It’s the first day of my printmaking course tomorrow, and I need a picture to cut into lino and print. I haven’t done a linocut since I was at school, so I don’t know what sort of pictures work best. I considered using a classic fashion photo, like this one by Louise Dahl-Wolfe. I loved the lines on the dress, and thought they might work well in a linocut.
So I put the photo on my lightbox and traced a few lines, but then got confused: do I draw lines for the white bits or the dark bits? If the lines represent the bits to gouge out then it’s the white bits. I kept getting it wrong, though, and decided it wouldn’t work anyway. The hat would look like a strange, beak-shaped head. It’s a shame, because I think the dress might have worked.
Then I realised that putting layout paper on the photo created some interesting effects. You could curve the paper to fade the photo in or out, crumple it to add texture, and glue it to key areas so that part shows through whilst the rest is distorted. You could also extend the picture by drawing on the layout paper or adding objects under it. I need to explore all this!
Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to print out other photos to try. Perhaps Edward Weston’s photo of a lettuce leaf, or his photo of an onion.
Edward Weston’s is the interesting one, on the left. I liked the straggly roots on my onions, though, so I might combine Weston’s leaves with my onion bulbs, into a fantastical onion chimera.
My memory of Job Centres goes back to the 1980s, when I visited one in Darlington. I wanted a job for a few months before I went abroad. I’d just finished a degree in Psychology and the bloke said to me, “We’ve got a job as a roller-blind fitter. Is that any good?”
Job Centres have improved since those days, when each job was written on an index card and pinned on a board, and dispirited people browsed the rows of boards. I bowled up at the Cambridge “Jobcentre Plus” and there were no boards, and barely any people. An elderly lady with a clipboard greeted me at the reception.
I said, “Hello, I’ve come to see Penny at desk 47.”
She smiled like she was doing voluntary work. “Yes, what’s your surname? Just go upstairs and wait by her desk.”
I entered a long room with desks down either side, and sofas down the middle. Each desk had a glass partition separating it from the next, just high enough to hide someone sitting down. There were about 30 desks, but only five or six visitors were sitting at them, being counselled by their “job coach”. Desk Number 47 had a visitor, so I sat down to wait.
A man in a black polo shirt and combat trousers walked past. He had a walkie talkie pinned to his thigh pocket, so I guessed he was a security guard.
A couple of job coaches who didn’t have visitors chatted on the phone. “Hello, is that Shona? Hello, can I just ask you a question, so we know it’s you? Where were you born?”
The security guard walked past again and I thought, “Blimey, he must be busy”.
“Children are back at school, and they’re all okay? Good, good. And how do you feel about doing the next training slot? Level one. See how you feel. Absolutely.”
The security guard passed me again, and I realised he was walking round and round the room. I didn’t time him, but I’d say it took him about a minute to do a lap. On about his twentieth lap I noticed he had a sentence tattooed down his arm, which I guess must have read, “For god’s sake, someone stop me!”
A woman leaned out from behind a momitor and said, “Do you know who you’re seeing?”
“Yes, Penny at 12.40.”
The woman was in her fifties, and stout with a red face and white hair. She rose cautiously to her feet and lumbered across the room, with such a bad limp I wondered if she should be in hospital.
Penny was busy, but I had to sit on the sofa in front of her desk. “They change everything and don’t tell me!” Penny was saying. “Maybe I should have retired.”
Then it’s my turn, and indeed Penny was retirement age, plus she didn’t appear to have a skeleton. Her body looked like two sacks of old clothes piled on top of each other, one for her belly and the other for her boobs, and the whole thing wrapped in a black cardigan. A head was stuck on, but not well because it leaned forwards.
Or perhaps she was filled with water like an amoeba, and didn’t need a skeleton to keep her turgid. You just can’t work out the structure of some people.
Anyway, she was lovely and we had a happy conversation because neither of us were interested in finding me a job. She printed a National Insurance form out for me, and rose to collect it from the printer at the end of the room. In some consternation, I watched her haul herself up as painfully as her colleague had done, and limp just as agonisingly to the printer. I should have offered to get the form for her. Maybe next time. We’re meeting again at the end of the month.
I went back to the town centre feeling relieved, because I was worried I’d have to show proof I was looking for work. At least I don’t have to perform that charade.
I bought Madame de Lafeyette’s La Princess de Clève at the Oxfam charity shop, and tootled up to the Waterstones cafe to celebrate. As I sat there with my cappuccino and lemon drizzle cake, reading the introduction to my new book, I felt ridiculously privileged and happy.
I decided I’d sketch people before I went back home, but the rain closed in. I wandered around instead, and looked at people: a pretty young woman riding past on a bike, her face flushed and her skin smooth with youth; a Middle-Eastern looking woman with white foundation on her face and startling red lipstick; a small old man bent double, his trousers tucked into his socks, shuffling half a foot-length at a time and always looking at the floor; a South Asian woman pushing a pram with make up over her face that made her skin look purple; a skinny woman with lank white hair and a face mask, walking briskly past whilst muttering to an imaginary friend; a man with a bottle in his hand walking sideways with his arm in front of him, like he was edging through a crowd, but with no-one around him.
When I went for a piss in Lion’s Yard, there was a poster for the Samaritans in the toilet that said, “No matter what’s on your mind, we’re here to listen.” What’s on all these people’s minds? What do they think about when they’re alone at night?
Tonight I took some photos of my hand by candlelight.
We had a thunderstorm today, with violent rain. As part of my “Stop to observe life” campaign, I wrote some notes whilst sitting at the back door. Here is an extract:
The patio is a frenzy of flickering circles where the drops spatter, percuss outwards and vanish. Rain scurries down in lines against the dark background of the fir tree. Lightning tremors and thunder rumbles like boulders tipped down a cliff. Water plitter-platters down from the leaking gutter. Leaves twitch and drip. Droplets tap on the window, nudge into each other, then streak down leaving a dissolving trail of water. I open the door and close my eyes. The air is cool, damp and roaring, like I’m standing next to a waterfall. Suddenly the sun emerges through the rain, and the droplets on the pine cones glimmer. The shadow of a bird crosses the lawn. The rain stills and the droplets shimmer down from the fir tree, iridescent like tinsel. As things quieten, I hear the washing machine whirr and clunk, and the downspout, which was blurting out water in spasms, now trickles a caressing lilt, like it was singing someone to sleep but couldn’t speak words. The leaves waver peacefully and a blackbird whistles and chirrups like a woodcut maker chiselling a new line in blank wood.
I don’t like how that sounds poetic. I’m not trying to be poetic, I’m trying to say what it was like to be there, but I don’t have the words. Perhaps I should say more about how I felt and what I thought, rather than just describe what’s around me.
I’ve written these sorts of notes since I was a teenager, by the way. I don’t know why – I’ve just felt like writing them. In the next six months I hope to work out why, and what to do with all these scraps of paper and notebooks I’ve amassed.
The rain brought out the colours of the dead leaves
I decided to make a website for my essays with a system called Astro. Luckily I found I’ve already started a site with Astro for another project, so I’ll just use that.
I got my old Takumar 55mm lens out. It was made in the early 1970s and gives a distinctive colour to photos. It seems to absorb light in a different way to other lenses, and produces warm and saturated colours. I didn’t believe that myself until I did a comparison with a modern lens, with no post processing.
Here is an example. I took a storage heater apart this afternoon, and this is what it looked like inside:
Notice the colours in the concrete in the bottom left of the picture, and the colour of the screwdriver. I haven’t increased the saturation of the image at all.
I need to start drawing. Photography is too quick, and records rather than expresses.
My contract ended yesterday, so my six months with nothing to do begins today. Emotionally, though, I’ve already changed. I took my last two weeks off, and something odd happened. I got possessed by a spirit that compelled me to wake up at seven, do some yoga, eat healthily all day and work towards a purpose in life. That’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks, and I don’t recognise myself.
It feels like someone else has taken over. Perhaps this is what happens when you have enough money, and when you have time in front of you. The person you’ve always wanted to be emerges and takes control. He knows what to do because, from deep in your subconscious, he’s been watching your thoughts and fantasies, and he’s worked out a plan.
It’s as if you’ve inherited a garden planted by an expert, but which the previous owners had neglected. It’s swamped with brambles and ivy, so you launch into it and hack it all back. Then flowers start appearing everywhere: some aconites under a bush, a rose in a hedge and irisis by a pond. It’s surprising, but they were always there. They just needed the space to flourish.
So yes, I was up early this morning and, completely without thinking, I put a day bag together. It contains all the things I need to go out and observe life. Here are the items:
My camera (Canon 6D) with 28-135mm zoom lens
A 40mm and a 100-200mm lens
Lens filters
Speedlight flash with batteries
Remote flash triggers with batteries
Mini tripod for the flash
Large tripod for the camera
Small light reflector
A hardback notebook for noting what I see, hear, smell etc
Some biros
A sketchbook (I’ll draw with the biros)
Later on, I’ll add some watercolours, brushes and a small pot for water.
In the afternoon I bought the domain for this website, and made it. Just like that. No research into technologies, like I used to do, and no squandering hours trying trendy systems that have thousands of dependencies that you have to cobble together like the parts of a prestigious, but frustratingly unreliable, vintage car.
Tonight I meant to go out and take dramatic pictures of a withered tree with my flash, but it got late and I was too tired. Instead, I include a photo I took earlier, which shows that I have finally delivered myself from Banjo the Cat.
