Birds, Still-life and Stuff . . .

Thought I'd put a few more bits and pieces on today, after all, this is supposed to be about my work even though I keep getting side-tracked! Butterfly-brained I know.

Birds, birds, birds . . .

   I have started getting a little obssessed with our feathered friends! thus far they've tended to be of the generic variety as that allows me a bit more artistic license, which translated means I get let off mistakes!! I won't have bird enthusiasts pulling me up for getting plumage wrong, or missing a claw off. But, as I have a head full of new ideas based on extinction and evolution, to include dodo's, pteradactyls, etc, I'm going to have to break the habit of a life-time and at least attempt to get things right, or do I??? They're extinct, who can tell me off?
   And here are a couple of still-lifes, just to prove that my bird obssession isn't totally taking me over, yet! After struggling to do these things when I was at school I swore blind that pots with greenery in them would never darken my desk again, so what when wrong? Well we all need a challenge from time to time, and to tell the truth, I enjoyed doing them. The pots are by Charlotte Morrisson, a local maker and their stripey-ness inspired me, so a stint parking my car up hedgebacks in search of interesting frondly things to arrange in afore-mentioned pottery eventually brought forth these two pieces, there may be more but my studio is a tad messy and they could be anywhere!
   Thankfully school art classes didn't make me still-life phobic forever, after that initial quivering fear and dread I took the plunge, alright, hundreds of years later! but I think these turned out ok.

    

A Sunny Day . . .

Something a bit different today.
   I've been a bad girl and have done very little papercutting thus far, there is time yet, as bed-time is a few hours off!
   Hit the market in Masham, a Saturday ritual, can't beat David's butter and cheeses and the veggie boys at Blands then lunch and today the sun broke through so we ate outside with big red dog. Oh, and I bought some rather spiffing bunting to put up for Queenies Diamond Jubilee, yes, I admit it, I'm more royalist than republican, we can't half do pomp and circumstance splendidly over here!!!
   Then off to Northallerton to collect my train tickets and a little trawl around the shops, for essentials only of course!! The drive over was lovely. It's been a day of hazy sunshine, almost autumnal to look at but without that chill. Fields full of cattle, sheep and lambs at various stages of growth, little jiggly new borns hassling their mums for milk, through to the stockier older youths! Birds everywhere doing their usual bonkers springtime showing off and the hedgebacks starting to green up with blackthorn sprinkling white, confetti like blossom throughout. A definite windows open day in the car, the haunting voices of the "Civil Wars"(a bloody marvellous American duo who sing country, folksy, bluesy stuff, heavenly) just adding to the afore-mentioned loveliness!  I'm so lucky that I live in the midst of all this life. Out here you feel the full force of the seasons all around you, the wildness the beauty the stillness. A walk down the road takes you straight into it, away from houses and people, surrounded by the sounds of curlews, traffic just a muted buzz off in the background somewhere. And if you're lucky the peregrine will show his/her feathers.
   I should be getting inspired by all this and creating pictures but instead here I am thinking I'm a writer and wiffling on about it in a very bad writerly way, maybe now is the time to grab another cup of tea and go wave my scalpel about!!! 
   But first maybe I should email www.yorkshire and see if I can blag some commission off them for my praise of this most marvellous bit of England! I'd do it for free any day really. 
   I should put pictures on here but you can't do justice to perfection with a camera, especially when it's me pressing the button!!!!
   I really am going now, goodnite x    

Just Finished . . .

I've been busy getting in a tiz about getting things finished this week and wondering whether this latest piece is any good! Still not sure as it is a tad different from what I usually do. It's one of two pieces that are heading off on a trip to the big city next week - the RA Summer Exhibition!! Oooh, err!! Yes, I know, horribly ambitious of me and as I'm going to be up against many and more talented folk I am not holding my breath, I can hope, but . . .

    Anyway, here is the thing itself, titled "Extinction:Passenger Pigeon".
The poor passenger pigeon was very sadly wiped from this planet in 1914 by us of course, from billions when America was first colonised to nothing. The last of these birds died in captivity and was called Martha. It just struck a note with me and I suppose this is my tribute, whether it is worthy of Martha and her species I  don't know but it is done.
   I stepped outside my rather precision edged box in this picture, tearing paper as well as cutting and I also included maps, this was hard to do as it involved brutally hacking into a book and I really hate damaging books because I love books to the point of obssession! A girl can never have too many, but I digress! A bit of symbolism got thrown into the mix too: I left the egg and the birds blank and un-detailed to show they are no longer here. The text is a very brief history of the bird but the inclusion of the name of the last survivor I think makes the whole piece more poignant.
   There will be a very excited entry on here if it gets selected but as I won't know 'til May it is now time to forget about it all for a while!
   On a more realistic note I have just got involved in the "pop-up gallery" being run by the very lovely Sue. She has decided that the remoter areas of the Dales need a small invasion of we arty types! The next pop-up will be at Tunstall, near Richmond, all are welcome and there will be drop in workshops too. I shall be doing a papercutting one. I've diversified a bit and am getting some little bits and pieces printed up from my papercuts, cards, bookmarks that sort of thing, and in colour too! Here are some rather splendidly coloured bookmarks, I do hope people are still reading proper books and haven't all gone "kindle" mad or I'll have to eat them!!!!

  

A Bit More Thought . . .

A bit of a step back in time this picture.

I cut this one last summer for inclusion in a juried exhibition titled "Invisible". It took a while to come up with something I felt fit the theme, I'm so used to just doing whatever idea comes to mind that this was a bit of a challenge, time to use "the little grey cells" to quote Poirot!
Finally an idea popped to life.
I love the song "White Chalk" by PJ Harvey - do check her out, brilliant singer/songwriter. It talks about how we come from the land and return to it in death, feeding what feeds us. I'd often listened to it and wondered how it would translate into a picture, here is my take on it. 
As well as depicting a skeleton in the roots of the tree I have included the major elements - in symbol form - that make up the physical human body. On a more romantic level the tree is carved with hearts and the initials of the families of Andrew and myself. The planets are depicted too so the whole piece is about life and death and the constant regeneration and evolution of this speck in space that we live on.
And I do like skulls and bones, so any excuse to put them in a picture, especially as this time I could really justify it!
I ended up doing two versions of this as one sold at the exhib and I was commissioned to do another, personalising it by including the initials of the couple it was for in the trunk of the tree.

In the Beginning . . .

Back again, and this time with a work in progress.

I started her this morning, ably abetted by furry friend Tiggy, pensioner Persian cat extraordinaire, who loves nothing better than walking back and forth across any papercutting I'm working on! So glad my picture framer, Dave is good at picking cat hairs off everything I take down to him, well. . .  his eyes are younger and better than mine!
Back to the Mermaid. A long way to go with her yet but I'm enjoying how she is coming along so far, especially as this time last night I had no idea how and where to start. This will be the most detailed layer, mermaid, fish and the swirly lines that depict the sea, in a very loose way. 
Little Miss Mermaid is a piece I'm doing for a challenge - Folk/Fairy Tale Illustration - put out by GAP ( the Guild of American Papercutters) do have a look at their facebook page. After much faffing about and searching on t'internet I opted for something fishy, hence, the mermaid. She is more synonymous with Cornish myth but I thought it a good subject as I love using the human, well, half human! form in my work. I'm afraid I don't know any specific mermaid tales so she is depicted in her aquatic environment and that's it! As a northerner I should have looked more into stories of the "Selkie", a human/seal character but, shallow me, I thought a bit of glam was more up my street and mermaids are definitely that!
I'd better get back to my cutting mat and the new series opener of CSI now, dying to see how Ted Danson gets on, but no-one will ever be as good as Grissom!! 

papercuttergirl: Here Goes . . .

papercuttergirl: Here Goes . . .: Well, here it is! At last I have taken note, after much telling, and am starting a blog, yee ha! Whether it will entertain, amuse or enlight...

Here Goes . . .

Well, here it is! At last I have taken note, after much telling, and am starting a blog, yee ha! Whether it will entertain, amuse or enlighten, who knows.
   Most, if not all, I put on here will be about papercutting, my one and only talent, I hope!

   A bit of general background on papercutting before I begin, and it is very general as I am new to the art and there are many more wonderful papercutters out there who know more.

   I only discovered this creative medium about 3 years ago after playing about cutting wood up, too messy and you had to us a machine. My tea was sawdust flavoured and I couldn't hear the "Archers"! Something quieter minus sawdust was needed so scalpel and paper eventually popped to mind. After years of painting and being too scaredy to try something different here we are doing something totally different!
   Cutting paper has had to make me re-think how I work. Everything is drawn as a silhoutte, though I do then add detail into this, text I do in reverse as I work on the back of black card, rubbing out pencil lines means tearing the fiddly bits I've cut and it's one more picture in the bin! and I have a full bin as it is.

   Most of my pieces are inspired, sometimess in a very loose way, by the natural world. Trees, birds, leaves tend to appear everso frequently, but I'm not always so good at realism, and it means i can use a bit, or a lot, of artistic license!