This month on emuse

It's been a colourful month on emuse! One of my favourite posts to write this month was this one about why I love to wear bright colours:

Why dress colourfully?

I posted about some of the fun things I've been doing recently:

Collage exhibition

Bridget Riley exhibition

Parkrun

Cowden Garden

My 100 day project is going really well, and the next update after these will be the final one!

100 day project days 41-60

100 day project days 61-80

I've been buying some fun secondhand things:

Vintage fabric

Recently thrifted (car boot sale)

Inspired by a magazine article, I wrote about how you can wear the latest jewellery fashions without it costing the earth:

High style jewellery at low cost

And I talked about how I'm getting into learning more French:

Relearning French

This month I have been mostly...

Doing:

I went on the In Colourful Company walk in Edinburgh, and to the Luminarium in Dundee (blog posts on both coming soon). I went to a couple of exhibitions in Edinburgh, on collage and Bridget Riley. I've been keeping up with my 100 day project which is nearly done now! And I went on another Parkrun.

Watching:

Lots of moon-landing related documentaries (more on this in a few days).

Reading:

Donna Leon's Brunetti books, Le Journal D'Anne Frank graphic novel by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, and  rereading I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Listening:

Lots of podcasts including InnerFrench, Atomic Hobo, Nice Try: Utopian, Monster Presents: Insomniac, Word of Mouth, 99% Invisible, and 13 Minutes to the Moon.

Bridget Riley exhibition

I recently visited the Bridget Riley exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. I didn't know much about her work in advance, but I'd loved a couple of her paintings on my first ever visit to the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow many years ago, so I knew I'd enjoy the exhibition.

Usually I spend a lot of time reading the captions with the pictures, but in this case I just allowed myself to absorb the patterns and colours instead, and to capture some of the patterns in my sketchbook. Working in a grid made it really easy to record the patterns, although some of them required a double space!

The first room showed how she'd been inspired by Seurat, and the second was full of bold black and white pictures that I loved, then a room of huge colourful paintings. One of the staff members was really excited to show me the next room after she spotted the sketches I was making. This room contained the graph paper studies for the paintings, and it was really fascinating. After this there were many more rooms, each full of either colourful or monochrome works.

The colours of the paintings were lovely. They just seemed to work so well together. And the huge canvases made them into perfect backgrounds for the occasional selfie!

After exploring further, the guide checked my sketchbook to make sure that I'd visited all the rooms! "Have you seen,... ah, yes, I can see it here!" I filled in all but one square, then I placed the exhibition sticker there. Despite this being such a colourful exhibition, I think it will work best to leave my drawing as monochrome.

Why dress colourfully?

The first clothing ensemble I remember choosing for myself as a child was a collection of about five bubblegum-pink pieces from Adams, and the next was some mint green items from M&S. I think my parents were great at allowing me to obtain a whole mix-and-match wardrobe in one fell swoop!

I reprised the pink look in 2006 when I was heading to Japan on holiday, with some pieces from Gap including a jacket, and this is when my love of wearing colour really began to take off. When I looked back at other people's photos of that holiday, I realised I could be easily spotted in the photos with my pink jacket, and I decided to keep choosing colourful coats for that reason. So in China I wore turquoise, in Peru purple, and so on.

I began doing the same when attending events that I'd later seek out other people's photos of on Flickr, and it worked really well! I could easily find my deep pink coat in photos of a visit to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

I began to notice how drably most people dressed when I was walking along Princes St in Edinburgh and it was a sea of black, navy, beige, and brown. I was determined to go against that tide.

Wearing colour is not just a way of easily finding myself in photographs, it's also a way of bringing joy and fun to my life and to other people around me. Now I have a name at work for dressing in bright colours, and it's always a shock to people when I dress in black & white or navy (although I do love wearing these colours on occasion!). In fact, I have a mantra that you should dress like it's your birthday every day!

This love of dressing colourfully culminated in me joining in with the In Colourful Company colour walk in Glasgow (and soon in Edinburgh). It was amazing to get together with a group of like-minded people who enjoy colour as much as I do, and to bring smiles to the faces of passers-by!

Collage exhibition

I recently visited the Cut and Paste exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It was an absolutely fascinating exhibition!

I found it interesting the types of things that are regarded as collage that I hadn't thought of before - photomontages, Victorian paper scraps, scrapbooking, beachcombed items, stickers, and the time when I was at school and covered one of my folders with black & white photos of celebrities (there was a folding screen in the exhibition that was the Victorian equivalent of this!). As someone who does quite a bit of collage, I was surprised by how little I knew about the subject!


Some of the things I really liked in the exhibition were things that evoked nostalgia for me - paper scraps, Fuzzy Felt, stickers, neatly arranged objects, sepia photographs, and a toyshop window.

The first things I saw in the exhibition were some flower pictures. At first I though, "Oh, I didn't know pressed flowers were collage!", then I read the captions and realised that only some parts of the images were made from real plants - and it was impossible to see which! Of course, pressed flowers probably do count as collage anyway, but these images combined them with paper in an amazing way.

I liked how some pictures were done with painted paper that was then cut up. It was very difficult to distinguish these from actual paintings. I'd really like to try some of this kind of collage. I really admire an artist I follow online, Clover Robin, who does this sort of work.

I was very excited at the very end of the exhibition to find some Matisse collages, including the one that inspired one the illustrations for my 100 day project!

I came out of the exhibition fired up with inspiration and ready to create! And so I immediately stuck my exhibition sticker onto the sketchbook page I'd been drawing, and when I got home I added some of the scraps that I bought in the gift shop. I love that collage is such a versatile medium and everyone can use it in their own way.

100 day project days 61-80

The latest batch of my 100 day project drawings – this includes some of my favourites so far of the project!

Recently thrifted

Here are some of my finds from a recent car boot sale, and from the local charity shops.

I spotted the basket as I came in, and went back for it after a little while. I decided that if it was £8 or less I'd buy it, and it was £8 exactly! Everything else I bought there was either £1 or 50p, including the Bingo game, a huge variety of dolls' shoes (more than in the photo), Creme Egg mug, a spotty shirt which is my new favourite piece of clothing, a sheer flowery top and a summer dress, and a lovely Russian doll that's a great addition to my collection of wooden folk art dolls.

The crumb set from my local charity shop is one of those things that seems like a needless single-purpose kitchen item, but I just couldn't resist the illustration on the box and the mid-century design of the item. I think I'll use it for eraser crumbs in my craft room!

The jungle print dress is another new favourite in my wardrobe. It's Per Una and was from one of my local charity shops. It's a long shirt dress with a tie belt. And I nearly flashed the whole town centre while trying it on, but the less said about that the better!