More Scenic Painting

Apparently the key to successful blogging is having some sort of routine publishing date every week or whatever. This means that your audience knows when to check your blog for updates, and makes your blog more successful from a marketing point of view and less frustrating for your readers to use...

however...

                 well...

Like many arty people, I’m electronically shambolic.

 Here, therefore, is some scenic work I did in January (oops).

Lizzie and the Pirate/Tarradiddle

Summery Gardening Things

It may well be six degrees today and drizzling greyly, but I am wearing thigh-high socks instead of woolly tights and listening obsessively to The Pierces and The Mamas and Papas – I don’t care what you think, summer is definitely here.

I was going to blog about my scenic painting photos from January, which have finally managed to ‘find a destination’ (apparently) on my laptop... but quite frankly, all I can think about is gardening.

So while the weather sorts itself out a bit more, let me share with you some photographs from last summer at my old house...

My little slither of garden was nestled under a huge sycamore tree and was very dry with practically no sunlight, making it nigh-on impossible to grow things in! Here is a raised shelf I made to try and catch some more light. As you can see, I’m not really into minimalism...

 Spot the following - two points for each:

-          A handmade candlestick, originally from the Picture Of Dorian Gray installation

-          A stone painted to look like a ladybird

-          A slightly wilted-looking tomato leaf

-          Three chilli plants with cunning copper slug repellers

-          A pot stand robbed out of a German dustbin

-          A lump of green driftwood

-          A morose-looking toad

-          A tiny headless stylised pottery figure from a set model

-          A broken rear-view mirror from my first Mini

-          My (former) jelly-shoes

-          A piece of mirror out of the skip at drama-school

-          A broken vase

-      A tile-effect bit of set from Dead Dog At Drycleaners

Another shelf-photo, featuring

-          A tiny broken cup, formerly owned by Rowena

-          The hand of a doll, brought as part of a box-full at a car-boot from a man gleefully selling off his ex-wife’s crafting supplies

-          A bashed up spice tin, gleaned from a fly-tipping site I used to browse

-          A naked lady tankard, formerly my Dad’s

-          A bee home, cunningly created from a can (spaghetti hoops, if my memory serves me correctly)

-          Another bit of pottery set, from Salome

-          A carnation, loving propagated by yours truly

-          A glow-in-the-dark skull, from, er, Asda.

A pillar I painted orange. I can’t be bothered to go into much more detail, but I will tell you this:

-          The candle-holder thing I found squashed in a local field

-          The broken bit of cup I found outside the doors of Ikea. It was made, glazed, packaged, transported, unpacked, stacked, brought and then dropped without ever getting so much as a sniff of a hot beverage. I was so wounded by its wasted existence that I took it home with me.

Well here are three of your answers from earlier.

I have a book on stone-painting from the seventies. Apparently the key is making them look like fish. Seventies fish. I went through a bit of a phase.

 The succulent above the headless man (John the Baptist, if you must know) was stolen from someone else’s garden as a cutting. I have no idea what its proper name is, but it has beautiful purple flowers and the leaves have this amazing texture, like tiny squid tentacles. I can never get enough of touching this plant. Succulents are amazing – I also love House Leeks (previous photo, another spaghetti hoop can). They have such a sculptural quality to them – whilst being proper hard! – they can withstand all sorts of weather and temperatures with very little soil!

St Pauls Oil painting and a plastic cherub, glimpsed through the chrysanthemums.

My horse chestnut tree! This came to be when I was around twelve and attempted to keep the best conker shiny by wrapping it in a rag from a favourite ex-dress (lamentably too small) and kept it in a damp Pringles pot... and now it is taller than me!! It’s on the way out in this photo, but is covered in lovely sticky buds as I type.

I laid this herringbone pattern flooring myself! Just behind the aquilegia, you can see a ceramic snail that I made when I was ten.

A mouldering plaster foot sticking out of a clump of stinking geranium. This is actually a cast of my own leg that I made in my first year of university.

As I’m sure you appreciate by now, I find the dressing of an outdoor space just as important as an interior or a set, and fill all the spaces in my life with little bits of junk that make me feel happy.

Please let the sun come out!!!



Properties!

When you have numbed all the nerve-endings in your fingers with an accidental layer of superglue... when you are desperately trying to remember trigonometry in order to sew a triangle of fur over a cat’s arse... when you are chasing what appears to be the last twelve gold beads in the whole of Germany around the props room floor... when all your colleagues are giving you grief about the tiny rubbery over-cooked chicken that you left on the doorstep a week ago (If I had found the bio-bin, I would have dealt with it earlier)...

... frequent blogging whilst at work doesn’t seem quite as attainable a concept as it did before you started working.

So let me show you what I have spent the last three weeks working on

Edgar The Spider

 

Edgar (fondly named after Edgar Allen Poe) started out in life as a joke-shop spider. He was a bit too small and plasticy to have much impact on stage, however, so I cut his legs off and extended them.  I created his new legs from wire (to add rigidity to the upper part of the legs) and lightweight chain (to add that satisfyingly startling jiggle-factor). I then covered him in tarantula-coloured fluffy wool, and attached a couple of yellow beads to created home-made-looking eyes, tying in with the slightly crafted look of the rest of the play.

 Edgar in the scary haunted-house scene in 'Lizzie and the Pirate'.

Mina the Cat

Mina (as in Harker, as in Dracula) also belongs to the haunted house sequence wherein she jumps out of a chimney! I vaguely made her pattern from scratch. She has a rigid tail, weighted feet to give her that extra leaping quality, and button eyes.

The Skull

The Skull (un-named, I've already proved I can read) rather unsurprising also belongs in the haunted house. For this, I rather excitingly devised an Indiana Jones-type contraption, whereby the skull sprung up out of a box!



The skull is activated when the actor sneakily nudges the end of the pole through the handle of the box. The weight of the large washers causes the skull end to flip upright and into view! I am a little bit obsessed with automata devices, so this was a very satisfying prop for me to make, even if there were a lot of chisel/washer/fulcrum-based adjustments needed!

The Crown

The crown was a central plot device in 'Taradiddle' and was somewhat challengingly required to be gold and silver and red and yellow and green and blue with diamonds and rubies and emeralds!!! I overcame this with feature-coloured gems at equi-distant points around the crown. The crown was created by wiring and glueing lots of beads to a pre-existing crown structure, and creating a new rim to fit the actress's head.

I love to solder!

The Mirror

The mirror was also in 'Taradiddle', and like everthing else in that play, it required bling! I created it from a plastic photo frame and cut it a new wooden backing and handle. I then covered it in gold paint, gems and glitter. I very much felt like I was working at the Mattel factory. Isn't it hideously wonderful?

...and that's all for now. I also have all my scenic painting to show you, but my computer is currently 'unable to find a destination'... hmm

Promised Land

Here is my Waterloo:

This is one of my most recently painted backcloths. It is a terrifying (well, for one person with limited time) 4m x 2.5m...

                                 ...and it's photo-realistic.

 An early blocked-in photo

 Look at the individual bricks!! Lucky I came up with a cunning device that made them easier...

 The finished piece in my painting tent

 In the theatre... all the brick houses have individual bricks

... and with some acting stuff going on in front of it!

A piece like this can really suck you in - I could easily have spent another week working into it.

The Taming of the Shrew

Marble effects are wonderful fun... lots of splashing and sloshing

Another one by Anna Michaels, painted with Meg Williams.

Painting in a tent...

I recently returned from working in a tent in Germany...

I spent three months there working as a Scenic Artist for White Horse Theatre, and worked on the backdrops and other set elements for eighteen plays. Please brace yourself for the highlights over the next couple of weeks!

These pictures are from the First Wave (as those of us in the know call it), and are of ‘The Weasel in the Sack’, designed by the lovely Anna Michaels.

We had a recurring joke about this backdrop...

Dragon: “Chicken! What is wit that weave on yo head? We are not going to the clubs like that!”

On a serious note, I would like to point out that the chicken is actually a bird of paradise, and that the dragon’s sexual orientation is unknown.

Six months later...

I had such good intentions for this blog.

It was to be an impulsive, expressive gallery of my work as I expelled it: An ephemeral collage of ideas, thoughts and opinions. Sketches, designs, inspirations, automata pieces, and a startlingly lucid article deconstructing the historical and fictional treatment of Anne Boleyn.with regards to the relationships between the eternally analogous twin contexts of witchcraft and feminism.

And then I buggered off.

Oh well, I’m back now – and having scraped my impetus back together, I am ready to share my work with you once more.

Let us go on with the blog!