Katherine asked to see some of the little drawings that I talked about in my last post. Here are a few of my favourites…

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

The torn edges are an important part of these drawings and I’m considering framing some onto larger sheets of watercolour paper so that the edges are retained. These are drawn on A6 cartridge paper (105 × 148mm) with a deliberately restricted palette: I’m ONLY allowing myself to use two pencils (a 2B and a 9B) and acrylic gesso. The greys are formed when the gesso mixes with the very soft 9B pencil. Working on this small scale and with such a limited choice of materials really frees me up to work quickly in an uninhibited fashion, which is absolutely what I need right now.

If you want to see more of these, check out my flickr pages.

When I was scanning these, I was thinking about the way that pencil is often regarded as a ‘neutral’ art material because it’s so ubiquitous and considered fundamental to art. Yet actually, graphite is a very particular material with its own distinct properties. The scans don’t capture the incredible, shiny, dense, silvery greyness of the 9B pencil but when I’m applying it so thickly, its status as a mineral becomes quite apparent. I’ve also been playing around in the studio with graphite powder on gessoed panels but it makes a much softer and more fragile mark than pencils, which contain clay and binder for strength and ease of use. I’ve been wondering what it would be like to densely coat an object with pencil marks or layered graphite? The idea of making sculptures that leave ‘drawings’ on their surroundings is very appealing to me.

Oh, and if you want to know how those ’simple’ and ubiquitous pencils are made, then check out this series of videos from Derwent. It’s a surprisingly complex process but certainly a lot quicker and easier than the way it used to be done!

One of the advantages of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work.

Unfortunately one of the downsides of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work!

In art college you learn to be critical of what you make and you learn a language with which to talk about your work. These are valuable skills and I’m glad I was taught them. However, thinking deeply about my work can become a handicap on occasion. I’ve found it can inhibit me and prevent me from starting work or make me constantly question the worth of an idea when it’s in that delicate beginning stage. Six years out of college, I still hear the sceptical voice of my tutor rattling around inside my brain asking me if the work is really meaningful and well-considered.

Of course, it’s important to be able to think and talk about our work; being an artist today requires those skills. But it’s also important that analysing and talking about the work doesn’t impede the actual making of the work. Analysing and making are two very particular skill sets that require different sorts of vision and attention. I run into trouble when I get the order muddled up: letting the analytical side out too early to run riot through half-formed ideas can be fatal to my productivity. Right now I need to make art without second-guessing myself all the time, something I’ve been doing a lot lately.

This has been a hard year for me - I’ve been weighed down with illness, both my own and that of my son. Thankfully he is much better and is back at school now but the strain of caring for him during the first half of this year has left me drained and unwell. Consequently it’s been a pretty hopeless year for art and I am currently in the tricky position of emotionally needing to make art but having very little physical energy to do so.

This tension is expressing itself in a hypercritical over-awareness of what little I am making, constant worrying about what I’m not making, fretting over whether my art is any good and all the rest of the neurotic behaviour to which artists are prone. I consider myself to be fairly level-headed as artists go, yet I still fall prey to these fears and anxieties, most especially when I’m not making art at the pace and level that I need to. I don’t think of my art as therapy but let’s just say that my family have been known to beg me to go to my studio if I’ve gone too long without making!

But although I clearly need to work, I don’t have the energy to do so in any consistent way at the moment. So instead I’m concentrating on improving my health and consoling myself by making little drawings that don’t take too much time or energy. And when my inner art tutor starts muttering that the drawings ‘look a bit Foundation-y’, well, I just grit my teeth and try to ignore him. I’m also a) considering hiding the work from myself until I can look at it with a clearer and calmer eye and b) telling myself that it doesn’t have to be good anyway. Those inner critics can be persistent buggers - sometimes tricking them is the only way to get anything done!

I can’t believe this has been sitting in my draft folder since MAY! It took an age to research, mostly because Americans will insist on using the word ‘pins’ to mean badges and brooches, which made googling for other artists who use dressmaking pins rather tedious and time-consuming. In this post I’ve concentrated on art where the pins are the main focus, rather than a way of anchoring or enhancing other things; I may do a post on pins as a secondary medium at some later date.

I’ve written about Tara Donovan before - I admire her work immensely and although our work is quite different in scale, there are obvious connections with my own art. I am completely in awe of her huge block of pins. This isn’t held together by anything other than the pins natural inclination to wedge themselves together - incredible!

Tara Donovan: Untitled, 2001

Mona Hatoum, another well-known artist, has made several works involving pins, including this sinister looking rug.

Mona Hatoum: Doormat II

American artist, Katie Lewis makes stunning wall pieces using pins, drawing and thread that focus on repetition and counting. I think these are fabulous and I wish I knew a bit more about this artist: I hope she puts a website or a blog up soon.

Katie Lewis: Accumulated Numbness (12 months and counting)

Katie Lewis: Process of Accumulation

Katie Lewis: Body Area x Time

Lisa Kellner uses quilting pins in some of her work. This piece, Oil Spill, uses 60,000 bright yellow pins in a highly patterned work that has echoes of quiltmaking. I’m not entirely sure about the use of yellow in this work but I love the way the heads of the pins nestle against each other.

Lisa Kellner: Oil Spill

Lisa Kellner: Oil Spill

Margaret Diamond makes kinetic works. In her piece, Quietly Suffering, she has pushed pins through canvas and then wired them up to a motor so they move.

Margaret Diamond: Quietly Suffering

Margaret Diamond: Quietly Suffering (close up)

Fortunately there’s a short video, so we can see the piece in action. Pins are just amazing when they move, they catch the light in such compelling ways - one of my favourite things about my own piece, Quiver, was the way it gently shimmered as it moved in even the slightest breeze.

Hmm, I notice that all these artists are women, if anyone knows of any male artists working with pins, I’d love to hear about them.

A few other pins links:

This site about the history of lacemaking has some beautiful images of prickings (the pin-pricked paper patterns used for making lace) and a delightful cluster of pins in use during lacemaking.

Unsurprisingly, I love this sort of obsessive stuff - A. Schiller, a convicted forger imprisoned in Sing Sing in the 19th Century spent 25 years carving the Lord’s Prayer on 7 pins.

A fun little page about the history of small items like pins, zippers, needles and buttons. Lots of lovely pictures.

These were all taken today in the early morning sunlight. The autumn has been exquisite this year - it almost makes up for the rather drab summer.

Our beech tree is in its full glory - right before it covers the entire garden with millions of leaves!

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree, Nov 2008

I like the dark background on this but I’m not quite sure how I did it.

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree, Nov 2008

No fancy Photoshop, this was just taken through one of our very old and distorted Victorian window panes.

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree Distorted Through Old Glass, Nov 2008

The morning sunlight on the woodwork in the kitchen. Yes, it really is that blue.

Kirsty Hall: Reflections on Blue Wall, Nov 2008

Kirsty Hall: Reflections on Blue Wall, Nov 2008

Kirsty Hall: Reflections on Blue Wall, Nov 2008

I really appreciate the comments I get on this blog but I’m a bit lousy at answering them, as those of you who get a reply weeks or months later already know! I’ve been making an effort to catch up lately and while doing so, I was struck by the insightful comments I got on last month’s Falling Off Beams post: it seems that I’m not alone in struggling to find a balance between life and art. Instead of answering the comments individually, I thought I’d quote them here and just for a bit of fun, I set myself the challenge of going to the sites of those who commented and trying to find an image that related to the idea of balance.

Vivien Blackburn wrote:

That description of childhood gym and the terror of that beam for an un-athletic child with no balance brought back memories for me!

me too

and yes, life is often like that

Vivien was easy; on visiting her site, I immediately spotted this beautiful charcoal drawing of an apparently impossibly balanced rock.

Vivien Blackburn: Rocks above Sennen Cove, Charcoal

iHanna wrote:

Thanks for writing what I’m feeling too Kristy! All those unwritten blog posts, all those things one plan and never will get to!

calmness and chaos!

More chaos than calm by the look of it - iHanna’s moleskine notebook is full and so is her brain!

iHanna: Image from Moleskine journal

Annalisa from Kaizen Journey wrote:

Well said! I feel as though I have been buffeted by conflicting forces for awhile now too, and like you said balance can be hard to find but the struggle for it is what makes life lively…

This was a tougher choice, I could have chosen some of Annalisa’s lovely symmetrical shibori but in the end, I decided on this delicate floating image. Maybe on the days when balance feels hard we can all try to breath deep, lie back and just float a little?

Alsokaizen: In Solution

Daniel Sroka wrote:

I have a partially written post just like this one sitting in my blog’s Drafts folder. I believe that you may need the tension between what you have to do and what you want to do in order to move ahead with either. It is the energy created by the two, like a magnetic force, that pushes you forward.

Wise words there from Daniel, I shall try to keep them in mind the next time I’m beating myself up for not working hard enough. I knew I’d be spoilt for choice on Daniel’s site and indeed, the problem wasn’t finding something appropriate but narrowing it down to just one image.

Daniel Sroka: Flight

dryadart wrote:

good to know there are others struggling to make room in a “real” life for the art they must make… some days one feels so alone… balance, peace, space, wisdom, all such elusive and fleeting things, thanks for the post

I just loved this quirky drawing from dryadart. I enjoyed the sense that all the figures were slightly off balance, the centre figure in particular looks like she’s about to fall.

Lee from Dancing Crow wrote:

thank you for a reminder that balance is not-falling, rather than any simple pose that can be maintained over time. I am flailing my workroom, trying to winnow and weed and return to the pristine space only things I really want to work on. An impossible task, of course, all the old projects and ideas are crowding about looking for a chance to be made (or finished) as well as new ideas…

And here’s a perfect image from Lee to finish.

Lee: Untitled

Thanks to everyone who commented, I appreciated all your words of wisdom - although it did make me wonder if any of us are ever in balance? If you have any tips or tricks to finding a balance between your life and your art, then please let me know because it sounds as many of us could do with some help in that department!