I went on television and I saw my name on the screen, Sheila Radburn.
It was taken across the screen with all the other names and this was a group in a program
called House Party.
There were seven women and each one had something to show.
There was a nurse and a dressmaker and a cook and a beautician and an artist and each time
we showed something to one of the other girls and at the end of the program we had a subject
and discussed it.
There was no script and we had to remember what we'd done in the rehearsal which was
quite difficult and the first time I went I took along some wood carvings and in four
minutes I'd shown four years work.
But each time you go it's a good idea to have something that can be shown the following
week and so on.
So one time I went I showed this sketch of a root, chiefly because I wanted to show that
if you had a piece of wood with a little branch at the side you could make it into a tail
and carve a sort of stoat or weasel.
Well when I showed that they said well come next week and bring that bit of wood and carve
it on the program.
Well I wish I'd thought of that because this little bit was rather narrow here.
If I'd realized it I would have had a wider bit of wood.
However I took it along and wound it into the vice and started tapping away but the
microphone was just up in front of me and the tapping was too loud for it so I had to
change and I got a piece of lime wood and took the tool and pressed it in.
This was better except that the camera was behind my right arm and they said we can't
see it because of your hand being in the way.
Do it with your left hand.
But if you're told to do it with your left hand you do it so I did and it turned out
to be quite good.
Well my daughter who was in hospital nursing gave me some x-ray film and she said I'm
sure you could do something with this if you put this in very strong soda water for a couple
of hours all the black comes off.
So I did this and as you can see it made it into a film which had no black on it.
So then I got a sketch of an owl and I put the film in front of it and this was really
quite easy to do with the children because they don't have to work too hard they get
a felt pen and they can trace the picture and when you've traced the picture you get
some coloured ink and just paint in the lights.
This is how it looked but really and truly it's a bit of a nothing because I've only
painted the lights in.
However when you put a dark background behind it it alters it and it makes it into a more
interesting picture.
And I did two others to show that you can have different ones and it's according to
the mount as well sometimes it changes.
Here's one with a mount around it but they're so quick to do and at the end of that program
I showed a mobile which I've done with the x-ray film and I painted it and cut it out
and this made the owl and the pussycat which I expect you remember, Edward Lear's book
and when you hold that up or hang it on a light in a child's room and the draft blows
it's rather good because it turns them all round and they're so easy to do because they're
traced and cut out.
Here's the owl and the pussycat and the pig that lived on the hill and the mince pies and
the green boat.
I had to be very careful with this because it got so easily tangled up so I had to put
it down very carefully because I had another one to show.
I went along to the school for deaf children about them and I was showing them the Skylab
which you may remember went up with mice and minnows and a swarm of gnats to see how they
would react to outer space and the deaf children understood this because I had a picture which
I had done as a glass collage and this showed the mice and the minnows and the swarm of
gnats and the astronaut and just at first the mice were in a black box and they wove
their webs in the corners of the box because they were so confused but after a while about
a fortnight they had adjusted to space and wove a perfect web in the centre.
Of course the other creatures all died and there wasn't enough food for them and only
the astronaut had the choice of whether he'd like to go out there or not which was a bit
hard because they all died.
But I suppose that it was worthwhile because it proved how various insects reacted in space
and so the deaf children did their mobile of Skylab.
Here are the mice and the minnows and the swarm of gnats.
There's the spider's web and I was very pleased about this because we went into the staff
room for a cup of coffee and when I came back they were all hard at it, cutting out and
hanging things up and I thought perhaps they'd be bored but they weren't, they thought it
was lovely and they hung them all up in their classroom.
If you look closely at the background you can see that this is painted on a spider's
web.
I got a frame and I drew it through a spider's web and it stuck to the sides of the frame
and then I dipped it in milk and drained it and when it was dry I painted it with watercolour
and of course a very fine brush.
Just painted the whites and one other colour and then put a dark background behind it.
The fascination of a natural spider's web I think makes the background really lovely.
They seem to be on spiders because this one is also a legend about a spider.
When the Holy Family were escaping from soldiers they went into a little garden at Mataria
and crept into the hollow of a sycamore tree and legend has it that a spider came and wove
a rib right across the front of the tree so they were not discovered and I thought this
would make rather a nice collage and I put all my little bits of wood all round the outside,
stuck them on and then I had a fisherman's line I'd picked up on the beach and this made
the spider's web.
I just tried to paint the lights.
I found the wood into the vice, now I've got to get this bark off and fortunately some
of it has already come off so I've got a large tool, a gouge and I'm just going to tap it
here so that it comes off quite easily and when I've got all the bark off the exciting
part comes because you can start again and you see the little curl of wood coming up
and as you go deeper into the log so you see some grain appearing but you have to go fairly
deep and then as you've taken out quite a lot of wood you use a different tool, a little
flatter one so that in the end you've got a really smooth surface.
It's a lovely feeling as you tap away and the wood comes up in this little curl.
This is a very pale wood, I don't know what it is because I'm not very good on Australian
woods yet but having done it with the curved gouge I'll take a slightly flatter one, this
is a great favourite of mine, it's very flat.
You see you don't have to tap very hard and you can follow the grain of the wood as you
see it coming up and quite often you don't know what's coming and you find you have to
use your tool to go in the direction of the grain.
This is the sort of thing that really gets me because I go on tapping for hours and I
don't know what time it is.
You can see the marks the tool has made, a slightly smaller tool than this gouge and
I've been getting all the outside bark off here and it had such a lovely curve that I
thought this would be the breast of a bird, probably I'd have to cut it off there and
then it would come around and that would be the tail and then I'd have to make the mark
of the wing.
But this is a very pale wood and so far I haven't seen any grain, you'd have to go a
little bit further in to find the grain and also to get this piece away here but you can
see it's got a lovely curve to it, this piece of wood, a natural curve and here it's cracked
a little bit at this end so this end is good.
Sometimes you get quite bad cracks but it's a lovely colour and I think it would make
a very nice bird.
This is the large gouge that I started with and I use this for the bigger logs of wood
to get the bark off, it is rather a large one, if you get a smaller piece of wood it's
a bit too big.
Then the next size is a size 6, the same sort of gouge but a little bit smaller and then
you come to the flatter one, there is a smaller gouge, this is the flatter one, the smaller
flatter one but this is a 4, I was just thinking I ought to refer to this which is a smaller
gouge but much deeper and this is a 10, this is a beauty, I'm very fond of this one but
you can imagine you wouldn't use this on a very large log of wood, it's for smaller pieces
and this one too is even smaller.
I was just looking to see, yes this has got a number 8 on it, I never really look at the
numbers I just look at the tool and know whether it's going to be of use to me.
This is rather nice because it's got a curve to it, you can get into a hole if you're doing
a portrait or something of that sort.
These are very valuable to me and you really can't buy them easily, they're very very old.
This is a lovely little flat one that's very useful to use on small surfaces around a face
perhaps and there's another one even finer, you can imagine how carefully this has to
be used because it's so fine and has to be sharpened very carefully as well.
And then I'm gradually going smaller and smaller, this is an even smaller gouge and you always
hold it in the middle so that you get more guidance.
And this is a very thin one as you can see, that's tiny and if you're doing a very small
portrait, this is ideal to work around the eyes or under the nose and this is even smaller.
Don't often use these except perhaps this one I use more than anything, that one's lovely
to go around the eyes, they're rather difficult to sharpen and I use a carburundum and put
some oil on it and then I can just gently turn it from side to side or if you have a
flatter one like this and then you can just gently go from side to side and be sure that
you don't spoil the point of it.
It's a long job, very tedious but worth it and if you have blunt tools you don't have
good results.
And there's my mallet and I was given another mallet which is a smaller one made of cherry
wood, this is a little small for my large hand but lovely for my grandchildren when
they have a go and then I have rasps and there's a lovely little rifler here, this is a great
favourite of mine, I use this a lot, a little rifler.
And then I have other rasps, this is a very very fine one, they have to be cleaned from
time to time and I just throw them down at the time and leave them and then I have a
great tidy up.
This one is a circular one and then this is a longer one, this one ought to have a handle
really.
I'm very impatient, I haven't put handles on them, I just grab them and use them.
I think that's all the rasps.
And sometimes if I'm working with a balsa wood I find these very useful, they've got
a circle with a hole there and you can just press it into the wood and make the shape
of an eye.
And then of course onto the sandpaper which is rough and medium and smooth and this is
how I get the beautiful surface, the surface is like silk when it's finished.
When my husband retired all he wanted to do was to play golf on the cliffs so we went
all over England looking for a golf course on the cliffs and finally we found one at
Barton-on-Sea, the very southern tip of England and he went off to golf happy as a lark and
I went down onto the beach.
One daughter already had gone to Portugal, married a Portuguese man, the other one had
travelled to Australia and the third one was still at school.
So I went down on the beach every day with my old dog and a sketch book and I sketched
the old trees that I found there and the moment I was there I was hooked and I got this sketch
of the old tree roots that were on the beach and as you can see there are lovely holes
that join together and go off onto another rhythm and I was fascinated by these and I
went home and got my saw and sawed off great chunks of these and put them into the vise
which was a high vise, about waist high and let them dry out and I didn't have to wait
too long because they'd been on the beach and they'd been weathered.
If you take a log from a forest it's full of sap and you have to wait about a year and
a half or two years.
One of the first that I found was this one which I call mother and child because it looks
to me rather like the mother with her baby and all the lovely links that you have between
mother and child flowing together.
This is oak and the base is evergreen oak and the base had been in the sea such a long
time that it had really been pickled and it was so hard I couldn't saw it through so I
took it to a timber merchant and he sawed it through for me and then of course I had
to get it smooth.
And the next one had been in the sea even longer and I call this one the kiss.
As you can see all I did was just to carve the two faces because all the rest was there.
You can see that the arm is round here and this one is holding up her hand as if to say
oh I like that kiss.
I thought this was rather a nice one.
It's very heavy and you can see that it's a root because of the hole that's here and
the base is the other half of the base for the mother and child.
I like to do as little as possible and to leave the natural rhythms that are there.
And the third one that week, it was in a week I found all these three, I call this one east
wind.
This is also oak and it's lost a lot of its color because all of these were on the beach
and salt water really does take the color away.
The base is the same wood before I had polished it and just at first this one had a sort of
club foot at the bottom which I hated.
So I put it away for a whole year and when I got it out again I knew just what to do.
I sawed it off at the bottom and put a screw up through here and balanced it on its own
base and then it seemed to sit better.
Now the face is rather black because it's been burned and sometimes when I went down
the fishermen had been there and they'd lit a fire and perhaps they were cooking their
meal or maybe they fished all night.
So in the morning if I went down I found this burnt piece and I thought the face looked
rather like east wind.
Now in England the east wind is the cold one and I thought if you stood on a cliff in an
east wind you might look something like this and I thought this looked rather like the
hair flowing down and you could imagine the wind whistling up through this hole.
This one was exhibited at Bladen galleries at Hursporn Torrent and they rather liked
it as a talking piece.
This one is something somebody gave me and they said you can't do much with this can
you?
Well of course it's a tired old woman on the tired old horse and you can see there's a
sort of hoof here and the horse's head was there.
I didn't have to do anything to that.
The shape was there for me and it looked like an old woman because it seemed to have a cloak
on and it had been burned and so this you can see the ashes here.
So I called it Lamentations and the reference there was he's broken my teeth with gravel
stones, he's covered me with ashes and I thought it fitted in rather well with the whole attitude
which might be the Israelites bowed down with their cares and their disobedience and if
you have broken teeth you can't eat and if you can't eat you have no power.
So this was rather a good reference and then I put them on a very rough base going downhill
I thought well perhaps the next one I get the head will be looking up and it will be
more cheerful.
This one I found and it had a long piece here right out to there so I sawed that off and
don't you think it's extraordinary that this stone should have been driven into this piece
of wood and the wood went on growing round it?
And there's the hole to show that it was a piece of root.
I was talking to some people one day and one lady said I saw that on the beach she said
I went next day to get it and all I found was your saw marks.
You have to be quick with these things lots of people who like floral art beach combing.
This one rather like pottery sits well in the hand and this is acacia wood and in Australia
this would be called wattle.
I couldn't find two pebbles the same.
I searched the beach and of course you never can find two pebbles exactly the same and
then I went to stay with a cousin in Los Angeles and I found these two shells on Laguna beach
they seem to be just right for the eyes.
When I'm thinking of the culling of the seals I feel very sad and I think an artist often
puts a lot of their feeling into their work and also in Palestine the acacia trees that
grow there have terrible thorns and it is said that the crown of thorns was made from
the acacia wood.
So here is a very sad seal.
This is a little bird sitting in its cork nest, little bit of cork from Portugal and
this was juniper and it didn't have any interesting grain so I thought I'd paint it to go with
the story I was writing for my grandchildren.
It's a white capped dipper bird and it lives somewhere near Peru near the waterfall and
it swims about under the water for its food and to make a nest it flies up into the face
of the rock with some red leaves that grow on the ground all round about and they have
a very vicious fluid which melts the stone.
It really does and this little bird takes a leaf in its beak and rubs it on the stone
and pecks away the rubble and there it has a safe nest.
So this was rather a nice thing for the story but of course when it got to the beach at
Barton it found that the cliffs were made of clay and that was no good to it so it had
to go back to its own home.
I love doing birds and I think it's nice when they sit in the hand and they get a little
bit warm and you can stroke it and it feels like a real bird.
This is a piece of nectarine.
I have some nectarine trees in my garden and I did cut this little piece off and waited
a whole year and a half before I could carve it and the eyes are ebony and I couldn't find
ebony anywhere and at last I rang up a man who had to do with pianos and I said have
you got any old piano keys?
Yes he had so he sent me five piano keys and that was just right for the ebony eyes.
I cut little rods, drilled a little hole and hammered it in and then when it was set I
took a little rasp and roused them until they were smooth.
This little nest that it sits on took almost as long as the bird to do and it has a little
bit of white kid underneath so that it's nice to hold.
I was looking down onto this piece of wood from the top of the cliffs.
It was in a hollow filled with salt water and there was a great bank of shingle and
the sea didn't get to it.
I took it home.
It was a huge piece of wood and I thought I'd do an old man of the sea but when I started
to carve it it got uglier and uglier and I was so upset about this.
I went to bed and I had a very vivid dream and I heard a girl crying in my dream and
I saw her in this piece of wood and when you're finishing off a carving I cut off the top
of the wood that I'd had and just left this one piece and you rub it until it's smooth
and it's sort of dusty and then you get a little pad of linen with the varnish and just
stroke it on.
To my surprise when I stroked it on here the face of the girl in my dream appeared.
She had told me that her name was Morifa and she spelt it M-A-U-R-I-F-E-R but I've never
found it anywhere and I wonder what caused this.
Was it a coincidence or a thought form?
Somebody said oh it's you in one of your past lives.
I don't know about that but it's definitely there and it doesn't look unlike me as a profile
so it was rather interesting.
This is yew wood and it's got most beautiful patterns in the grain and it's gone rather
grey because it's been in the sea a long time and off the same log of wood was the little
frog and it had one little lump here on one eye so I made another little lump and hollowed
it out under the chin to get this lovely rich red colour and put his feet together and he
sits on this little bit of bark which had floated down the coast.
It's a lovely grey colour that you see on all the beach things weathered by the wind
and sun and he sits on there.
I wouldn't like to make a little hole underneath to make him sit rigidly so I just put him
sitting on it right there.
This one was a little piece of pine with a slight curve at the top and I felt that if
I did a face it would be looking forward as if she was listening and when you start you
have this round piece of wood at the top you have to find the dead centre and then be very
careful to get the grain right in the middle of the face because otherwise it gives it
a dreadful expression and you can imagine why I would use those tiny little tools to
get the eyes and under the nose, very difficult.
But a lot of people said this was Saint Teresa and my daughter said well they had a similar
legend of Saint Teresa and the roses for Queen Isabella in Portugal who used to be very upset
about her subjects being so hungry and she'd ride out into the forest with her apron full
of roses, full of bread and her husband rode after her one day and he said what have you
got in your apron?
And she said roses and he said show me and she opened her apron and it was filled with
roses and it's a similar legend as this one.
So she's called Teresa, I did call her Serenity at first and she seemed to be so quiet it
reminded me of the words from Isa, in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.
And on the opposite way was this one which was carved from elm, this was some wood that
my grandson gave me after he'd been working in a firm that did garden furniture so it
had to be very weather proof and this elm was very good, it didn't rot but it was hard
to carve and I can't say I enjoyed it very much and you can see that she's solid standing
upright not in a lovely curve the way that Teresa was and of course everybody said oh
this one is Martha and she says as your days so shall your strength be and she's so dedicated
to her kitchen that she has no time to listen the way her sister did.
There was another one, a similar log of wood and this time it was curved a little bit backwards
and I thought that it looked rather like Elizabeth who was told when she was a good age that
she was going to have a child and you can see that she's rather thrilled and she's
holding her hands over John the Baptist so she was looking up and back.
And this one somebody gave me and at first I thought it might make a little house upside
down for one of the children's stories but no it wouldn't go like that and I just happened
to have this little piece of wood, just a tiny little root that I picked up on the edge
of Beaver Lake on Vancouver Island and it just seemed to fit in here and sat there and
this was Zacchaeus who was a little man and he couldn't see over the head of the crowd
and so he climbed the tree which he must have climbed many times when he was a child and
there he had this wonderful vision and this came just before we were coming to Australia
and I thought I was going to climb an imaginary tree and have my vision and what a lovely
one it was because we were so thrilled to be here with our two daughters and their new
families so this one is called Zacchaeus.
I suppose that most of these have come from the beach but this one came from a garden
in Oxford it was growing like this these were the roots and I always say I know what a dentist
feels like because all this part in here was filled with rubbish and a dentist must feel
like that if he's cleaning out a tooth. This is a piece of walnut and as you can see it
has most lovely grain down the front of the nose that it makes you want to stroke it and
this one side made it look as if there was an ear and I left the other side just natural
it seemed so nice and I can pick it up by these root shapes. I remember the day that
I had this on a table in the Guildhall in Winchester and the Women's Institute were
asked to do an exhibition called tomorrow's heirlooms and they asked me if I'd have my
wood carvings on a table and I remember that I had this one along in the front and all
the people came in at the door on the right hand side and as they came across the room
everyone put a hand out to stroke the nose of this piece of walnut. You wouldn't think
this was anything very special but it had quite a good value because I had a neighbour
who was in a wheelchair with MS and she wanted something to do she said if only I could do
some wood carving so I made this little shape for her and she sat in her wheelchair with
the sandpaper on the kitchen table and she took the wood and rubbed it and turned it
and rubbed it until in the end it was smooth. Now this took her a long time, weeks and weeks
but she loved doing it and in the end I varnished it for her and she gave it to her mother as
something that she'd done herself which gave her great pleasure and another neighbour was
blind and she said she'd have to do something like that and I'd been given a bit of bay
wood and you know the lovely scent of bay leaves where when she rubbed this on the sandpaper
the lovely scent of bay came up to her and this meant a lot to her. The biggest carving
I call the smiling lady and this one also had been done in that pool and all I could
do was just carve the face and there was so much resin that it blunted the tools, it clogged
them so all I could do was that little bit which was just as well because all this is
beautiful it's all so natural and at just at first it had a grey green bark all over
it and one day I had put it in the garden for three years and she sat there and the
birds came and sat on her head and I used to look out from the kitchen and see her smiling
away and I was on television at the time and I thought I'll take her along so I took her
to the television but I had to take all the bark off first with apologies to all the crawlies
that were under the bark after all it was their home and when I got it there the director
put some beautiful gloxineas all round the bottom. One of the other girls on the programme
had brought these lovely flowers and with the bright lights on the vivid flowers bringing
out all the grain it was lovely and she's got such a smiling face and she seems to change
and of course she's saying so ever things are lovely think on these things.
I always remember hearing the radio of this it was the abyss of Stanbrook here she is
reading a letter from George Bernard Shaw and he had said that he'd been to Jerusalem
to find a present for her he couldn't find anything there they were all touristy things
so then he went to Bethlehem and he found two stones by the roadside which he thought
our Lord must have walked on and so he sent these two stones to her and he said she could
throw one in the garden and no one would want to steal it the other was in a silver chalice
for display purposes and she wrote back and said it reminded her of the Urim and the Tumim
which were kept in a pouch behind the breastplate of the high priest and there were probably
two lots used in casting lots they might have been taken out ceremoniously or tossed on
the ground and according to the way they were displayed answers were given to questions
put to the high priest this slice of wood that came from the new forest seemed to have
the breastplate of the high priest and so I made these circles here representing all
the circles on the breastplate with all the stones there was the sardius the topaz the
carbuncle emerald sapphire diamond beryl onyx and jasper of course I couldn't get all the
stones right so for instance sapphire being blue I had a lapis lazuli and I went to a
class for lapis for lepidary and it took me two years to do this whole carving I polished
all these myself and I had two stones which I thought would represent the yes and the
no stone and of course the yes would be a beautiful crystal crystal clear and the no
stone is a translucent one when you hold it up to the light you can see the shape of a
tear in it and it is said that the Indians when they wept their tears were turned to
stone and so I thought perhaps the no was a sad stone and as it was the the Jewish high
priest I put in the star of David and about that time the group that I was with used to
have a letter from the bishop of Winchester and he said if you're starting a house group
it's a good idea to have five points and these points I remembered because I thought of them
at the point of the star and the first one was understanding and this was a biblical group so in
order to understand the Bible you have to study it and the second one is sharing you share it with
the group no good doing it at home alone and the third one was prayer and here was interesting
because this star dissolved into the bars which seemed to be where the abyss was praying and the
fourth fourth one was action one has to do something about it and the fifth one is telling
so here am I telling you and perhaps you'll tell your neighbor and something new will develop and
at the top of the breastplate I found this mark rather like a thorn and I thought that one of the
names for Jesus was the great high priest and I thought this might represent the crown of thorns
and then here and there were marks rather like bruises Isaiah said he was bruised for our
iniquity and having done this and come to the end I came down to the bottom here and my thoughts
were taken up and up and up in this lovely pointed piece of wood and that was the the story and you
see it's only a slice of bark this was from a beech tree in the New Forest in England and my daughter
gave it to me and it was in the garage for about two years and suddenly this all developed and so
it was the abyss of Stanbrook and what came from it
I always enjoy whittling balsa wood because it's soft and if you get a really sharp knife you can
go very slowly and just gently scrape it away and the beauty of this is that it's so soft that it
doesn't cause you any complications with your hand or what you're going to do with it afterwards
because you can rub it with sandpaper and what I do usually as I make a little bird and I keep
on cutting away at each corner here you can take the pieces a little bit bigger it all depends on
my mood sometimes I'm feeling tired and I just do little gentle bits but if I'm in a hurry I can
do much bigger bits if you've got a strong hand and a very sharp knife you get used to doing it
and then I think about point here where the beak is going to come and I cut away towards that point
then of course the other end is going to be the tail you can if you like do it that way but I'm
more used to doing it towards me and then when I've got the point of the beak I think about where
the wing is going to come and I make a cut like that and then I cut away underneath so this piece
comes out and I know where the wing is going to be and I keep cutting here and then I know that
this is going to be the underneath part of the chest keep cutting away of course you can't put
it back once you've cut it off but you have that vision in your mind of what you're cutting towards
and then when I've got that this piece of the wing I can cut another bit on the top here and
perhaps turn it round and cut another piece here where the wing is going to come at the top and
then of course all this bit here is going to come away because that's where the tail comes you do
have to be careful because it's a very sharp knife but I've got so used to doing it that I can do
it without the knife slipping that's the other wing and then this wing piece comes out here I
can do it this way it's coming along and then when I've got shape pretty well done it comes
out like this you see I cut away under here for the wing and on the top here and I cut away until
I got the beak shape and then I rubbed it with sandpaper until it was beautifully smooth then I
found a lovely little piece to put it on a little bit of wood and then painted it with acrylic paint
which makes it rather effective and you can put these in front of a floral art or anything of
this sort you can have any colored bird and I usually try and put a little bit of white on
the wing and perhaps just over the eye so that it looks like a natural little bird sitting on a
nest so that from a hunk of wood when I get this in the craft shop it's about this long so I cut
it into about five pieces and then you see you can get about five birds out of it but the joy
also is going for a walk keeping your head down and looking for a little bit of wood like this I
go along the beach and find pieces and all my friends give me little bits it's lovely they
always come and say oh I've got another bit of wood for you and for sure it's something like
this which has been weathered and it's been lying about on the beach for ages.
I'm going to demonstrate painting violets which is a subject that everybody is familiar with I
like to either work from the real thing if they're available or I take photographs which show me how
the flowers grow and in particular help to point out the depths and highlights on the leaves and
on the flowers and the different angles that the flowers grow. I'm pulling the color in in the same
way moving my tile around all the time just with a brush stroke getting a brush do the work for you.
Cleaning out the center I also need to go back and increase the colors that I've used on the
center of the others those colors fade just a little in the firing and need to be built up
again I won't use the yellow again but just the dips with some ochre just a hint of color on
those main flowers and also softly on these fly away flowers.
Now I might keep redrawing this drawing reversing it each time and scribbling on the back and
amending all the faults I see in it anything up to 10, 15, 20, 25 times with one that's giving me
a lot of difficulty until I get it to my complete satisfaction and until I've got the drawing
absolutely right I'd never start to paint a picture. Let's get the air bubbles out because
otherwise the thing will dry unevenly and give problems later on and the other thing that is
most important is not to touch the wet paper with the metal ferrule of the brush because
that will produce a school mark in the paper which you can never get rid of it will be there forever.
And intensive, intensive machine sewing or machine embroidery in what I call my
free sewing style and here goes.
Here's a completed butterfly. See the four wings are all attached together and heavily
machine embroidered. The silk on the back and this one just for fun and decoration has some
beading on it and fur fabric for body. This is one of a series of textile sculptures based on
things from the sea. This was the specimen I used to work from but of course when it was
fresh it was very pink and lovely.
With these two minute poses what I'm looking for are the shapes, simplified shapes that
occur in the figure so I'm practicing all of these for the longer poses so this time
I'm making more of a geometric shaped figure here. The lovely lean of the head again the
spine.
When I say green I don't mean a green tube straight out of the tube green. I'll probably
mix it up from blues and yellows that I'll have on the palette. Talking of palettes you'll
notice I use old sources or plates and I don't wash off the old color because it's all usable
it all dissolves again and becomes quite practical in its use. So I think we'll start off with
a little of the scarlet lake using plenty of water because I want a nice flat wash.
I've been laying out my colors here on the palette. I have my own way of laying them
out. I haven't put out my white yet. I'm going to use a lot of white in this particular painting
because the general mood over here is quite soft and I'm also going to be using quite
a lot of flesh tint. It's a color I have been using lately a lot in landscape particularly
because of the dry autumn and summer we had and I find the flesh tint gives a very warm
even sort of glow to the painting. I arrange my colors with my cool colors down one side.
I have green out here which I often don't bother putting out. I prefer often to make
my greens and I have my warm colors down here. To me landscape or practical landscapes have
three essentials. They have sky, distance and foreground. I spray the figure at regular
intervals because although it sounds a contradiction I want it to get firm but I also have to keep
it moist. Because of the paper inside the figure now it tends to dry very fast and because
all this modelling takes a certain amount of time the figure is drying faster than I
can model so I have to keep using the spray. Now I'm going to start putting the clays on
the figure and if you're using small amounts of clay, small pellets or rolls like that
you don't really need slip providing the clay is moist. And I'm putting this around here
and that's going to represent the roll of the shirt at the bottom of the figure. I'll
just blend that in like that. Sarah's head has now been painted and fired. There were
two separate firings. One was for the eyebrows and the eyelashes and the lips and a second
firing for an overall skin tone blush and cheeks and she's really starting to take on
more life. The eyes are set in with the wax. I rolled a sausage of wax and put round an
eye and then set them in. The leg's specially grooved here so that when I attach this I
can draw that thread and get a very tight fit at the top of the leg. Back to creating
the story. Worked out dates of the year when she was born, when she arrived. This research
has been marvellous for me because I hadn't realised that the convict women were not landed
until the 6th, 7th of February. The men had already been on and the flag had been planted
on the 26th of January but the female convicts had not actually touched ground until that
later date in February. Gone through, researched, written my story, had some other person read
it for me. Catherine has read it and we've worked around and worked out all our paragraphs
backwards and forwards until it has become a story that follows in a sequence. Anybody
who does go into doing anything, it's always good to start with fact and I thoroughly recommend
that you go to a library and research whatever you're doing first and then coming up and
working your idea in it so that you're actually working from fact into fantasy.