Art

A little bit of news – I opened a threadless shop!

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Over the last few months I have been working on ideas which would enable me to earn a bit of side income from my art and interests in creativity. I have been looking at different options and have been particularly inspired by the prolific Sableyes and his Little Fears project.

Having looked through various options I’ve decided to follow his example and dip my toe in the water with a Threadless Artist Shop. I’m a bit excited about this as it feels like I have been able to come to the end of a project with an actual product out there in the ‘real world’. I have picked a small selection of products including high quality prints and a few bags – please go over and have a look if you are inclined to do so.

So, drum roll…. here is the Magpie at Midnight artist shop, where you can buy my stuff.

Working with new materials

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I’ve been working with some new materials recently with I’ve been enjoying. Alongside working with cut paper I have been experimenting with cutting cotton. The problem I had was that cutting cotton was that the edges fray, and I particularly like the strong lines and silhouettes produced by paper cut. 

I have managed to fix this problem! I have been coating the cloth with a PVA style glue (I am using this Modge Podge but I don’t think it matters which brand you pick). Apply with a paint brush and make sure you use a plastic sheet to protect your furniture.  This then needs to dry for a good 24 hours before you can cut with scissors. It’s rather satisfying to peel the cloth from the plastic. One side will be shiny while the other will retain the cloth texture. I’ve been using a paper stencil and pencil on the shiny side to trace out the shape I wanted. Then I can cut using scissors as I do with paper.

I like the effect produced – I think the combination of textures works really well.


A limited collection of prints of my are are now available here at threadless.

Mark Thomas, The Red Shed, Telling Stories and Emotional Truth

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Yesterday we went to see The Red Shed by Mark Thomas as Battersea Arts Centre. We go there on a fairly regular basis. We’ve only started going since a fire consumed the roof of their great hall. They are currently undergoing a painstaking restoration of the great hall, and each time we go it seems there is a little more progress, a little more of the building revealed, which in itself is quite exciting. Because of the fire, we have always seen shows in the much smaller council chamber upstairs, which is small and intimate, and possibly my favourite place to see new writing in London.

Yesterday we were seated right in the front row and so were less then five meters from Mark Thomas as he performed The Red Shed. I loved it. You should see it. I’ll say that upfront. He delivered the story of his relationship with a building known as ‘The Red Shed’, a socialist club in Wakefield. He drew on his own personal history of activism to tell the story of the Red Shed and the people who go there. A winding narrative that took a tour through his activism during miners strike in the North of England. Effectively, he gave a one man performance, but he also bought 6 members of the audience to sit on stage and had them hold up a series faces made of board to invoke different characters through the show. I really like this very stripped down form of storytelling, where the narrative is allowed to do most of the work.

Through out the piece he spoke about the importance of stories. That stories are important in allowing us to remember our history, and so understand who we are. The stories that are told about us can come to define who we are, we may come to live within those stories and that they may come to direct what we do in the future. For this reason it important that the stories we tell about people are true. He made an important point about how the stories about the working class in Britain are frequently told badly or incorrectly, over simplistically, or simply not told at all. Politically this has had great and damaging impact on the working class in the UK. The realities of their lives, their needs and anxieties have been ignored, lost, misunderstood and ultimately somehow seen as irrelevant by many of us. By failing to make space for these stories, and by failing to recognise them as important, we have failed understand, and have failed to see the people and communities behind them as important.

After the show he was in the foyer signing books and I wanted to speak with him but couldn’t quite arrange my thoughts to do so. I was quite upset coming out of the performance. Much of of what he said resonated strongly with me and I wish I could sit and talk with him about this. Some of the documentary and playwriting work I am trying to do is around mental health and disability. These are complicated stories that are frequently seen in the news in only their most simplistic and ‘tragic’ form. My starting point now I think is to try to work with the people whose story I am interested in, so that we tell the story together, rather than have me tell their story for them. I’m not quite sure how I’ll pull this off, yet.

Stories have an emotional truth. We believe or don’t believe them based on whether we feel they are true, so if something feels true it is easy to slip a few lies through with that feeling. In fact it is possible to cynically slip through a lot of lies if you can attach them to an existing feeling, which can have awful consequences. A lot of the racist propaganda emerging from the leave campaign for Brexit last year did just this, and now we have racist hate crimes on the rise. This is why it is important when tell stories about real people, that we make sure what is in those stories is true.

Poor boyfriend: a practice

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Copyright Rose Thompson

So here’s a little gif based on the poor boyfriend concept. Made using Adobe Animate CC 2017.

I’ve been using a Wacom tablet made by Bamboo. It’s an old device (I think the newest version is this one here), I bought it a while ago but only just started using it properly recently so I’m still getting used to the whole drawing while looking at the screen thing so some of these drawings are a bit ropey.

Feeding ourselves: Vegan food, art, and all the treats

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It’s been quite an up and down week. I’ve been feeling quite tired and grumpy, and like I’m not really ready to go back to work tomorrow. I’m feeling better now, but was feeling pretty grim at the beginning of the week, and have been thinking about what has happened between now and then to improve things. It’s has led me to reflect a bit on the things we can do (or not do) to look after our selves when things begin to feel a bit stressful.

The main things that have been helpful have been focused around feeding the creative bits of me. To start with we went to see exhibitions of work by both Robert Rauschenberg and the William Kentridge. I found both exhibitions interesting and though provoking, but the exhibition by William Kentridge was particularly inspiring for me. This is because he used lots of film, narratives and animation in his work, which are also things that I like to play with. He has talked about using a ‘stone age’ approach to film making, and many of the pieces in the exhibition used these techniques, with beautiful effect. From a technical point of view there was little in his work that I probably couldn’t have a go at myself with enough time and effort. Seeing that kind of work on a large scale has been a trigger for me to think more widely about my own practice and where that could go.

We’ve also been out for several good length walks, one through the centre of London and one through some local woods. I tend to find my thinking is most productive when walking about, there is something about the rhythm of walking that works for me. A walk in the woods can really help me work through the kinks in an old idea, or snatch hold of and develop a new one, so this was a helpful thing to do.

Finally we’ve both been paying a lot more attention to what we put in our bodies, as we are a week into Veganuary at the magpie nest. We have had one vegan fail, but as this is time of learning for us I think it’s ok. One of the brands of gluten free bread we’ve used for some time uses egg as a binding agent and we didn’t think to check the label until we were half way through the loaf. What we have found is that we are having to think more creatively about what we cook, as a number of our ‘go-to’ meals are animal-product heavy. In putting limits on what we can cook, we are exercising our creativity in this way too, which is fun and an unexpected benefit.

Finally, we’ve also been indulging in some vegan treats. My boyfriend bought me a box of these chocolates from Booja Booja for Christmas, which are dairy free and particularly yummy. They have quite an intense chocolate flavour and I find one or two are satisfying enough so while they are on the pricy side, you can eek them out a bit. They come in a really beautiful hand painted box (see the picture above) which is particularly appealing to my arty/crafty creative side. I have been enjoying them anyway.

 

New Year Plans

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It’s the beginning of a New Year, I hope everyone is feeling positive about making this year kinder and more inclusive than the last. I don’t tend to make New Year Resolutions as I don’t feel like they work particularly well for me. I tend to see my self as a work in progress, and in need of far more regular check-ins and course corrections. However it is a good time to take stock of what was achieved in the previous year and make some loose (and less loose) plans for what to do in the one to come. On Christmas day I wrote this post about actively practicing kindness and holding onto liberal, pro-diversity principles in the face of what feel like grim times. I feel like this is a pretty important perspective to go into the new year with.

Here in the Magpie nest we have a few other immediate plans:

Dry January – we did this last year (and did dry October too) and found that we felt much better for giving our bodies a bit of a rest from the sauce, so we are going to be doing that again this year. On both occasions we found that our wallets emerged in a better state too, so that’s a bonus.

Money – we are going to try to save up a bit of a financial cushion this year as we feel that we may want to start thinking about making some lifestyle changes of the ‘work less, live leaner’ variety pretty soon – it will be good to go into those with a bit of cash behind us as we work things out. I’ve been inspired by reading some of the posts at Frugal Health for Life in approaching this endeavour and look forwards to reading more of these.

Veganuary – We’ll be trying to go vegan for January. This morning we had our first vegan breakfast of home made baked beans and avocado on toast. It was yummy. I have to be a bit careful about eating well as I have a health condition that could lead to diabetes (I don’t want that), and my partner is gluten intolerant, so there will be some nutritional kinks to work out as we go along. I’m not sure how well we’ll manage this one, and imagine that after January we may well settle into something that looks a lot more like vegetarianism, but my partner and I are doing this together so it feels like a fun project to work on.

We’ve been watching quite a few documentaries on a range of things ranging from global warming, to animal cruelty, to many health issues, to the nutrient poor foods that have become dominant in the market, to antibiotic resistance. When you look at major contributors to all of these problems, the road seems inevitably to lead back to industrialised, factory style farming of animals. We’ve hit the point where we have a stack of reasons to give veganism a try, and only our own laziness as a reason not too. We generally cook lots of vegetarian meals from scratch anyway, so I feel we’ll get on ok with that side of things. We used to eat lots of bacon, and couldn’t imagine not having a bacon breakfast on a Saturday, but we’ve not really eaten that way for a while, and haven’t really missed it. We have been phasing out other types of meat and lots of forms of dairy for some time, but I think I may struggle with not having eggs. I really like eggs. Eggs could be a problem.

Building a creative business – I’m still exploring ideas for this. I’ve not even begun to think about starting trading yet, but I think I have some good ideas now for a set of art pieces, and may be in a position launch something later this year. Until then I’ll continue to highlight any useful resources that I stumble across on my route there.

Other creative stuff – I have a play and a film to finish, and ideas for another play, and another film (that relate to each other) to get going with. And a little animated series. Plus some art. Lots and lots of art. Oh gosh, what a list.

Mental health – I’m going to reduce my hours in the day job in April, I’m really looking forwards to having a whole day a week to myself to work on creative stuff. Let’s see how that works out.

That’s about it for a round up, but who knows what other opportunities may crop up as we go along. What New Year Plans do you have?

Christmas creativity: Something pretty to do with those empty booze bottles

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I hope everyone is enjoying some down time over the festive season. We’ve had some family staying. They left today and we have a night off this eve before another round of family arrives tomorrow. I’ve not had much time for creative things but was able, in an idle moment, to put these beauties together. This is super easy so I wanted to share this with any one who had been working up a recycling mountain, which you can now confidently rename as a ‘stockpile of craft materials’.

So you will need:

Empty glass bottles or jars – you want to wash these out and let them dry thoroughly before you do this. Keep the corks, screw lids or wire cages. You’all need those later.

A small/ light weight string of fairy lights. I have been using theses Starry String Lights from YIHONG. I really like these and had them in the house because I bought a load in for a completely different project. They are a 2m strand of tiny LED lights sealed in blobs of glue on delicate copper wire, attached to a battery pack fitted with an on-off switch. The sales info suggests the batteries should last for 72 hours. I’ve not had these going for that long to test that out yet but we’ve had them on for most of Christmas and they are still very bright. The batteries are replaceable. These lights are designed to be worn in clothing so don’t use a high enough voltage to cause a shock. I would avoid using fairy lights that draw power for the mains – I’m not at all sure how you would use these safely with bottles that have metal caps or lids.

What you do:

You want to uncoil the length of the fairy lights and then feed them slowly into your glass bottle. I’ve deliberately let mine coil up in a very uneven pattern as I think this looks quite magical but I’m sure that the more ingenious among you could find a way to get them to sit evenly in the glass. I’ve been really lazy about capping these off, and have just pushed the tops back in or on over the wire – mine stick out a bit. For a better result you probably want to slice a channel down one side of the cork for the wire to sit in before you push the cork back in. You can also screw screw caps over the fine copper wire if you run it down the outside of the neck of the bottle. And that’s it. Done. 

Happy Christmas. 

Putting things down, picking things up, starting again

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a slow return to working on two projects that I started last year. At the beginning of last year I took a course in documentary film making and I took two courses in play writing. I’ve been interested in the process of documentary filmmaking for quite a while. A lot of my formal training has been in research methods and in the social sciences, and have some frustrations with the way that academic work gets communicated (or doesn’t) to the wider world. At the time this seemed like a good thing to understand a bit better, and a good fit with my existing skill set. I took the play writing course because I was stuck with a novel I was working with and thought it would be helpful to look at it from a different approach. But then I got hooked and decided I had to write a play, obviously. And I did, sort of.

But there were problems. The film school that I enrolled with decided to change the dates of their course without really giving me much notice and I ended up trying to do both things at the same time, and have a full time job too. It worked for a while, but then I went through some crappy nonsense in my private life, and started a new job, and it didn’t really work anymore. Up until the beginning of September I’d not really worked on either project for 12 months and was not feeling great about that as I really wanted to finish something well enough to send it ‘somewhere’. I also have a film maker in my family, my dad, who kept gently reminding me that I should, ‘Work on my film’. And he’s right, I should be working on my film, because I got lucky with a really good story and could do something really interesting with it.

It took me a bit of time to work out what the blocks were on continuing with both projects, but I think I have a list now.

  1. Space – I was living with a friend of mine at the time and didn’t really have a huge amount of space. I’m kind of messy, and didn’t want to leave my mess all over his flat, so I ended up with a kind of squashed psychological space to work in.
  2. Teaching style – on the doc film course at least I felt a little as though I didn’t gel with the tutor. I think she’s great film maker, and loved talking to her about films. But she’s very much from the observational documentary style school. I wanted to work with other artistic things, like animation and set up pieces of film. I think I felt at the time that I wasn’t really able to make ‘my’ film so I did’t make a film at all.
  3. Time and Timing – the timing was bad, I was sad and exhausted. I was still getting used to living in London having moved from Cardiff, which is a much smaller, calmer city and one that I knew very well. I did’t have time to feed my creative self and that meant I couldn’t really put the work in that was needed.
  4. The fraud police – would anything I produced actually be as good as I thought they could be?

Above are some images I finished off yesterday that will part of an animation for the documentary. I’ve been writing new scenes for the play. So what’s happened? What has changed? I can think of two things that have really worked in ‘unblocking’. The first is that I cut out a load of things that I was doing, including socialising with some people that kind of drained me a bit, and carved out that time for doing creative stuff. Small, achievable projects first, at which step by step led me back to the ‘big’ ones. I’ve also come to realise that part of my creative process involves giving projects long ‘down’ periods as this enables me to come back to them with a new perspective. So not working on either project for a year doesn’t feel un-natural with hindsight.

Second, and I think this is the big one. I moved in with the boyfriend. We got a place together that gives me more space, and that helps. But I think the real key here is him. He’s constantly and consistently supportive, and frequently cooks the dinner so I can get on with something else. He’s such a tidy organised person, and yet he tolerates my creative mess everywhere, and he does it all with humour. He’s always happy to listen to my ideas, and talk to me about that, while never once said ‘you should do this’. I think that’s enabled me to regain some creative confidence. I had been told in the past that picking the right partner was really important, and I had been a bit dismissive of that, because at the time I was single and thought I could do it all myself. Turns out that advice was pretty good advice, after all.