I first met artist Anne Watt on an Arts Practice course we did together at the uni in 2010.  All of us had to present to the others a project we had previously completed.  Anne chose to present to us how she, with the occasional help from friends, had a barn delivered from France (I think), planned the whole thing and physically put the whole thing up.  I took an immediate liking to this can-do lady and we have remained good friends ever since.  She joined me at my workshop several months ago and produced these wonderful tiles.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.297311586987155.93574.193945193990462&

Today, I had an unplanned meet with her as the itinerant sketcher prepares to embark on new life adventures.  As we were chatting about our next steps, she whipped out her sketchbook.  Her sketches, they speak much even without her there; I love seeing her on-line posts coming up.  She has kept sketchbooks for a long time, but last year, our mutual friends Minnie Teckman and Viv Richards went on the local radio one Sunday morning to chat and sketch along to.   https://www.facebook.com/groups/artskillsworkshops/

My poor rendition has not seen light of day since, for good reason I may add.  Anne however, has been sketching regularly since.   

Her talented sketches have a very unique liveliness about them, and draw you in to whatever she herself has been looking at.  I feel myself walking round her place, sitting at the window seat, playing on the piano, collecting wood and even hanging about the mechanics waiting for her car to be repaired!

Her posts online drew the attention of the Sketching Workshop group, limited to 150 people, which she joined by invitation.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Jorge.Royan.Workshop/

There is a great ethos about the group.  It invites participants to actively share their comments and feedback on work and asks to be ‘encouraging’ and constructive in their comments.  What a healthy approach, very growth and development centric rather than protective, negative and limiting.

I wish Anne well for the future, we parted with the words vignette and static/ dynamic gaining new meaning for me.   No doubt she will be posting more of her work on-line.  Look out for her. 

Lately, I have encountered many people who emphatically express that ‘Art’ is something that should be very representational and painted with strict rules - a landscape, a pretty scene, a human or animal portrait, and ‘Craft’  is something which is made ‘properly’, symmetrically without fault, like a vessel or a nice tile.  Everything else is apparently a waste of time.
 
I am not so black and white about it.  I think the former is something that gives you pleasure to look at or experience or which raises your curiosity and interest, maybe even triggers other trains of thought.  As for the latter, craftsmanship is only one element, but using materials creatively to express ideas can sometimes be as captivating, sometimes more.  It need not be confined to a gallery, or made specifically by someone for displaying and selling, it could just be in the everyday.  Occasionally, it is the physical process of making that is equally or more pertinent than the final product.  

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of overseeing the Amalgam8 exhibition with fellow artist Katie Ellen Fields.  Her work at the exhibition consists of mainly life size painted line portraits (I later found out were self portraits) and a video installation.  She is interested in progress and time and her fabric ribbon portrait diary is very original.  They were very effective in the gallery in their own right, but I’d noticed something textural in two of hers at the back.  From far, the portraits looked like they had been edged with brown/ gold.  On close inspection, layers of the material they were painted on had come away revealing the raw underneath.

Apologies for the sideways pictures!

The two paintings were created and then put together while wet.  When taken apart, each painting took away part of the other, and made it its own.  The work is all about relationships.  Though the portraits stand apart as two separate people, they also have parts of each other - shared experience, habits, sentiments;  that’s what happens when people are in any relationship - give and take.  As organic beings we take and absorb as part of our own what the other gives, willingly or otherwise.  I found that quite beautiful.

It also reminded me of the poet Kahlil Gibran, whose poetry my father used to randomly quote parts of when we were young.   No scholar of his myself, I have time and again come across the one about marriage, especially the bit about the pillars:

"...But let there be spaces in your togetherness, 

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. 

Love one another but make not a bond of love: 

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. 

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. 

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. 

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, 

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. 

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. 

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. 

And stand together, yet not too near together: 

For the pillars of the temple stand apart, 

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow. "

If only life could be so poetic.

And a bit on friendship:

.."When you part from your friend, you grieve not; 

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain."




For more on Katie, follow her blog http://howlsofgrace.blogspot.co.uk/ and on Twitter @HowlsOfGrace 

I’m on Twitter @nitanathwani and we’re both exhibiting together with six other friends until Oct 5th at 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Collective-Collaborations/372163626177301