Workshop with Jane Davies, Part 2 (work on menhirs)

I last wrote about my second planned piece neolithic menhirs back in August, here.The first thing I did when I turned to this project again during my second week at the Jane Davies workshop was to draw a full scale sketch of a composition, using a roll of newsprint I'd brought with me for this purpose. I knew the facility would have ample wall space available for this, and it's more difficult to do on my design wall at home which is large enough, but is composed of foam core covered with flannel, not too good for drawing. 

This drawing is not in any way final, but I was glad to see an image in something like the size I am want to end up with (about 90" high). This is enough to serve as a placeholder, while I go on to work through the details of the composition. I am still at the very beginning of this process.

From there, I wanted to experiment with color. When I last worked on the project in my home studio several months ago (when I was thinking of four shapes rather than three), I'd cut out the menhir shapes from hand-dyed fabric I had on hand:

But this left me dissatisfied, reminding me of the challenge I'd faced before in making abstract work about stones, which are already such simple shapes. Of course, another possibility would be to move away from abstraction, towards a more realistic approach. But I'm not drawn to that for my own work, even while I much admire the superb work in this vein by quilt artist Denise Labadie.

In my previous work about stones, I got to abstraction by focusing on color only, resulting in the piece "Holiness." So, I started thinking that maybe for this piece, I would focus on shape only, and not use the natural colors of stone. I looked forward to the workshop for the time it would give me to experiment, and the tool of collage for coming up with possible colors and arrangements. I decided to try colors very far away from natural stone colors, thinking this would bring the focus to shape; I used a mottled black for the background. Here are the resulting 11x14" maquettes, with the second one pulling the shapes apart a bit.

And since one of the demos at the workshop was about texture, I decided to test out texture (and shading) on one of the shapes.

While I felt engaged in these experiments as I did them, I didn't feel gripped by the results, and I would now say they were a dead end. Indeed, I'm embarrassed to even include in this post the collage sketches in green-turquoise-magenta. But I know that once the work is finally done, I'll be interested to look back and be reminded of the paths not taken. I may hold onto the possibility of some kind of texture, but the bright colors are definitely out. So the next steps will be more exploration, sketching, and testing. I have accumulated a pile of books about Giorgio Morandi to look at. His quiet, simple, forceful still life paintings are deeply moving; I think I will learn much by looking closely at his compositions.

And I find myself also looking back again at the stitched drawing of two stones that I made back in about 2015:

21" x 11"

And I also keep looking at this pencil sketch that I made during the workshop, in preparation for the large-scale drawing (click to enlarge):

11" x 14"

Who knows, maybe I'll end up with a large-scale black and white drawing of some kind.  

I'm thinking I will continue to work on this piece until I come up with what seems a promising direction, and then put it aside for a while as I go back to "Persistence," the first menhirs piece, for which I prepared the fabric this summer. The earth pigmented fabric has now cured, and is waiting for the stitching to begin. . . Once the stitching plan finalized and the contemplative stitching begun, I'll be able to come back to the second piece. I just can't do hard thinking about two big pieces at once.