Photoshoot

Today P took photographs of artwork for a group of friends from the Book & Print Art Collective that I belong to.  My job was to press the button on the umbrella that made the flash work.  That wasn't overly taxing, so I amused myself by sketching some of everybody's work.  The work was beautiful, intriguing, moving, astonishing.  My sketches give only a cursory introduction; but they helped me appreciate the work as I slowed down and really studied it to draw it.

This piece consisted of 8 different prints from the same collograph plate  and with stitching, drawing, and painting.

The piece on the left and top right needs color to really give an idea of it.  Each page was an abstract seascape, more of a thumbnail in lush colors.  At the bottom right is a hornet's nest that the first artist to arrive brought with her.  She had found it in the middle of the road that leads to our street.  The outer skin is gone so you can see the inner construction.  I at first thought it had been sawed through because of the gaps, which looked like saw kerf marks.  But each layer was one cell deep, and the construction is actually like a parking garage built around a central stairway or rampway.  It was soggy from all our recent rain and completely empty of hornets, and it's out on our back porch now.

Two people are represented on this page.  Again, color would have been good, but by then I had been given a couple of other jobs-- squeezing a handle that wouldn't stay squeezed, fetching tea, etc.-- so just getting in a few sketches was all I could do.