Blog 3

I have been drawing the last couple of days, on a set of new drawings which I started the beginning of January. I have taken the map of the United Kingdom as my starting point, my destination. I have plotted every place we visited from August 2009 until December 2010. Some drawings contain just those dots, whilst others are blank with only the outside line of the UK. Some contain the lines of each county and some have the grid lines of the longitude and latitude of the area. Some are a mixture of all of these things. I want to fragment these drawings, draw into them so they become abstract and 'something else', a memory, a feeling, a response to my trip in the UK during this time. I'm not looking for an exact replica of our trip , neither a visual diary, but a response to this trip, the journey we have been on, my homeland. The outcome may or may not be pleasant. I may or may not like what I see. But I want them to be a more internal response, not a conditioned response. Being away from the UK, how do I feel now about the UK? Distance, Space, Travel, Time, Boundaries...
These last two days I have started to draw a map of the world. I wonder about all the places I would like to visit. The UK looks very small in the scale of the world. This is not a negative, an observation. The drawing is looking more abstract than the UK drawings.
I have been embossing using an embossing pen and no ink creating white lines across the paper. They are softer, almost invisible. I have been using a dipping pen and black ink in other drawings. I love the way the lines appear as I glide the drawing tool across the surface of the paper. With the black ink there is such a contrast between the blackness of the black ink and the whiteness of the white paper. They are wandering lines across the paper plane, like myself wandering across the surface of the land. Imaginary and real mixed together. Sounds a bit romantic. Too romantic.
I am struggling a little and feel I need a new process of mark making. The visuality of the works look quite similar to what I've done before. I need something new.
I take a step back and flick through some of my books - Land Art to specific artists - Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Hamish Fulton, Yves Klein and Tom Friedman - all who have influenced me at one time or another. I look at the pictures in the books in a casual kind of way, like you would a magazine, to allow snippets of imagery to lodge or disappear in my brain. Trigger points that may or may not come up randomly when I start creating again. I have made a few notes, but not too many.
There are really random links that somehow link together - John Constable's The Haywain, Joseph Beuy's Coyote, I love America and America loves me, Christo and Jeanne Claude's yellow umbrellas planted across a Chinese landscape, Richard Long's walking texts and all the drawings and marks that have been created in the landscape, especially large works that you can only see by flying above.
I do sometimes feel that many of my drawings are blueprints for something much bigger, either in scale or medium, or something else intangible. How can I execute this, make it happen?
I then return to my drawings and start drawing again.