Poetry

A good friend of mine is a talented poet. Introducing Claire Jane Carter, conjurer of images through words.

She wrote this poem in response to some ink and salt experiment I was playing with...

A small house sits,
flicked in beside
the flaring trees
salted and wet
and yet somehow on fire.
Mud flats simmer in the ink thick space
that extends, hiding god knows what
to the end of the page
What swims in the white?
Turns its milk eyes to the sky
to watch as
overhead you wreak detailed chaos.
Something mineral
crackles, bleeds,
spikes the night,
oils in clouds with the residue
of its own burning.
Is this simply a
a salt slight of hand
from whoever would build that house
on the edge of such a catalyst.

School workshops

Last week I was invited along to Watercliffe School in Sheffield to help run a workshop as part of their annual Artsweek. Here is the room in a pre-paint/collage/mess state and another photo of a selection of pandas that obviously overrun China according to our map. I think my favourite bit was when one of the children got distracted from what she was supposed to be doing and painted Africa blue instead.

meraki

Residencies

Another artist from my studio sent me a link to this project in Scotland...

http://www.thebothyproject.org/

Sheffield Showcase

Some drawings on show as part of Sheffield Showcase at the top of the Moor just down the road from the Peace Gardens. 

Collaboration with the ever talented artists Jill Ray (http://jillraylandscapes.co.uk/) and Mandy Payne (http://mandypayneart.co.uk/)

Bloc Projects Open Studios..

photos courtesy of Jordanna at www.artistsinthemaking.co.uk

Adventures in Mind by Heather Dawe

"Each of us is only here for a brief time. Part of why I find contentment when high in mountains is because I find their age, their relatively infinite nature, reassuring. I am just a flash in the pan compared to the Cumbrian fells or the jagged, snow-capped Alps. I don't find that a depressing thought. While the mountains remind me of my mortality and fallibility, they also put my fears and worries into context. The stark reality that strikes me when surrounded by beautiful towering peaks is that nothing really matters. This serves to remind me to make the best of everything, enjoy the moment, indulge the good and forget the bad. I'm only around for the blink of an eye. Make it count." 
Adventures in Mind by Heather Dawe

http://www.v-publishing.co.uk/books/biography/adventures-in-mind-a-personal-obsession-with-the-mountains.html

Wilderness

"The wilderness is not a landscape you visit, it is all around you wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of the television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave,the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness even curled up in our lover's bed."

Paul Shepheard 'The Cultivated Wilderness'

drawing in the sunshine

Millstone sketches, The Peak District

Patti Smith talk

Long ink drawing of Stanage Edge

Another drawing of Stanage Edge up on my website http://www.tessalyons.co.uk/stanage-edge-the-peak-district/

This was drawn sitting outside crouched behind a drystone wall, failing to take shelter from the wind...

Brighton Festival Open House in Kemptown

Dropped my drawings off ready to hung for this yesterday.

You'll be able to see them every weekend in May at a beautiful house in Kemptown, Brighton. Check the flyer for details...

New Drawing Stanage Edge, The Peak District

Stanage Edge, The Peak District
charcoal and chalk
1.5 metres x 0.5 metres

Climbing in Kalymnos, Greece

I recently returned from a climbing holiday on the Greek island of Kalymnos. We spent a couple of weeks climbing the most extraordinary rock with caves full of stalactites and big overhanging pockety walls. I'm more of a balancey technical climber so it took me a while to get into the swing of it, but once i did, i loved it! I miss the long days spent climbing, the amazing food, the clattering goats around the crags and the smell of thyme underfoot...i hope to go back one day

Children and charcoal with Artists in the Making

The other day i went along with Jordanna from Artists in the Making to a school in Sheffield to carry out a project with year 2. We had a giant roll of paper and a lot of charcoal. Groups of about 6 kids worked on each landscape drawing and this is what happened...

Norman Ackroyd Documentary on iplayer

 




http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rd35q/What_Do_Artists_Do_All_Day_Norman_Ackroyd/

Boulder Brighton Climbing Centre

Good luck to Boulder Brighton! For such a long time Brighton has needed its very own wall and it looks great. In celebration of the centre opening i dropped off my Black Sail drawing before i left Brighton so it will be on display there for a little while too.

The climbing wall will be open from this Saturday at noon.

 

A few days in Snowdonia

Arrived back to Sheffield yesterday after spending a few lovely days stomping up and down the rugged mountains of North Wales. A group of us stayed at http://www.jessejamesbunkhouse.co.uk/ which is run by a fantastic couple who are so full of stories and anecdotes you would never believe how old they actually are!

This photo was the only view we really got the whole way up to Crib Goch and the Snowdon horseshoe. For the rest of the time we could only see about 10 metres in front of ourselves, if that! But none-the-less it was an exhilarating and thoroughly enjoyable scramble.

Saturday we went up the north ridge of Tryfan and then on our last day we went for a 'brisk' walk in the quarries. I picked up some beautiful pieces of slate with a new project in mind. Back in the studio now ready for action. Watch this space

Burbage valley makeover planned for 2013

http://thebmc.co.uk/burbage-valley-makeover-planned-for-2013

drawing Derwent Edge, The Peak District

When i left Brighton my lovely friends made me an unusual pack of playing cards. Made up from lots of different packs, they wrote ideas and quotes and things to do on each card. Today i sat and drew Derwent edge and then found some orange trees in the woods.

Artspace session 2

Today was our second day at Persistence studios talking about creative businesses. We had two more guest speakers and i particularly enjoyed hearing from Emilie Taylor. Emilie took the 'starting out' course 5 years ago and was able to form a plan with very clear ideas of where she wanted to get to and how she was going to go about doing it. Throughout she has maintained a job working with people who use drugs and alcohol and homeless people, this helped her to sustain her artistic practice and not only that but has lead her work in many respects. I liked how her work had this socially engaged element to it as well as creating work for herself. Below is an example of one of the projects she has carried out. Emilie worked with twenty residents from Phoenix Futures Residential Service to create large scale ceramic art works that depicted their individual experiences of drug use, dependency and recovery (see below)

She talked about the goals that she had set herself and what she had learnt along the way, i admired how she was able to stick by her values and beliefs, turning down work that didnt match up or coming to an arrangement that worked both ways.

I remember seeing her work recently in the Millennium Gallery's exhibition 'Force of Nature; picturing Ruskin's Landscape' (above)

New studio space whoop whoop

Climbing day out in the Peaks with the family

snippets of drawings

These  two drawings are both very long so it is hard to show them properly on here. I've taken small sections of both the Burbage snow drawing, Peak District, Yorkshire (above) and the Jurassic Coastline drawing, Dorset (below) At some point in the near future i will upload both whole drawings to my site.

View from my office...

 

Yesterday I went out to the Peak, wandering around Burbage in the snow. It was a nice day for drawing indeed, the landscape already looked as though it had been rendered in ink on a white page. I sat on a cold rock for what must have been hours, trying to capture the scene with my brushes. I like the idea of drawing the essential, how Chinese masters could illustrate the landscape with one or two strokes of the brush. 

Yorkshire Artspace and Bloc Studios

Yesterday was my first proper day in Sheffield. I started my course with Yorkshire Artspace which i enjoyed a lot. There were quite a few people there and it was nice to see such a variety of makers and artists in one room. We heard from a couple of speakers who came in to talk about their practice and we started to look at where we all individually wanted to be and realistic steps that we needed to get there. The wealth of knowledge shared by the people on the course is reason enough to go, one lady gave me two very useful contacts one of which was for a studio space. After the course had finished i rang up the number she gave me and went to look at the shared studio space he had available. It was super cheap and small but big enough for what i need it for. I got a really good feeling from the place and i was so excited i decided to take the space there and then :) I'll take some photos of the place when i get the chance and upload on here.

Force of Nature: Picturing Ruskin's Lanscape at Millennium Gallery

The day before yesterday I went to this exhibition in Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. I loved it! There was a really interesting mix of contemporary work to do with landscape and work from old landscape heavyweights such as J M W Turner.

The Map Project

Signed up for this... http://www.sketchbookproject.com/projects/secretadventures

Perfect timing for such a project! Having just moved to Sheffield from Brighton, i'm going to make myself a map of sorts about my new surroundings.

Drawing the Jurassic coastline from the Cobb at Lyme Regis, Dorset

Short film from surfer Mickey Smith

Darkside Of The Lens from mickey smith on Vimeo.

Cheryl Strayed

I'm reading this book by Cheryl Strayed about her hiking solo for 1100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail which runs through California up through Oregon and on to Washington. She decides to hike the trail after suffering the loss of her Mother and its about her personal journey out of her darkest times. She writes with such an honest and true voice that it resonates with you long after you put it down.