sketchbooks

drawing, looking and seeing

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

I’ve recently returned from a lovely family holiday, traveling by train from Norfolk to London and via Paris through France to the south and on in to Italy, up into the foothills of the Alps via Turin … and back again. I made lots of small sketchbooks so I could have one close at hand at all times, with a selection of pens and pencils. I’ve always enjoyed drawing from trains, preferably sitting backwards, looking, identifying shapes and details, then hastily capturing what I saw in a few lines.

It’s a great exercise to keep the hand, brain and eyes in check, and although I have previously used this sort of drawing for my design work – including my degree Final Major Project back in 1997 – I only really do it now as a good activity to check in with the view and focus on the places, stations and landscapes I journey between, and as exercise for keeping my drawing practice fit and healthy. A gable-end of a barn, a cluster of trees or mountain horizons can be documented and it’s amazing how these drawings are then able to capture and remind me of the journey years later.

Here are some of the drawing from the trains. I sometimes get a bit more detail down if we sit in the station for a few minutes, and I jot the station name down for interest.

I also managed to do a small amount of drawing while sat in cafes or sheltering from sun while other family members were up to something else. They take a few minutes each, so still pretty quick observations. It’s clear my interest in pattern comes in to how I see the world. Rhythms of windows and balconies, railings, ornamental buildings….

I also made a couple of sketchbooks using tracing paper as I was interested to see how I worked with the transparent pages as the drawings built. I quite like the results and reminds me of how I plan lino blocks and screen prints with the layers of tracing paper.

It was definitely good to spend time drawing and I’m thinking of revisiting some in the studio, no pressure, just a few ideas. I hope you like them, let me know if / how you make drawings from trains!

pattern informs the piece: Zandra Rhodes exhibition review

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Finding a couple of hours to spare in London last month I took the decision to head across the river to the Fashion and Textile Museum, and specifically, the Zandra Rhodes: 50 years of Fabulous exhibition. It proved to be a perfect visit for where my head was at; juggling fashion and textile design in both a design commission and my academic life.

Zandra Rhodes is first and foremost a textile designer although it is her fashion designs that carry the printed and embroidered pattern she is famous for. The silhouettes of the garments, constructed often from multi layered draping fabrics are guided in their execution, in fact dictated by, the pattern design of Zandra’s strong handwriting or pattern, and executed using print processes and surface manipulation.

I’ve included plenty of images of these outfits in university design lectures over the years, discussing how the designer maintains the focused design style and aesthetic but also manages to evolve the work through the decades.

As ever it is very different when you get the chance to see the fabrics in real life. The white printed pigment on chiffon from the ‘Lovely Lilies’ collection (below right) and the quilting over screen printing of her signature swirling motifs as borders and placement prints provides the evidence that Zandra Rhodes is first and foremost exploring fabrics to lead garment design.

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The variety of fabric manipulation and surface embellishments was fascinating to see, some rather crude and some pieces held their own more than others. The ease in which the textiles worked as one with the garment design is certainly demonstrated throughout the exhibition, and it was useful to see the screens for printing to see the composition of the designs later on in the exhibition.

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The theatricality of Zandra Rhodes’ work was a perfect match for opera costumes, and upstairs in the gallery a number of interesting examples were showcased. I also enjoyed seeing original sketchbooks alongside a film of the designer talking about how important drawing is to her. I hope many textile design students visit the show and take her advice.

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There is a significant body of work on exhibition here and it is important to view it as a considerable output of a single designer with a thirst for carnival. Her practice spans fifty years, hence the exhibition title and although her style is not for everyone, her contribution of bravery, exuberance and fabric play should inspire others to take creative risks and find a way to make the work they want to make.

I would also recommend the small showcase of company overview and embroidery work by Norman Hartnell as you enter the gallery – stunning pieces from a different era.

The show is on until the 26th January, 2020.

time and sketchbook time

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

At the moment I’m juggling lots of different projects; one has been years (really!) in the making, another much quicker, straightforward and some more ‘surprise’ projects. They all have different requirements of my time, and in each week there may be a telephone call to a manufacturer to discuss things with, an email exchange between a client and myself to clarify details of a brief, or a call to a stylist / marketing team to plan a scheme for the future with, and the usual trade show sales team call! This all takes time, and different skills to manage.

A different skill altogether is to maintain a practice that, at the heart of it, seeks to challenge, engage and inspire the creative self that was the reason I set off in this direction at the start, twenty years ago. The sketchbook is the place I go back to, the safe place I can explore those ideas in, old and new, that keeps the journey going, the continuum that is my creative practice. Ideas do evolve over time, and the sketchbooks are testaments to the ongoing inquiry that may lend itself to something commercial in due course, but is not the reason I do the drawing in the first place.

In my role of design lecturer I regularly explain the uses of a sketchbook, the hows and whys a designer may approach the mental and physical task of working in a sketchbook. Retro-filling the pages that have post-its in saying ‘research’ needing to be completed the day before a hand-in lacks rigour and purpose, a scrap-book mentality is not necessarily the best use of printer credits unless you really do look and reflect on the relationship between your work and someone else’s. Dare I say it, I enjoy the task of working on a new white page, and see the potential, not the fear. I don’t often share pages of my sketchbooks, but here’s one page from this week in the studio, having gathered new ‘material’ at the weekend, furthering my ideas for my Grasslines print series…

I say let’s celebrate the sketchbook, the real one with paper pages that doesn’t require likes, favourites of retweets to be justified, the one you do for you. Why / how do you use your sketchbook?

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Hanbury Hall delights

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

My creative practice has been inspired by National Trust gardens for the last few years and as a result I’ve had a number of people suggest I visit Hanbury Hall – finally I got round to it at the weekend. Despite the poor weather it was a delight to discover all the pockets of gardens, each carefully considered, and demonstrating the wide variety of formal and informal planting the National Trust excels at.

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Armed with my sketchbook and camera I gathered plenty of inspiration for new prints and will definitely be back later in the season.

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Its also a fantastic building inside and out. I dashed around the inside and a particular wallpaper caught my attention.

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All in all, I left feeling excited about making new work again having spent so long preparing for my solo show at Tinsmiths, opening later this month… now where did I put that lino?

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