Fri/Sat/Sun -19/20/21. Day 31/32/33

I taught a life drawing class on sat, yesterday, and it made me really wanted to draw and not teach, they were a really nice group and some beautiful drawings came out, i was pleased. So today i decided to go and draw, i felt inspired to try and use colour and challenge myself [colour is problematic for me [i find it really hard and for landscape - its all too green] although I'm not quite sure this drawing is finished yet. I also turned to black pastel and am really pleased with the 2nd and 3rd drawings. I decided that after today and reflection on Harry's show last weekend i am going to draw again, regularly, and i really like the format of these squares, so for the mean time they will be this size. Although i also think some really large drawings would be good too. I am not going to think about this decision too much and just enjoy the engagement with space, place, materials and process, if i think too much it doesn't make sense. Anyway, perhaps a bit of a cheat but here are 3 days in one

day 31 - string

I had to add this - its not the countryside/my place without this. Others call it Bailer twine, we call it Orange String. Although now we sometimes also get from quadrant bails orange string but to differentiate we call that "thick orange string". We have a poorly ram at the mo and he needed some extra bedding, this is the string from one bail, cut near the knot for ease of pulling and also for next times useage.

wed 17th - kate. day 30

Flys, a Bee and a Daddy Long Legs, all found in my studio today. they were already dead, and the spiders were closing in, but now i have them!

Tues16th - Day 29

It was a windy day today and i went for a walk with my mum to see my dad who was power harrowing, after doing some decorating for my youngest sister. On the way home i picked up these leaves that had fallen from my middle sisters Virginia Creeper that covers our adjoining wall. The reason being, that on the walk i was thinking that landscape is so inherently linked to my family, or in fact we are so inherently linked to it that I wanted to blog about family, but didnt know what to put in the press. The leaves are a compromise, as i cant think what else to put in at the moment and they seemed right at the time, plus they are beautiful and red.

Monday 15th - day 28

'Giant' one of our Kade lambs died this morning, we called it Giant, because it wasnt, in fact i think it might have had a lamb dwarfism. We had talked of keeping it, but hey - Dust to Dust.

I have put a copy of this photo in the press

Saturday/Sunday 13/14th - Kate.

SUNDAY
Found this today in the field - its a cows ear tag [the main number is her - 600227] with the herd number at the top, which tells us where it came from. Both are government required registrations - which means that the passport matches and can be sent with the cow when sold etc... its also handy when you either find cattle or loose cattle, when they sometimes escape, as people can identify them by ringing the BCMS - British Cattle Movement Service. The cows pull them out when they rub and itch, which is where this one comes from. Dad always moans as you have to keep replacing them at £3 ish a pop.








SATURDAY
Im not sure if i am allowed to claim the visitor sheet from Harry's show as mine, as you got the pollen from the pine cones? if its mine then this is my one for today.
if not im going to draw a portrait of andy inspired by the paintings as my entry for today - its in process

23 Mushrooms again

I think Kate must have lulled me into a strange sense of security with her shit picture of a rainbow but then she followed through with a whole series of beautifully thought through days and I felt a bit like I needed to put some effort into a day.  Whenever I see flygarrics it makes me thing of 3 things

1. Laplanders drinking their womens piss to get high without feeling sick and poisoned.

2. The fact that they must have been one of the brightest things in nature before man - I know there are big red flowers but these are crazy mothers

3. Smurths.

I took spore prints you can do this to work out what type of fungus it is - they look nice but give me the slight eebbee geebeesa.

22 news paper

This happens occasionally it remind me of the opening scene in airplane where someone clicks a camera and the image is instantly on a newspaper on the news stand.  The stories of our lives occasionally co-inside with the stories in the news.  My first daugter was the first baby in Sheffield on the 1st Jan 1994 I remember buying the paper the next morning and Kim and Holly were on the front cover - it was a slight let down when this didn't happen with the other two.  The paper got wet on my way back from the shop.

21 Locked in

The police locked me in my house today as they said I could not drive across evidence.  Nobody would tell us what had happened but five shots were heard.  I enjoyed been stuck in all day but was also a bit frustrated. It reminded me of people who are tagged or under house arrests and I thought of the liberties we take for granted.  I stole some of their police tape but they did not arrest me

fri 12/10/12. day 25

I was digging for some potatoes for leek and potato soup and found this. its a representation of a landscape on a piece of broken pot - it made me smile that such a job could turn up such a lovely picture. so i painted it in watercolours and its the second picture.

thursday 11th - day 24. kate

I decided to pulp my page today and remake it - its the closest i could get to landworking/reworking.

day 23 - wed Kate

this is a drawing of my route today when i took the dogs for a walk - its a wayfinding map. i have marked on it all the things i saw or the fields i walked through etc.

day 20 bad day

A bad day picked this at the gate on my way in about ten minutes ago - was going to quote Brect and write somethings missing but thought I would save that for when I felt more was missing.

Day 19 Flygaric

I struggled to draw this but thopught I should as you tried to capture a rainbow

Day 18 Bee Haiku

I felt Like I was running out of steam today as I stayed up late at a party.  I spent about 10 minutes trying to catch a red admiral butterfly in the hood of my coat.  I was going to kill it as an art act. Luckily I was to slow.  The bush was alive with bees and wasps collecting the last of the pollen.  I wrote this Haiku it's not very good but it was certainly a Haiku moment.

Bees Buzzing arounfd Bush
Tried to catch a red admiral
in the hood of my coat.

Kate told me the bush was ivy- I knew it was but hadn't really thought about it.

Day 22 - Kate Tues 9th

Soil from a field on the farm made into mud and rubbed onto the sheet. In this field i found today a let go by mistake balloon too, but didnt feel i could have 2 of those. In the field next to it [not today] i found a white flint hand tool/scraper 5000ish years old sitting on the surface..
I wanted actual land in the press, i reflected on death....

Kate Day 21

Visit to Birmingham to visit Multistory meant we used a handy given away free map - here it is.
This great quote by Perec that i thought of :
This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on a blank page. To describe space to name it, to trace it, like those portolano makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text."

Sunday Day 20: Kate

 I came home today from Sheffield, feeling tired, to find a dead, dried out partially squashed worm stuck to the kitchen floor ..where its come from and why its squashed i'm not sure but am now worrying things are trying too hard to get into the press.? I suppose if i think of a reason to include it, it made me think of things being of one world entering another, and how through the act of being in my kitchen did it make me think of earth and insects and soil etc. Its amazing to look at.
Kate Pahl would say  - "we use looking to think"

kate: day 19 - saturday6/10/12

Another day in the gallery, in the same space , with the same works, one of which is a great Calder mobile - called Maquette for Mobile
I spent the time, amongst talking to people, drawing/cutting out the elements from the piece. Of course it kept moving and so they changed shape and it was almost impossible to capture the elements as they tracked around being affect by the sheer numbers of people passing by. This was an attempt to describe temporality and talk of infinitely changing possibilities and viewpoints when considering landscape.

kate - day 18

like steve it was a busy day and i too reflected on the ruskin archive trip which you can see in the blog section of the poly-technic site, as i was thinking about the beauty inherent in the work and the skill of the makers. it made me want to paint something really beautiful and colourful and perhaps a bug after Edward Donovan but that will have to wait..... Instead, as i was working in Leeds Gallery, based in one small room, for 5 hours, with only very minimalist works for company from the current show - Sculpture Drawing, i did a sculptural drawing of my immediate landscape - a rubbing of the perimeter of the first gallery of the Bernard and Lucy Lyons gallery. Here it is folded as a book, with the floor board lines on the creases - it is beautiful and reveals invisible traces of actions and people......

Day 17 cans

On the same walk I found these cans. they were all in the same place and I wondered if they had fallen out of a bag or been crushed in the street.  Me and Kate talked a lot about aesthetics and the romantic idea of representing nature and how it takes away the essential reality of time and place.  For me these cans are as aesthetically appealing as the feathers or the orchid - just a different aesthetic.

Day 16 Ruskin

Today was the first day I cheated and found something for the day the day after.  I thought that perhaps I should leave the day blank to say - well today the landscape of my life was so busy there was no time to think.  I'm sure there will be blank days but yesterday we visited the Ruskin collection and Louise Pullen took us downstairs to the strong rooms and it felt like I had to put something in about it.  I found this flower on  it's own on the Roman Ridge at Wincobank.  I hope it's an Orchid and I hope that they were growing when both Ruskin and Romans were alive.  Louise told us that Ruskin didn't like to have to many things on display so people would not be distracted.  I felt guilty picking it.

Day 15 festival of the mind

I projected a film for festival of the ind 9 times in the past two weeks on different bits of the city.  I suppose I had a big temporary impact on the landscape. I learned a new term "Trespass By Light."

thurs 4/10/12 -day 17

Blimey - this is turning into a task on top of everything else - I'm trying to get back to doing the page on the day not catching up the following day. so here it is. It talks of landscape needing to be considered as 'perpetually in process rather than in a static or otherwise immutable state'. T Ingold

"To think that's evidence of the first canal dug in England - in the 1600's and it came from Wharf Road in town and went through to Deeping all at the same level, and it wasn't a spur off the river - they must have been some decent surveyors"

Paul Genever


its a thing he said this morning while we were shepherding and driving over it

wed 3/10/12 Day 16 - Kate

i saw this today - it was massive and amazing and lasted for ages - i wanted to get it in the press but didnt/could in that moment know how. I didnt want to put a photo in as they seem to always lack something -reality i suppose - aura some would say! ... so i decided to pick the colours from my paints that are straight from the tube - red,orange,yellow,green,blue,violet..to see if they worked better at capturing it ..... but of course they didnt and its the same problem as the photos - it looks shit, but did make me laugh at me trying representing something so massive and complicated and loaded. i hate how this page looks.

Day 14 - Martins Pills Monday

These are my friends Martins Empty pill packets- he has to take 16 a day.  He has Parkinson disease.  Some days he says he feels locked into his body like the space between him and the outside world has been slowed down.  We run a film festival together.

Kate Day 15 - tuesday 2.10.12

36 finished Lambs to market
6 cull Ewes to market
8 Cows and Calves weaned
1 male Calf castrated
2 Calves ear tagged
33 Bullocks creep fed
Remaining finishing Lambs trough fed
28 Cows and Calves moved to better grass
1 unfit Bull fed and watered making him 1 day closer to the chop
2 stories of sorrow

A black ink border with the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth written on in pencil

Monday 1/10/12 Day 14

Eric the Butchers hot sandwich order sheets, collected today from E Suck Butchers. Parson Cross.
B/E - bacon and egg
B/S/E - bacon,sausage, egg
B/M/E  - bacon, mushroom, egg
B/BS - bacon and brown sauce
and so on................

Day 13 Writing in the street

FOR THE MEN WHO EMPTY BLACK BINS                                          just Look
THIS IS NUMBER 15 AN EMPTY HOUSE
FROM NUMBER 13

Day 12 Tims page

I gave Tim Neal a page while playing poker- he texted me the next day while while I was walking the dog

he said

don't forget the page invite............

I said

No will give you it today

He Said

 Phew!

I said

Are we talking about the same thing?

He said

Yip.

clearly he is looking forward to filling it in - with some kind of crazy esoteric landscape museings