a weekend in glasgow 1

The images here are only vaguely linked to the subject of the post but I'll come to them shortly.

On Saturday morning I travelled to Glasgow with Louise Woodcock doing research for a proposed residency by Rare Experiments. This art collective was started by Louise with Jennifer McDonald and Graham Dunning before Graham relocated to London. I was only recently drafted in.

I'll write in more detail about the trip as soon as I have the chance - although it's going to be a busy week. There is work connected to the trip to complete, I want to review Womb at Off With Their Heads at Islington Mill, The Other Room happens on Wednesday and Counting Backwards on Thursday.

I also have two pieces of work to deliver to Bury for the Text Festival. This may be news to a few of you. The truth is I don't like to advertise things until I'm absolutely secure in my own mind that they're really happening. There'll be more on the work and the Text Festival once everything else is out of the way.

Edit 5 April 11: The two pieces are separate from the sound works fleetingly mentioned in Tony Trehy's recent post on the festival. Which nonetheless caused me great excitement.

Anyway, I promised to tell you about the images. They follow on from Lilybet Grey's life drawing demonstration at Live Art:Live Art Vol 2 at Contact a couple of weeks back. I was particularly inspired by the idea of drawing without looking at the paper. So I tried it. On the train up to Glasgow. Mostly drawing things while the train was in motion.

While not easy to see the three images on the first page are two trees and the back end of a sheep.

While in Glasgow Louise and I met up with a number of artist groups and people including Glasgow Open School and Psykick Dancehall. It was at the flat of Glasgow Open School's Liam that we saw a gig organised by Psykick Dancehall that featured Muscletusk* who were fucking tremendous and Arrington De Dionyso who was a total revelation.

Like I said right at the start there'll be more on all of this and more when I have the time.

The next set of images were also on the journey to Glasgow. They are (left to right, top to bottom) a barn, the end of a viaduct, a station light (this and all but one of the remaining images from this page while the train was stationary), part of a ruined building, a digger (drawn as the train passed it), ornate chimneys, and two men on a platform.

I'd never actually been to Glasgow before and found the people we met incredibly helpful and open. I hope we get to return the favour in some way. Before we went I wasn't especially looking forward to the trip. However I'm now very glad I went even though it was a pretty packed schedule.

The third page is also from the journey out. It shows part of a man on a platform, part of a building, the cylinder was a muck spreader but the train passed too quickly for me to complete the drawing, immediately below and looking like part of the same drawing is the wing of a bird - both bird and train were travelling and conspired to defeat the sketch, a wind turbine, a sheep, and the top of a tree with a couple of wires crossing in front of it.

Both the building and the wind turbine are a bit shit because I cheated on both and looked at the page. This simply made things worse.

I'm now quite knackered and about to go to bed before one of my only two days in work this week. But before that I'll talk about the last set of sketches.

These sketches were made on the way down. There are fewer of them because Louise and I had to draft our report on the visit first, and since we set off just after 5pm arriving in Manchester at 8:25 quite a bit of the journey was in half-light and darkness.

I didn't plan to do these sketches. I was actually intending to investigate ideas for the studio since I completed the figures and both they and the current mask are drying. But I had no ideas and the sketches trying to prompt something were really unhelpful. I decide to forget about it and just draw, and then decided it would be interesting to try without looking at the page.

This last set of pictures are a house, a tree, a truck, the top of an electric pylon, the triangular thing is a sheep kneeling - we passed too quickly, a station light - again passed too quickly, a man sat on a bench at a station, the back of a set of lights and some signs on the track at a station, part of another digger - again passed quickly, what I thought was two crows on a station roof when we were stationary - in fact the left crow is two crows. The shading was done after the fact. The other marks on the page are a tractor we passed too quickly to draw which I then scribbled out.

So that's the first part of my account of the Glasgow trip. More to come sometime soonish.

*Sorry, I refuse to link to MySpace until it stops freezing my fucking browser.