sense. However, this one really needed a gold body to work, and once I'd painted that in, the bronze head, tail, and legs just screamed out for some variants of Marine Blue. I drew other stuff at the Burrell Collection that day, but I like this one best, it just pops.

One continuous 0.35 rotring line. FW inks to fill.

football on her shoulder

football on her shoulder, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

Spent a lovely day setting up interestingly placed drawing shots. The etsy success emails advise getting the best photographs you can of your stuff, so I've really tried. Time will tell if this helps sales...

more life drawing

more life drawing, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

I usually draw on A5, but on tuesday I decided to branch out and draw on nothing smaller than A3. Most sheets were A2. It felt smashing, big sweeping curves, and room for detail on fingers and toes.

If I carry on like this though, it will play merry hell with my storage solutions. I need to cut out the dead wood...

Working on balsa.

I've been working with balsa, it's bigger than paper somehow; can be inked up, sanded, made smooth, drawn on, inked again, collaged on. It stands on its own. These two balsa blocks hint at mini canvases for me. It seems to change the modality of the drawings.

My work sometimes occupies a frustrating no man's land between applied and pure. All the work I make that doesn't have anything to do with another text feels to me like it sits in some space between them, not really one thing or the other in the world. I don't think I should worry about this. I should probably just get on with it.

Coffee and Water T-Shirt

So, a bit of drawing with a coffee, combined with some marketing type thought, and the coffee and water t-shirt was born.

This is my friend Clare modelling it for the shoot. And it's my first live item on my new etsy shop! I'm excited!

Notes on the artist's reality.

Kind of picking up where I left off last year. I'd got a copy of Mark Rothko's The Artists Reality, and done my usual close reading technique of rewriting most of the book onto sheets of scrap paper folded into quarters. Which G. thinks is mad. Possibly I should just write all over the book itself when I'm studying. But I rarely can actually take a pencil into a book. I just can't.

I was lassoed by this book's title. I've been interested in the relationship of the drawing as a representation, to the experience of the subject through the senses as another representation. My expectations were a little too specific for this text, and as Christopher Rothko points out in the introduction, this is not a finished polished text. It has been published postumously, with minimal editing, from a draft manuscript that Rothko might or might not have finished himself and attempted to publish. He had certainly stuck it in a drawer for twenty years without doing so. I'm not sure we can know precisely how this manuscript functioned for its writer. It was written early on in Rothko's career, before his development of the abstract squares which are so strongly associated with him. It was written when he had spleen to vent; artistically frustrated, and in an unhappy marriage with a more successful designer.

I found it to be romantic in its perception of other artistic ages, and bitter in its description of applied, common, or popular art. I had hoped for discussion about abstraction and its edges, although with hindsight, this was not the text to look for it in. I wonder if there are edges. If all representation isn't in some way an abstraction from what it is possible to experience.

Jerwood

It was June. June is about the Jerwood Drawing Prize submission. In some ways, all my drawing endeavour centres itself around this point. Every year, every June now is about the Jerwood. The first time I submitted something was in 2004, the year I graduated. I put in a life drawing, and was rejected. I didn't submit again until 2007, when my little drawing called Trio made it to the finals. Every year since, but no more finals.

It had been a crazy eight months, November to May this time, so I'm pleasantly surprised I had anything to submit to the Jerwood this year. Neither made it to the finals. They're still two of the drawings I've been most happy with recently. Hey ho.

The drawing at the top is an extension of some of my recent collage work, with collage worked on top of collage. I went out especially to buy the shade of yellow ink for the hat. It seemed to me there were many different narratives that could be placed upon that hat in this image.

I had been stuck in a corner near the end of an All the Young Nudes night, so some of the other drawers got into the second drawing. Again I was toying with exclusion in this one. And the blanket was magenta pink, not red like it is here.

kneeling

kneeling, originally uploaded by Donna Nicholson-Arnott.

I'm thinking of making this blog about drawing, and things connected to drawing. It's very much under construction at the moment, and I'm newish to blogging. I'm on flickr.

I've been making some life drawing recently at the Flying Duck's club night All the Young Nudes. It's been great to pop along for two hours, drink some peppermint tea, and draw.

This drawing is one of two that were included in an All the Young Nudes group exhibition, as part of the Space Made Live event hosted by Small Media Large, The Arthouse, 752-6 Argyle Street, Glasgow, on the 12th and 13th June 2010.