Stage Fright

I’m not keen on climbing ladders, positively scared of rollercoasters and nothing on God’s earth would get me pot holing.

That’s not a definitive list by the way, just a few examples to show that I’m not one of Nature’s bravest. What I will do however is to venture outside my comfort zone and to that end I have embarked on setting up some studio workshop days to allow people to come in and learn about printing lino.

Being an artist is a tough thing to define, but I think part of it is to be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable mentally that is – I definitely need access to a comfortable bed, a bath, oh and Radio Four, the odd glass of wine and a hot dinner. Normally I teeter on the edge by signing up for enormous public art projects with woefully little idea of how to complete them, embarking halfway round the world to condense a seven year apprenticeship into eight weeks and by finding ways of making my everyday printing near technically impossible. This time I’ve been agitated about stuff like where people will park, what they’d like for lunch and how to give them access to the loo and not my jewellery box*.

Finally I realised that I was dithering. It’s madness: I love teaching people about printing, I have the studio space (thanks mainly to my husband and brother-in-law, though I like to think my barrowing of the best part of three tonnes of concrete helped) and people are kind enough to be asking. So I’ll be sending out the booking forms soon and you’ll be able to come and haul on the Albions for yourselves if you wish...

*actually not worth the bother for the serious burglar consisting as it does of what my mum would call ‘schmuck’ – stuff I like, but an insult to any professional fence.

Missing

If the world is divided into those who keep and those who throw away, I am standing, bin bags in hand, at the fanatical end of the throwing away section. I’m not sure when it happened: as a teenager I clearly remember sleeping in a bed which rocked, balanced as it was on a slag heap of under-the-bed detritus, my mother in despair and my cupboards bulging in dangerous and delicate balance. Somewhere along the line there must have been an epiphany since now I’m never happier than after a good clear out – that rush of endorphins that accompanies the appearance of an empty space, however temporary, in this house of male hunter gatherers.

Today it caught up with me big time: a deadly combination of technological ignorance and literal thinking. While I don’t have an iphone, I do have a mobile that will talk to my email (after a delay suggesting a collection of switchboard operators distracted by an unexpected box of chocolates). This morning I decided to clear my phone, getting rid of all the untidy messages in the inbox that I’d downloaded over the past few days while I was travelling, confident that they were now safe on my computer. You must all know where this is going: no, they weren’t safe and yes, they are all permanently gone. I’m left wondering how this could possibly be: imagine if I slung out all the redundant paperbacks in the spare room and came downstairs to find my cookery books gone too...

My husband has been very kind; instead of a well justified victory song and dance avenging his many beloved items I’ve disappeared over the years, he did his best to recover the mails. No joy. If you are one of the victims then I apologise. I’d like to say I won’t do it again, but actually, that empty inbox does look much neater...

Good Housekeeping

The problem, I feel, with the short bout of food poisoning I had recently was that, after a couple of hours lying on the bathroom floor wishing for death, I was forced to the disagreeable conclusion that not only were the gates of Paradise going to remain firmly closed, but that it was high time to sand down and repaint the room’s skirting boards.

One thing we did manage last week was to replace the kitchen floor. It’s not often we get interior decoration wrong, but we’ve had nine years of a pale laminate floor which, since it showed every micro-particle of dirt in glaring detail, would have been a perfect worktop surface in a forensic laboratory (no more government enquiries into lost evidence, however small), but was a disaster for a working kitchen. Now we have cork – swirling chunks of the stuff in cross section a bit like marble, but marginally less expensive. It looks beautiful and is brilliant at concealing dirt; I know this because I only discovered the remains of a dead mouse this morning by treading on it with bare feet.

While our kitchen floor was approved by an architect friend and his wife who came round for dinner, my studio heating was condemned. This may have been because I put the fire on and it made their lovely clothes reek. I am resigned to smelling like a construction worker’s site office, but I realise that ‘Bute’ for men is never going to be a stocking filler. I am however quite safe: my brother has insisted I install a carbon monoxide monitor. This shows a touching concern for his little sister’s safety which I’m pleased to say he never exhibited when I was small and he was my twelve years bigger, marvellous, dangerous and tyrannical babysitter.

Trainspotting

I’ve always liked the London Underground. I cut my teeth on the Metropolitan Line at seven, taking a couple of stops to school and back. By nine I was making the trip to see my dad who lived in Kensington High Street: a neat change at Baker Street and a loop of the Circle Line. By eleven the system was my oyster (though those were the days of singles, returns and seasons only) and I was loose to roam. These days, thanks to my enamels project, I count among my friends the people who cut, spray, print and fire all the London Underground enamel signage which adds a sort of warm and fuzzy feeling to my travels.*

Today I needed all the warm and fuzzy I could get once I left the shelter of the tube: a bleak howling day of sleet and pinched faces. I visited my print supply shop which is a gem. When I started out I found the assistants horribly intimidating with their total lack of eye contact and empathy. Now I know what I am doing, I find their obsessive expertise enormously helpful. I spent a long time with a man who was possibly even more interested in the mulberry fibre content of Japanese paper than me and knew to the drop exactly how much cobalt drier to use for each ink colour.

Travelling back I had to balance two heavy bags, a large and awkward roll of lino and a fiendishly expensive, long and delicate roll of Japanese paper. Like every over-burdened woman extra in every British film ever made about trains, I decided that I needed tea. Unfortunately, on reaching Marylebone, I was unable to do the sensible thing and find a seat, stymie the romantic end of a love affair and exchange some banter with Stanley Holloway. Instead I juggled a boiling pint of earl grey along with everything else up the platform and onto the down train home.

As a footnote, I have finished my experimental woodblock and lino mixed print that I mentioned in my last couple of blogs. You can see it and access the rest of my website here

*Sadly I do sometimes find myself patting enamel signs in a slightly mad sort of way and saying things like ‘I bet that’s one of Ian’s’.

Exposure

Sometimes I despair: I have been printing now for five years give or take. Five years of cleaning down my rollers, palette knives and the sheets of glass for mixing inks. Five years of sloshing white spirit from five litre cartons and mopping it up with paper. Yesterday it finally occurred to me to put some of the white spirit in a spray bottle and, taa daa, cleaning up became a miracle of economy, accuracy and efficiency.

The print I mentioned last time has reached the stage where all the action is down at the bottom of the image. I’m on oil based lino now so using the press. It’s important to have a fair amount of pressure so I packed the press with additional paper and was heaving the handle across with my feet braced on its feet (imagine Mammy lacing Scarlett into her corset Gone With The Wind style). The print quality was still very patchy. In desperation I went to get my husband (now he works from home he is open to such abuses) to give it some more welly. Instead he considered the print for a moment, fished a small scrap of lino from the bin and positioned it at the top end of the block. Instant printing success: his small adjustment stopped the block from rocking away from the plate. His brains triumphing over my brawn.

It could be that the cold has addled my brain. My dad, supplier of the dehumidifier, also supplied the genes for a total inability to generate my own warmth. I get up, think of a sensible number of clothes to wear, double it and still I cool through the day like a human storage heater, needing to be reheated in the bath by evening. It’s tiring and it’s not great for my image. Van Gogh had the romance of candles stuck to his hat while he painted the wheeling stars in the French night sky. Turner, I bet, looked heroic in a sou'wester while lashed to the mast and sketching his storms at sea. I, on the other hand, resemble the sensible pensioner in the Government information films about winter cold; the one who’s wearing those oh so practical layers, fleecy slippers and a warm knee blanket. I too have the warming mug of tea and the hot water bottle. I’m even wearing the cat...

A little rusty...

While the rest of Britain may be missing work days through snow, I have found that my studio is easily warmer than my home and my productivity is rocketing. It has insulation and double glazing; our house does not. Indeed our house, in the best turn of the century tradition, demands roaring fires in every room and the generous consumption of fossil fuels. Sadly its ambitions are all now bricked up bar one and the only echoes of Edwardian largess remaining are the five chilblains I’m currently nursing.

In Japan I learnt to cut linden plywood. The masters cut wild cherry which is not only frighteningly expensive, but very hard and it lacks the neat guideline of reaching a new layer of wood to tell me that I’ve cut deeply enough. Here I raided my husband’s carpentry supplies and ended up with builder’s birch ply. In a fit of optimism I decided on a starter piece that a) was at least twice as big as anything I’d tried before, b) combined water based woodblock with oil based lino cut (another first for me) and c) used up paper I already had irrespective of its suitability. I think the cheapness of the birch ply had a lot to do with my insouciance. So far it’s going ok: the birch splinters like hell and the paper wasn’t perfect, but a Japanese landscape is emerging and I will keep you posted.

The only glitch in the studio is humidity: the butane heater throws out moisture and my huge chilly iron press is the perfect condenser. Fortunately my dad bought me a dehumidifier for Christmas. I’d like to say this was an act of genius on his part, but actually the cheque came with a note to ‘treat yourself to something pretty’: I just added ‘fantastic to save your work and your press’ to the end of his message. I’m hoping that I can polish the superficial rust off the Albion before the Open Studios and embarrassing questions start.

Pipes and Quiet

I’m not very big on shopping which is an unfortunate character flaw for anyone visiting Tokyo. Shopping there is a serious business: department stores have their own stations on the underground while Japan Railways own department stores in return; full size roller coasters twist through the high rise malls, illuminations flash, people throng and the noise is beyond imagining. Throw in a couple of replicants and you get the picture. Raised in central London, I suddenly found I was a village child in the big city for the first time.

I blame the subsequent feelings of confusion and deep longing for some quiet for my hiding in the Tobacco and Salt museum in Shibuya district. I’m even less of a fan of cigarettes than I am of retail therapy having spent years in the dense fug of my stepfather’s sixty-a-day habit, but this is a surprisingly charming museum. Miraculously it has a fabulous collection of Edo period woodblock prints along with a worrying encyclopaedic collection of fag packets.

The museum also revealed* that the washi paper I’ve been using and the same sort that I watched being made at the paper mill is largely responsible for Japan’s excellent record for preserving documents. Washi is phenomenally strong when wet: when fire threatened, documents were thrown into the nearest water to be rescued later. The damp paper printing technique (the cause of so much angst on my part) means the pigment dyes the paper rather than sitting on the surface and so remains legible after the dunking, the paperwork restored perfect nick when dried. Neat eh? And just as well with all those smokers around…

* bizarrely this was the only information available in English so I was unhampered by any serious consideration of the history of Japan’s tobacco production (last visited while in Mrs Smith’s upper fifth geography class.)