Jour Journal Journey - Mail Art Routes Journal 1.csv 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 9.0
Route of Journal 1= Red line Route of Journal 2 = Green line
Jour Journal Journey
Journal 2 1 Margot Teusner 2 Michal Teague 3 Magdelena Brzezinska 4 Agneta M Lindh 5 Peter Sansom 6 Sharon Lemay 7 Cynthia Willett 8 Kate Tyrwhitt
Beaconsfield Ba Dinh District Poznan VĂ„STERĂ…S Wageningen Ottawa New York St Marys
Western Australia Hanoi, Vietnam Poland Sweden Netherlands Ontario, Canada NY USA South Australia
Journal Entry 1 Margot Teusner Fremantle, Western Australia My journal entry records a journey that started in Western Australia and ended in the Scottish Highlands, commencing on 21 June 2017. The journey was planned to take just over 24 hours, but due to unanticipated delays took over 40 hours – nearly two days. However, due to time-zone changes and sleeplessness, it seemed to me, to be one very long day. My visual documentation records the long periods of waiting and anticipation at the journey ending and the adventure beginning. Some of the entries were made during the journey and some were recorded from memory or from reference images after the journey, but all directly record the event. I used a mixture of memory drawing, life drawing and reconstructed drawing techniques. The media used are graphite pencil, charcoal, conte and chalk pastel, liquid watercolour and aquarelle pencils and expresso coffee (purchased at Amsterdam airport).
Journal Entry 2 Michal Teague – Hanoi, Vietnam My journal entries document the trip I made with my family on Sunday August 6 to the Bat Trang ceramic village about 15 kms from the Hanoi Old Quarter. We met at 11am with a group of 13 students from Thai Nguyen Province who had been travelling by train since 6am. We caught the #47 bus from Long Bien Bus Station across the Red River to the village. The students came to Hanoi to meet with foreigners to practice their conversational English. Sometimes they are quite nervous as they don’t get to meet many people from overseas and are worried that they might mispronounce words. Basing a conversation around a shared activity makes it much easier for them to practice. We painted ceramics at the tranquil Delicious Ceramic Studio and played with water in their courtyard garden to cool down. After sharing lunch, we explored the narrow laneways in the old part of the village and had tea with an older couple in their French Era house and listened to their fabulous family stories. The trip was organized by Thanh Vu who works as a tour guide and has developed these trips as her way of giving back to the community. I made a photographic record of the day and then converted them into black and white line work using a crunchy old iphone app. I made mixed media collages based around key moments of the day and used a gilt pen, stencils and coloured pencils.
Magdelena Brzezinska Poznan, Poland I created my journal entry on an ordinary day, August 29, 2017. If it documents a journey, it’s a spiritual and emotional one. The first page corresponds to Michal’s gilt collages, and it also features Cynthia’s beautiful artwork I was lucky to receive. I wanted this page to symbolize our collaboration and unusual bond, so I made it a maze with all our names tangled in. The next two pages are a collage which was meant to be one, but there was not enough space. It features my daughter’s spiral galaxy she drew for the Odysseus II contest, and my own portrait of her, huddled like the galaxy and resting against Belgrade’s sunlit skyline. It was meant to symbolize how tiny and vulnerable we all are in the vast universe. It was also to commemorate the “Common Skies” project. The sparkly bits and the piece with the Moon are fragments of the diploma I received for our participation in the Odysseus contest. There follows the City of Depression, which further stresses the insignificance and vulnerability. The printout used for the “City of Depression” is my own photograph of an everyday object. My entry ends with a written account of the moment in time when my entries were created. The media used are: an HB pencil, gilt and black pens and pieces of printouts.
Agneta M Lindh Västerås Sweden It had been raining for days when the journal arrived and the forecast was not promising. I thought how can I make colours pop without sunlight? I experimented with red fairy lights in a dark room, then I set my camera to the effect ‘selective colour’, and separtated turqouise against a black and white background. This gave me an idea and I went out, started to snap away at leaves and noted that colours come in patches on certain leaves, like pixels. As I went back inside I brought leaves and rowan berries with me, put a maple leaf under a white paper and started colouring using Waldorf pencils. When finished I wanted to bind the colours together, and keep small patches of white for the colours to pop. I crushed rowan berries and finger painted the drawing. At 8 pm I looked out of the window - it was pitch black and I had one more page to fill. I used what was on my window sill and bounced the artificial light from a decorative lamp against the window to produce hues from blackest black to whitest white. That concluded my Jour Journal Journey Day.
Materials • photos, printed on matte paper • red fairy lights • miniature furniture from the 1950s • pencil sharpener of the world from the 1970s • Waldorf Selection pencils, giant triangular • white matte sketching paper A4 135 gram • a maple leaf • rowan berry juice • a 50s decoration lamp in light blue • a royal blue Norwegian crystal vase Blog on my day: http://www.agnetamlindh.se/fotoblogg/colours-come-in-patches-working-the-scenefor-the-jour-journal-journey Agneta M Lindh
Peter Sansom 23 September 2017 I am travelling alone, which for this route is unusual as I normally are accompanied by my family. The journey involves buses, trains and the boat between the Dutch coast and Harwich on the east coast of England. My journey is a sort of birthday treat to myself, and will involve in the forthcoming couple of days a fair few artistic impressions. First in Cambridge where my older brother has an exhibition of paintings and then on to London to see the large retrospective show at the Royal Academy of Jasper Johns’ work. With these two exhibitions in mind I did a little preparation work in order to include a few examples of the things I will be seeing. But the pages themselves are all being put together ‘en route’ to the UK. As I write I look out of the window on an extremely calm and clear day....a day with a razor sharp horizon line between the sea and sky. Peter A final note: my final image is of my destination, completed once I had arrived. It shows Ely Cathedral, the ‘Ship of the Fens’, a huge, part Romanesque, part Gothic cathedral that dominated the very small City of Ely. The drawing has been made using home-made walnut ink that my brother gave me when I arrived.
Sharon Lemay Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Cynthia Willett To the Etowah Searching for a thread that will connect the spiritual strands of my life in this day, this time, I am drawn to the Etowah Mounds, an archaeological site located on the north shore of the Etowah River in Georgia, USA. Whose footsteps would I follow on this journey? I travel to the Mounds on this beautiful fall day. A bridge on the path to the main site crosses an enormous depression in the landscape—a “defensive ditch”—excavated around the perimeter of the site. Beyond is a “borrow pit” from which the soil was removed to build the mounds. From the edge of the pit, I “borrow” a leaf from a spectacular tree, a river oak. The Chief Mound - Mound A - looms ahead. Mound B lies further back on the left. I stop to pick a twig of grass still bearing a few seeds that guarantee spring renewal. Like the Etowah, I climb the wood staircase, 63 feet to the top, 176 steps. It is said that remnants of the original construction are buried below.
And here is the view of the ancients. From my high platform I look down on Mound B. The forest beyond obscures the Etowah River, which sustained the community. I try to “hear” the sounds of ancient voices, but everything is still. Nothing of their 800 years of existence remains except for their mounds and their objects. Later in the museum, I see in the models that the Etowah flattened the skulls of their children—a cultural preference? I meet these two marble figures, a woman and a man, the Ancestor Effigies. The woman kneels and seems eternally intent. The man sits in a lotus position. He bares his teeth. He may be speaking, or smiling. The woman’s hair is elaborately sculpted. I wonder where they quarried their stone? The effigies were excavated from Mound C, along with clothing, jewelry and shoes. Objects of industry—tools and implements--and weapons of stone and metal were also found there. Clay figures and stone heads were beautifully modeled. They left no written history. I follow the objects that quietly lead me to them, whispering through time in an unintelligible tongue, leaving their spirit, inviting us to join them—as we have done here.
Background: The Etowah people were members of a mound-building civilization that occupied broad expanses of the North American continent from 800 to 1625 CE. Their “archaeological horizon� is characterized by large earthworks called platform mounds that supported temples of log and thatch. Their domestic structures were built of and wattle and daub. Their artifacts reflect a technically and artistically advanced culture. Process: These drawings were made primarily in ink, along with some graphite, colored pencil and pastel. In the studio, I worked from sketches and photographs made in situ, and consulted an online image in one instance (the Ancestors) as museum glass distorted my photograph. Thanks to all for joining me on this journey!
Kate Tyrwhitt Adelaide, South Australia My first sketch is of my Mum at Brighton Beach - a local beach here. She came for a short stay and it was a hot day in Adelaide. My school work was just finished and I could think about what I wanted to contribute to the Journal. When I was younger I used to draw my mother quite a lot. She lives in another state from me and the visit and process of drawing her made me reflect more deeply about her and also some more similarities she has with her own mother. Their instinct to worry about possessions while trying not to be materialistic but still falling into the trap we all do to some extent. Being Christmas time we are saturated with adverstising, sales, the need to prepare for festivities. It can be a costly time and not just financially but our sense of wellbeing and identity. The first drawing was of Mum tanning her legs and looking out to sea. For me it was a familiar bone structure to draw again.
The second drawing (done a few days later - Christmas preparations took over!) and then digital art process was in response to an old Vogue Magazine. I turned the back page open to a Dior ad with Marion Cotillard reclining on a bed; protectively looking over her shoulder clutching her red Dior bag. It reminded me of my mother buying a bag in Sacks Fifth Avenue which was beyond her budget. It became a source of anxiety and she used to dream about losing her black bag often. Her own mother used to bury her posessions such as jewellery due to some hang over trait from the Boar War in South Africa. Is the price really worth it for our psyche let alone budget? Cottilard certainly is beautiful as the bag probably is too if you like that kind of thing. From an artistic point of view I thought of Pop Artists such as Warhol and Hockney so I decided to play around with the original sketch by colouring it in on You Doodle or DoodlePro (the paid version). Notice the strawberries in the red bag.... I recorded the process and then uploaded it to You Tube https://youtu.be/RigMRd2eZJ0 Then after I saved the image to my camera roll I imported it to WordFoto Kate Tyrwhitt 23/12/17