This year's theme for the Summer School was "Travelling Lines", the travel could be going downstairs to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee, the garden, a real travel or even an imaginary one.
I saw this as an opportunity to get back into the theme had I chosen for the Diploma and shortly before leaving for the UK went back to the nearby industrial site to eventually draw, take pictures and get re-inspired.
The class started with a quick but efficient exercise where we were asked to go out and make 20 sketches in 20 minutes on Post-it papers. We had to choose a maximum of 3 different mediums. Unfortunately it was still raining, we had to be quick and concentrate on the essential. Then we had the same exercise (less sketches) on our chosen theme relying on our memory.
We then had to choose three words out of those written down by our neighbour and do collages either with paper or fabric or both of them. Again this exercise had to be done rather quickly.
I wanted to render an urban feel, the decay and geometric shapes of Esch/Belval. This was an exercise I really enjoyed. I had taken some of my painted papers with me and knew in which direction I wanted to go. The limited amount of time was good as you didn't get tempted to overdo a piece.
All the time Jane showed us some of her work to explain what she wanted us to do and what the possibilities were. We were talking about thread, the colour of it, the amount of stitching, edges, we did some monoprinting (something I loved).
I soon realized that I wanted to start stitching on fabric, I was longing for some fabric in my hands. So the last day and a half I spent on the stitching.
Jane took the time to mentor each of the students separately. She didn't use the time that was supposed to be her free time. In this tutorial we took a look at my Diploma sketchbook and some of my photos. We discussed why it was important to sketch instead of taking just pictures with the cell phone. (I was so motivated that I sketched while waiting for boarding at the airport :)
I told Jane that I'd like to introduce more figurative elements at least in this body of work, maybe with monoprinting, who knows. I also realized how much I missed hand stitching (which I did then on my trip back to Luxembourg) as well as working with concrete imagery. I was very much attracted by the loose paints in Jane's work and I was mesmerized by the amount of her stitching.
The following pictures show the collaged work as well as the work in progress which I started in fabric.
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