Re-Creating, Part One

I've taken two other "hands-on" classes at the Esker Foundation: one that let participants build with corrugated cardboard, and the other that built a tunnel book.

Some of the pieces in the cardboard workshop, where we were encouraged to build our fantasies, were amazing construction projects: rocket ships, public art models, you-name-it. Mine was, well, pretty boring, in comparison: I built a live-work studio, with the studio end having a full skylight for a roof.

These days, that's my idea of a fantasy.



But I had great fun at the tunnel book class. Although we were encouraged to bring our own source material, I decided that I wanted to see what we would be able to draw from that was provided, and was happy to discover a topographical map of Quebec, a postcard with Greek statues from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, an old National Geographic magazine with a map of The Bahamas, as well as a vintage ink sketch of a flamingo.

With supplies in hand, I set to work, along with everyone else. There were times when we were working that you could have heard a pin drop and the photo above shows the furrowed brows of everyone in near-silence over the worktables.



I rather like the result, although like most of the work I've created lately, I'm not always sure where my ideas come from. That being said, I have been noticing recurrent themes (that's supposed to be a flamingo on a beach in one of the watercolours I posted up in my previous post, for example), so I obviously have fond memories of the time I spent on Great Inagua.



I've also finally gotten around to replacing the set of watercolour pencils I left in Nassau nearly three years ago, and decided that creating a page where I showed an example of the colours I had bought, both wet and dry, would be useful in returning to using them as a medium again.

One of my first artist books, The Zebra Book, shown here, used them: I like watercolour pencils for their portability, and, well, because they're fun too!