It’s not spag bol……

No, it’s not spag bol ! This is the page spread that illustrates Bologna as ‘la grassa’ – the fat – meaning it’s a great place to eat. This is a type of tagliatelle called ‘paglia e fieno’ from the Emilia-Romagna area. The cutaway at the top of the page is from a famous Bologna roofline.

The date-and-time page spread is the date and time of the strage di Bologna. The station clock is always left set at that time. I suppose you’ll think I’m weird that I’d do a book about this massacre so long after the time, and from the other side of the world. The family I lived with in Rome were communist intellectuals. They said I must go to Bologna, and I just adored it. The thing I remember though, in my first visit in 1975, everyone’s luggage was searched at the train station. Such a thing was unheard of, and it stuck in my mind. It took me thirty years to get back, and I loved it just as much.

This third page is to illustrate the massacre at the railway station and the collage is Italian words to do with murder and terrorism. It is sooo hard to find Italian magazines for collage in Sydney. Leichhardt, the Italian area, which is near where I live has not one op shop.

Playing with Bologna bits and pieces

Glad you liked my Bologna book. Yes, it has been submitted for the AGNSW exhibition – that’s not to say it will be accepted. I’ll post more pages when I’ve had time to crop them & so forth.

This is something I did to let off steam when the book was finally finished and all the deadlines met. I had all sorts of little bits and pieces left over. I have been selling some art books on ebay, and I quite often put in a handmade bookmark and I was running out. I’ve also used some credit card paper and a piece of itajime paper. The second set is what you see through the window when you pull up the red blind.

This artist comes from Bologna.

Who is he? Alison, from scribblesadagio has been using him for inspiration.

I also did some bookmarks with credit card papers glued onto matt board I bought at Reverse Garbage. I’ll show you them soon.

Bologna book finally finished…..meets deadline.

Thirteen days of rain and finally today is sunny. I’ve finally finished my Bologna book, photographed it, and it’s ready to deliver in time to meet the deadline for the exhibition. Aaaaaaaaargggggh. It took so long.

Bologna is one of my two favourite cities in the world. (The other is Barcelona.) When I saw a wonderful Peter Lyssiotis artist’s book of Paris at the AGNSW, it was very abstract to me, who doesn’t know Paris at all (I’m a Rome girl). It gave me the idea that I could make a Bologna book, which would also be an ode to red, and possibly incomprehensible, unless you know something about Bologna. Each page is painted, in a sort-of faux fresco in many layers of acrylic paint and medium like the red buildings in Bologna. Then I let the paint cure before working on the images. On the cover I have used three colours of bookcloth to abstract Bologna’s famous towers . The endpapers are copies of an oldish map of Bologna I got on ebay, scanned, printed and treated with shellac. The book starts with the things that Bologna is famous for – not only ‘la rossa’, but also ‘la dotta, and ‘la grassa.’ The book begins with the lighter side of Bologna, but then becomes political and ‘dark’ and leads towards ‘la strage di Bologna.’ Bologna is full of arcades, and I have made stencils from photos of the light and shade that is created by the pillars. The image with the arrows is where the book begins to become political. The arrows point right and left (destra e sinistra) – the choices in politics, and the arrows made by the stitching on the spine reflect this too. And guess what is behind the red blind when you lift it up?

Old Darling Harbour – in acrylic paints.

This last week I’ve been struggling to finish two projects at once. This one is DONE. It’s a small acrylic painting for my entry in the Pyrmont Art Prize.
This photograph is 25 years old. In 1983/4 I worked in Glebe and lived in Edgecliff. I used to drive home across Darling Harbour towards the city, and at this time of the year, in the late afternoon, the whole city is bathed in golden light when seen from the west. At the time I was heavily into photography, having done a two-week summer school at UNSW with an inspirational teacher called Clive Jarrett (Anyone know what happened to him?) Late one afternoon, a friend and I went to Darling Harbour to take photos of the city. A that time it wasn’t the tourist precinct it is now, but a wasteland of mostly unoccupied wharves, unused railway lines, and empty warehouses. I’d been planning to go to Pyrmont to take photos THIS Easter, so that I could paint an urban landscape. then it rained and rained and rained. So I ratted around and found these old photos.
In the Pyrmont Art Prize, you get a canvas supplied with your entry fee (what a great idea!) so all the canvases are the same size and format – 30cm square. So my first act was to crop the photos in Photoshop, decide on a composition, and do a study in watercolour pencil.Once that was done, I drew it up on my canvas (underpainted with yellow oxide) in chalk pencil. Then I painted.
This is my first urban landscape painting for some time, but I hope not the last. I certainly want a more grungy look in future, but this time I was trying to capture that gold of the light in the late afternoon. I was aided in this by Matisse’s new transparent glazing colours, Transparent Yellow Oxide, Transparent Venetian Red, Transparent Umber, and Transparent Red Oxide. These colours are wonderful for glazing (I used Spreader Medium with them) and I’ve had a lovely play. Most urban landscapes don’t have foliage, so I hope it’s not too ‘country cottage with roses round the door’ because those are WEEDS.
I sent my photo to the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority hoping to identify the building. However the very helpful people there tell me that warehouses very similar to this were all over Australia and used for about 70 years.
You can see on this page a map that shows the Pyrmont area, and my warehouse was definitely on the other side of the water -the Sydney side.
I’m now on the last leg of my artist’s book about Bologna, which I hope will be accepted for the exhibition in the AGNSW. I just have to actually pierce the cover to bind it and that’s pretty scarey.

 

It’s a conspiracy !

The planets seem to be aligned in a consiracy to stop me making art. Waaaah! I’m getting stressed. The deadline for the Pyrmont Art Prize is coming up, as is the Australian Bookbinders’ Exhibition. Neither of my entries are complete. Today I am making the cover for my Bologna book, which is highly stressful – a lot of cutting & piecing. I worked on the Pyrmont Art Prize entry yesterday (stuff the planets) and it is now well down the track. Still, I want to make a major change, so it’s next once the cover is made.

On Monday afternoon I had some friends round to make credit card papers. I learnt about this from Kelsey first. You can find detailed instructions on her blog on this post. They are such fun – totally addictive. You only have a certain amount of control when you make these papers – the variables are the paper, the card, the consistency of the paint, the smoothness of the surface under your paper. We used pieces of perspex, which I had Ajaxed to get off any bits of old paint. It was very interesting with three of us making papers together. We made nine each, and when you saw them in a bunch, it became obvious that each group had a slightly different ‘look.’ Obviously the hand of the artist has something to do with it too.

The top one (I think) is Aqua Green Light, and Burgundy and Copper. The second is Magenta Light, then half Cobalt Blue and half Hookers Green, then Silver.

The third is half, Yellow Deep, half Yellow Light, then Burgundy, and Australian Sap Green.

The last is a bright red (I don’t remember) Hookers Green and Metallic Gold. All Matisse Flow Formula paints. I did make one piece with Matisse Structure Formula but I didn’t like how that panned out so much. The Structure has a lot more plasticky stuff (technical term, there) in it, and therefore the water doesn’t move the paint so easily. Nevertheless. it’s just a different look, and may well suit some purpose in the future.

At present I have a painting in an exhibition in the “At the Vanishing Point” Gallery. Last night was not only the opening, but the gallery’s first birthday. Huge crowd, but huge cake with plenty to go around. They have a courtyard out the back and everyone tends to congregate there, because that’s where the bar is. At this gallery, instead of an inch of warm wine in a paper cup, you pay a ludicrously small amount for a proper glass of wine in a proper glass, or a bottle of beer. I love this gallery because Renee and Brendan are such a pleasure to deal with, and they make everyone so welcome.

Before we went to the gallery, we ate at African Feeling. Yummm -oh! I am Thai’d out at the moment. The food at this restaurant is like the best home cooking and it is only a couple of very short blocks from the gallery (as is Doytao, our usual haunt.)