COLOUR, drawing using natural stone marks, 1m x 1m. Into February, into better light levels and this stonework (Dec 15) is now complete and about to go off to the framer. COLOUR will hang with two other metre square stone drawings in the new Haymarket Hotel. And in the middle of March, I + team will be reinstalling ORDER, permanently, in the hotel’s foyer. I often choose to draw in monochrome and use colour very sparingly in tapestry, yet I find myself getting increasingly intrigued by the range and qualities of colour found on a seemingly grey beach. Of course, if I give it half a second’s thought… it’s obvious… optical mixing on a massive scale. Only after hours spent crawling around the coastline, nose to the ground, do the shades and tones become evident within the grey swathes. Optical mixing is an aspect of woven tapestry (weaving generally) that I have always found fascinating. Unlike paint ‐ where, when two colours are mixed, a third is achieved but the original pair are lost ‐ woven colours combine to produce a hue which is read by the eye and its constituent parts are still present. Like Pointillist painting this makes for a very lively colour field of rich depth. If I were to take this idea to its logical conclusion with coloured stone drawings ‐ perhaps I would work on a massive scale, using the natural marks of found colour in a more fluid way to mix new shades. But I’m not interested in this. For the moment, learning to notice what is given ‐ to train myself to see what is really there – is totally absorbing.
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