nineveh_uk

You know how it is, shopping with thought and consideration for some specific art or craft material*, and then whoops! Your hand/brain slips and the basket now also contains something completely different as well. So I am still buying some acrylic paint and paper/canvas as my art class will be doing acrylics the next few weeks, but also popped in some watercolour burnt sienna (extremely useful for everything, can't believe I haven't already got a tube only a very used half-pan) and Daniel Smith lunar black (extremely niche, but exactly what I want for a volcanic landscape painting I am thinking of).

The last few months have been rather challenging, but one thing that has been great is that I signed up for an art class run by the local FE college, hugely enjoyed the first term, and signed up for the second. At the beginning of the term, we were asked about our experience and why we had chosen it, and I said that I was outsourcing my self-discipline so that it would force me to focus on things I never do in my own time, practice, and learn new techniques.

So it has proved. I've done very little other art on account of it taking up this space in my brain and free time, but that's fine. I suspect that without it I'd have done even less. It's Wednesday evenings, I can drive and park there and not get cold/wet, and the tutor is really good. It was badged as a mixed ability class, and she's really good at lessons that work for class members of a range of previous experience and ability, and giving people the support and guidance that they individually need so that everyone enjoys themselves and learns. Moreover, while it's easy to sneer (and I have done) at the fact that local authority hobby classes now need to have "learning objectives" etc for their funding, in fact the tutor's application of it works really well in providing structure to the course and individual classes, so that what we are doing is contextualised both as a technique and in terms of art history/modern painters**.

In short, I have ended my long-standing feud with pastels, though I will only be using them at home when it is warm enough to work outside, have actually done perspective exercises for the first time in my entire life, and found that a still life drawing exercises are fun, actually.*** I find myself concentrating like hell. And I'm about to have a go at acrylics, which I have only tried once a long time ago, and which offer the opportunity to do something different than I usually do. Insert second set of grandiose thoughts about what I could do with them. Basics first!

Moral of the story: I nearly didn't sign up because I thought it would be too tiring. It is too tiring, but it's worth it.

*Or in IKEA, whatever 3 small things are on your list.

**Likes them. Looks up artist and sees price/discovers they are Canadian. Oh well. But also does feel a bit inspired by seeing what people are doing and how they are doing it.

***Though last week when I thought it would be fun to do the odd one at home when I just wanted to do some art and didn't know what, my brain rapidly went "Yes, you could do a big complex mixed media piece of these objects that are also in your home and it would be interesting to have the objects and the painting in conversation in the space together." NO!!! I can just draw one tiny vase in coloured pencils on a sheet of WH Smith cartridge paper, actually.

I felt very tired much of the weekend, evidently got a slight bug (again). But yesterday morning I got my act together and did a bit of painting, and had a go at a Lena Gemzøe style landscape, applying paint to very wet paper with a plastic card. It's a bit overworked, but all in all I am pretty satisfied with the attempt and it was fun and low stress, and interesting to see it evolve a long way away from what I originally thought I was going for.

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After a pretty duff four weeks things are looking up. I did three part days back a work last week, and managed it OK - no headache or extreme fatigue - and am continuing to build up hours this week and next, with a view to being full time by the end of October. Thank goodness for reasonable sick leave policies, but also for various reasons enlightened self-interest has clearly struck and this is a much better option for the office than doing too much and being off for ages.

I spent the weekend with antisoppist. The travel and a two hour historical walk round her village, plus people, were possibly a bit much, but it was a lovely weekend and also involved not doing my own cooking. I was very relieved on Sunday that on Friday I had felt too tired after a poor night's sleep for it to be responsible to drive, so took the train and was thus spared a return journey in pouring rain on the M5. Even the trains ran reasonably!

Then today I was in town in the morning and had to stop at the shops on the way home for some food basics plus toothpaste that is not quite so excessively tingly, and - inspired by fiendish jealousy of antisoppist's Eldest Daughter's charity shop Toast jeans - went into Oxfam by the bus stop, and emerged with a pair of unworn-looking winter cords from Poetry that were exactly the sort of thing that wanted, down to the colour, for £14.99 instead of £129, and a perfect condition (with original envelope, clearly a souvenir from Japan that had been in a drawer) modern woodblock reproduction print of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake for £12.99. Obviously as a modern reproduction these are neither rare nor particularly valuable, but they are considerably more than £12.99 in the UK, which does not have a huge ukiyo-e market (oh, the frustration of seeing what is available cheaply in the US and indeed Australia!). It will cost me more than that to frame it to match another one I have from the same series.

There are many things I haven't done, and which I will need to find energy for this weekend from ironing to sorting out a new manhole cover. But I'm also discovering a bit of a brain for writing (it's fair to say that He Who Drowned the World did not exactly reduce my desire/need for all the fix-it fic), even if a lot of free time at the moment is gently reading, TV, or a jigsaw. Outside the windows, it is definitely early autumn and the evenings are rapidly darkening, but since I don't want any more high twenties weather I'm not too sorry, and though the peaches and strawberries are going over, it is time for plums. It is also time for Yuletide nominations! Truly, winter approaches.

Seeing the price of a 5ml tube of paint I'm buying expressed in price per litre* is very disconcerting. £8.50 for a tube that will last years sounds great. £1700 per litre sounds terrifying. 5ml is more manageable, though now I really hope I like it. I am fed up of unsatisfactory sap greens - I'm convinced the Winsor and Newton formula has changed since I was a teenager, it's not simply that I am having to relearn colours - and this looks like it will be fun in landscapes.

I have found myself watching watercolour painting videos on YouTube and now I have to have a go at abstracts. This artist, Lena Gemzøe, has some really beautiful ones of northern landscapes, and is fascinating to watch at work.

*I thought I'd see how much it was on Amazon,who had it priced up. Too Much in more than one way, it turns out.

Having some errands to do in town last weekend, I decided that I would allow myself some fun as well, and spend a bit of energy on the Ashmolean Museum's autumn exhibition, my last opportunity before it closes early in the new year Tokyo: Art and Phototgraphy (Guardian review). Sunday at 10 meant it was pleasantly quiet. I was the second person in, allowing not only for less worry about Covid-19, but being able to spend ages looking at the individual woodblock prints. I was really glad that I did. l The prints were my favourite, which wasn't at all surprising. I haven't seen that many top quality ones up close in person and it was striking how different this was from even good book reproductions, with a distinct materiality from the layers of ink and embossing of the paper, and how the woodgrain has been used to create effects. But the contemporary art and photography was also interesting. I'd attended a talk with some artists earlier in the week* that had included thoughts about their works on display and the process of creating them, which since I know very little about contemporary art, was really helpful, and I found the whole exhibition gauged to exactly what I wanted just at the moment. Truly heroic efforts were expended only to purchase one postcard rather than all of the shop.

Worth it for anyone in Oxford still willing to risk the oncoming storm of omicron. I've got to admit, I'm not sure I'd have been risking it this weekend, when a positive test would rule me out of Christmas. The only things missing from the shop were themed facemasks.** Perhaps they had sold out.

*Which I spent much of being fascinated by the process of seeing the interpreter at work.

**I interrupt these thoughts with "FFP2s are not one size fits all!" Which is why I spent some time this weekend cutting up one and some surgical masks to add filters to cloth masks that don't leave me with enormous gaps round the sizes. Apparently masks should "seal" to the face, to which I can only say that the platonic ideal of a face for which this is possible is not mine.

About 10 days ago a university friend with a shared interest in opera sent me a link on Facebook consisting of the words "Looks relevant to your interests" and a link to a friend of hers tweet that Amazon had a special offer on a Frederica von Stade CD compilation for £4.75. Reader, I bought it and now I finally have a CD recording of her singing Non so piu and not simply a VHS.

It's nice to think that my teenage self may have been terribly wrong on some subjects*, but was thoroughly right on others, and fun sometimes to think of new things that I've found since as something that I would have loved had I known they existed (or they actually existed) when I was fifteen. Which is why I spent a bit of time this weekend listening to my new CD and doing watercolour exercises** from a recently-acquired book, Painting Landscapes from Your Imagination, to learn some proper techniques for all those Tolkien-esque mountains I used to spend hours on. It's a terrific book that I only wish I'd known about in 1996. My purple sky about Minas Tirith/Rivendell/with dragons in it will be a higher quality purple sky!

*Especially every single time my mother had a different opinion on clothes to me. In my defence, it was the early 90s.

**The great thing about art is that much of it can be done sitting down. Even better, watercolour needs to dry so what would normally be a slightly frustrating wait becomes a useful break.

It being Mother's Day next weekend, I spent an hour this afternoon attempting to concoct a card. Unfortunately, while - being seasonal - the aesthetic I was going for spring floral, the one I ended up with was 'naff tissue box'. I shall try again tomorrow. In the meantime, it is emergency brownies time.

I have been measuring up the following for an order with an online picture frames shop:

- 1 picture already mounted and just needing a frame.
- 1 picture with a frame but needing a new mount.
- 1 picture needing mount and frame.
- 2 pictures needing mount and frame, and that I want a double mount for.

Lets just say that I now really understand why people go to framing shops and let the professionals do it all.

I went into town yesterday for the first time since March, in the hope that I might be able to pick up one or two things from the shops IRL before all of the students are back, particularly some piano music which seems to be tricky to buy online without it being too difficult, too easy, or just not quite what you were after.

But I also took the opportunity to go to Sanders of Oxford to look at their range of Japanese prints, because having been reading a bit about prints over the summer, I wanted to see something IRL. Not that I've never seen them IRL before, including in the shop, but because this time I know just a tiny bit about them, which is more than I had previously. Alas, the tastes I have developed are both conventional and expensive! Why do I have to love shin-hanga landscapes instead of random minor C19 kabuki prints? But there was no hope: apparently Japanese artists have discovered the secret of representing snowy landscapes magnificently, and I am a sucker for a good snowy landscape.

TL:DR I want to buy all the Hasui Kawase*. Particularly the ones with red shrines in the snow. The damn things look nice enough on-line, but in person they look so much better. Alas, they come with a prince to match their looks, but help is at hand! Because they are prints, there are respectable modern reprints editions. So one day, when I know a bit more and can pick exactly what I want, I am going to get one. I am not going to be a collector, so I don't care if it is 1941 vs 2019 if the latter is good quality.

In the meantime I bought myself the £10 Cecily Mary Barker poppy fairy, because I have loved it since I was 7 (she had the hair I wanted, i.e. long), so why shouldn't I have a copy?

In the meantime, the freezer is defrosting, I have gone through the post, and I am going to watch the rest of the men's road race in the World Cycling championships and draw something myself.

*And the snowy Yoshida Toshi.

This year I've been enjoying a return to art as something I am able to pursue when I'm not feeling great. It's something that can be picked up, put down, done according to the strength available at the time, and crucially does not require looking at a screen. So over the past few weeks in between lying on the sofa, sitting in the garden, and keeping abreast of the washing up, I dedicated some time to carving my next linocut print, a second skier, and over the weekend I printed it. I am very pleased with the way it turned out, with a good sense of movement. It's a design I might well return to for a multi-coloured print in future, although first, it being mid-April, I think I shall do something less snowy. As I put things away yesterday I reflected on how very much I had enjoyed it, it's definitely a medium that works for me.

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