The art comes out of this clutter!

 

Back in the studio after a short break (hadn’t realised how much doing the last exhibition had taken out of me!), and working on new images for the next exhibition at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh, in May and June 2010.

This week I have been working on a sequence of seven drawings, based on the Hebridean Thumbnails,  evocative one-line poems or ‘threads’, written by Scottsh poet Andrew Philip. I had originally created four drawings as a visual contribution to an interview I did with Andrew as part of his Ambulance Box Virtual Book Tour (see link below), organised by Salt Publishing in June 2009.

In the new drawings, I have tried to recreate the linear, sketchbook quality of the poems. Rather than just being illustrations of Andy’s poems, I have used the work as  a prompt to create new images; influenced by the words and combined with my own experiences and memories of Lewis and Harris. By doing this I hope I will have created work that will enhance and support the poems, rather than merely describe them.

Here are Andrew’s seven poems, along with my four drawings I created for the online ‘blether’ between poet and artist.

 

Hebridean Thumbnails

 

fo cheò

islands buried in the sky’s white sands

*

baile tughaidh

the thatched ghosts smile as the sun slides down

*

na tursachan

gazes held for centuries, waiting for one to crack

*

sligean air an traigh

all the bonnier for being broken   broken   broken

*

solus na stoirme

where sky and land split, a fragment of grief flickers

*

taigh làn cuileagan

black nuggets of erosion settle everywhere

*

còmhradh a’ chladaich

after all this time, what has the beach left to say to the tide?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original sketches for Hebridean Thumbnails (Four drawings for a blether with Andrew Philip)

 

Watch out for further posts featuring this and my other poetry collaborations which will be featured in the Edinburgh exhibition.

 

Poems reproduced by kind permission of Andrew Philip

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Collaborations, Studio, poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.