Fluid Landscapes
As part of the Gravesham Art Sponsored Artist programme, Heather Haythornthwaite is organising a community project to create Fluid Landscape sketchbooks, along with an exhibition at the St Andrew's Centre, Gravesend showcasing the sketchbook, and work by local artists. Members of Gravesend Arts Group are currently working on the sketchbook.
These are the guidance notes for participating artists. Please Contact Us if you would like to be part of the project.
Click here for some example pictures.
Fluid Landscape:
Responses inspired by the river at Gravesend and the nearby marshes
This is your invitation to participate in a unique and exciting shared art project initiated by Gravesham Arts, with an exhibition showing in May 2020 at The St Andrews Centre, Gravesend.
The centrepiece of the exhibition will be the concertina sketchbooks, available for your drawings and paintings. There may be space for your writings, prose and poetry too.
1.These books are shared and circulated for use. Please pass on the book to the next user within 48h. There are other artists who are keen to be involved and our time is limited.
2.There is a small mark on the side of every external folded page. You must incorporate and use this significant mark in your work. It enables the fluid and continuous nature of the project to work.
3. Each page is to be used for hand drawn, painted and collaged work, and must be totally used with complete coverage – with no white paper to be seen! If you want some white, you must add it! Use any media that will be dry within 48 h.
Notes
1.Additions and textures: nothing too fragile or too thick.
Holes and cuts: keep them robust and strong – nothing that will destroy the book itself.
2.You do not have to follow on from the page before you. You can use any page or double page in the book.
3.Do not work on the back side of the concertina pages.
4.You may use photos for inspiration and as collage material. Please do not submit a digital copy of an existing piece of work.
There will be links to my website www.hazelnut-press.com and to the Gravesham Arts website once our exhibition dates are finalised.
The exhibition
In addition to the extraordinary sketchbooks, you are invited to create a piece of work for the show. There are some canvasses available for this purpose. The wall hung piece you make may link directly to your sketchbook entry – or it may be quite different.
If you want to write about your work, or wish to submit some of your own poetry or prose as a submission, please send it to me
Here are some sources of inspiration that might be useful, including two YouTube films. If you find more to share, please send them to me to add to the Hazelnut Press website.
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.”
― Laura Gilpin
“I have an immoderate passion for water…for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.”― Guy de Maupassant
“The road by the river had been one of my favourites. I could walk at the same speed as the river. I could feel it breathing. It was alive. More than anything, it was the river we had thank for creating the town. For grinding down from the hills over how many hundreds of thousands of years, for hauling the dirt, filling the sea, and making the tree grow. The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be the way”
― Haruki Murakami
No turbots dignify my boards;
But gudgeons, flounders--what my Thames affords. ― Alexander Pope
The Thames is like a great tidal pool ... It not only rushes on its way but goes up and down, tossing things and people, sucking entire lives down and out into the vast sea. ― Karen Harper
The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…’ ― Charles Finch
Bottom of Form
“Are you watching the boats?" Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.
Heavens no, I'm spying on people," Virginia responded unrepentantly. ― Lesley M.M. Blume
“The air moves like a river and carries the clouds with it; just as running water carries all the things that float upon it.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
“Sam was the only member of the party who had not been over the river before. He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
“It took him half an hour to reach the little mission chapel. From his position on his back in the river he could see just the tip of the steeple, but for the most part he gazed upward at the constellations…. There were a lot of stars left out of the constellations, and nothing to stop you from drawing the lines in different ways to create different pictures. He wanted to lift his wings and fly, but he didn't have the power. He could only let the river carry him along.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple
Youtube
‘Why the Seals are coming back to the Thames’
BBC London Sept 2019
‘ What’s in the Thames ‘
Port of London Authority Nov 2015