Post 111

It's going to be a 16 page book approx.

I need to decide what I want the illustration to do...e.g. illuminate the text. Find ways of getting the text to work with the images and consider how they relate to one another. I could do with 'losing' my recent habit of trying to make it a literal response...and shit like that...

post 110

I've nicked this from the web as a way of getting to grips with Lord Cut Glass.

"There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterwards and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents-punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases-for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West."
: : -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl, from Flappers and Philosophers, 1920."
: Although I suspect the expression has more to do with the phrase "cut-glass accent"; the image being of someone who was brought up by governesses to speak "properly", with an accent as clear and precise as cut glass, and not to mumble and drop initial H's and terminal G's as the hoi polloi do. (VSD): : : I'd like to know the meaning of the expression 'cut-glass'.
: : : I researched and the only definition who keeps coming up it's certainly not the one I need, which is "Glass shaped or decorated by cutting instruments or abrasive wheels". : : : I read it in a book, and I think it's something closer to refined, classy. I'd really appreciate if you could help me clear this up.
: : Perhaps the following quote may help.
: : "There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterwards and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents-punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases-for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West."
: : -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl, from Flappers and Philosophers, 1920."
: Although I suspect the expression has more to do with the phrase "cut-glass accent"; the image being of someone who was brought up by governesses to speak "properly", with an accent as clear and precise as cut glass, and not to mumble and drop initial H's and terminal G's as the hoi polloi do. (VSD)
Many things that look like they are made of cut glass often turn out to be pressed glass where the hot glass is pressed into a mold which has the shape of cut glass thus removing the labor-intensive process of cutting and grinding each piece. Molded imitation cut glass is cheaper than the "real deal" and can be usually be distinguished from real cut glass by the lines where the two halves of the mold were joined together. In addition to the mold lines, pressed glass has less definition and detail as the mold will not impress such sharp lines and tiny cuts as may be made by hand.
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‘It is one of the tendencies of the lyric to be concerned with temporality in both its formal arrangement and its subject matter. This is often illustrated in the thematic concerns of death and immortality frequently of forces discovered in Thomas’s poetry, but no less so in under milk wood. The dramatic temporality in Under Milk Wood is cyclical, rather than linear, reflecting mythic rather than historical time. From the first voice’s opening monologue in which he tells us “Time passes. Listen. Time passes” (also repeated later in the work), our attention is drawn to temporality and to Llareggub’s own consciousness of it. As a timeless place, the is simultaneously subject to time, Milk Wood is to Marianne Sailors “the garden of Eden” in which she counts the days. Lord Cut-Glass, “in his kitchen full of time,” attempts to hold at bay the temporality that may be associated with the external world by confusing his “enemy” which may be mortality or Time itself , for he owns sixty six clocks all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass thwarts time by multiplication rather than reduction, a strategy analogous to Thomas’s polysemy. More public time keepers like lord Cut Glass’s clocks,are also freely manipulable to the rearrangement of temporal laws, such as the clock in the sailors arms that say “half past eleven. Half past eleven is opening time. The hands of the clochk have stayed at half past eleven for the last fifty years. It is always opening time in the sailor’s arms.” The town itself even outwits a natural marker of time, for it is up and moving ahead of the cock’s crow, which is “Too late…too late,” Captain cat notes. Llarregub is a town that, through outright temporal defiance, embraces eternity in any form it can. Images of spring and birth are intertwined with images of death: “Noah’s Ark” clocks and grim reaper clocks, babies and old men, the voices of the living and the dead, all coexist. Marianne Sailors Eden is Lord Cut Glass’s Armageddon, yet even he with all his clocks, cannot keep out the opposing impulse that accompanies the rebirth of spring: “The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and the body of Spring with it’s breasts full of rivering May milk, means, to that lordly fish head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the tribes and the navies of The Last Black Day who’ll sear and pillage down Armageddon hill to his double locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love” (22-3

Post 109

I guess I've been messing about today...scanning, sketching, reading...Lord cut glass.

I've also been looking at the works of Maurice Sendak and John Vernon Lord.
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1. So the format will be a book...16 page at least.

I need to set myself a target of producing a series of characters engaged in activities...find various devices to get the viewer involved with the image. The central character here is Lord cut glass. What might he be doing? Winding up a clock, eating, hiding from 'the enemy',

Post 108

Lord Cut-Glass (66) – manic, sees his death coming and so is obsessed with time.

I’m going to use the passage about Lord Cut Glass in Under Milk Wood and create a narrative sequence of images that relates to a part of the text. I’m initially thinking about making these images act as part of a book, although I would also like to create a small animated response. I’ll need to cut this passage down into the essential elements that I wish to illustrate.

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks - one for each year of his loony age - and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tu-woo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands forever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime and tock. SECOND VOICE
The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lordly fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who'll sear and pillage down Armageddon Hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

I’m also considering the usage of my own flash fiction writing. I’ve loosely interpreted Lord Cut Glass as a character who is ‘out of time…’ A creature of modernism that doesn’t ‘fit’ this so called ‘postmodern’ world.

Lord Cut Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping…’

I could try my take, by inventing my own narrative….

‘Lord Cut Glass sighs. He has been searching for that springwheel for the last half hour. He’s never going to find it.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Time Passes, Time passed…

He slides across the kitchen floor. A disgusting smell of fish clock stew, rotting wood and time permeates the glass fortress.

‘They’re coming for me, I’m prepared…’

Lord Cut Glass feels the deep pounding inside his paper thin skull.

Tick tock, tick, tock…

‘I can’t be certain of anything anymore, the wheel, the wheel…’

Paralysed with fear and overcome with a sickness, nothing would be the same again.

Tick Tock….

He barricades himself with his blanket of time and waits for the hidden enemy from above…


Ok, rough and ready, but it may provide me with a structure, a starting point for my own unique take on the passage.

So the initial brief is to create a 16 page book about the above passage. I'd like to keep the words to a minimum but will think about the format, using exsting imagery combined with a closer response to a smaller section of text.

Post 107

and then I added a bit of opacity shade onto the suitcase...

Post 106

...and here is the updated image.

post 105

Here is the 1st installment of an image produced from a Guardian article titled something like: 'Governments used to use gunboats to nick from poor countries...now they use trade deals...' The article discuss how the EU (particularly the office of our wonderful Peter Mandleson) is making it easier for richer nations to fish in the waters of The Senegal.

I found an image of a suited man from my image bank of mainly Guardian photos, and have turned him into a public schoolboy sneak thief.

I've spent some time using the clone tool to tidy the cut out edge around the figure.

I've used collage, some bits found on the Humber bank, rotring ef pen, and shit like that (such wonderful MA language Jeeves).

Post 104

Mr Pugh conspiring. Materials used, spray paint, lining paper, collage background. Rotring line drawing. Reworked in photoshop and image ready. I'll look into something to copy and paste into the foreground...perhaps reference to Mrs Pugh? Further detail on jumper and shit like that...

Post 103

Here's a 2nd draft of my my next mail out design. I'm going try a 2 sided image...using both the hand written and typed fonts.

Feedback would be very much appreciated from all you people out there...ahem.

Post 102

I've been thinking about what to write as a thesis for my final project alongside the imagery for Under Milk Wood. I've come across an interesting new topic on the Tracey website (check the links to the right) and came across a new call for contributions titled 'What is bad (good) drawing?' I feel this is a topic that I'd work on with a great deal of enthusiasm and will find a way of linking it directly to the images that I produce for Under Milk Wood and use the foundations learned from the research methods. I'm going to keep this blog as more of an information point, with evidence of work in progress, prof development and daily thoughts. I'll keep the written elements separate and copy them to this blog at a later date.

The image above shows my experimentation with fonts for my next postcard mailout. I've still only got around 150 contacts on my mailing list...many of these are from the aoi directories. I would ideally like to subscribe to bikinilists but the fees are a bit high, unless I manage to find some funds....