And as i'm writing down the books and films and web pages i've come across, i see how good it is to have it recorded. In my head, as i note down The River which i watched right at the beginning of the term as a window into India, i am taken back to early 1950's India. I remember that the film gave me my starting colour palette. The River is filmed in Technicolour. It gave me sounds and images and a way into India. And the extras to the DVD were documentary films from the late 19th century through to the early 40's which let me see India as a colonised country through a very English lens. The documentaries made me realise that my not having lived or visited India was less of a problem than i thought maybe because nobody knows the life of another, the India of the Mughals was not the same as the India that was held by the British Empire which was not the same as the India of the 1950's that i was looking at through Alan Ginsberg's eyes and mind, or the India that friends spoke of or the India in my mind that comes from 30 years of yoga & meditation or the India of the Ramayana which is the seed point for all my work this term. It made me think that a man/woman cannot live in another's skin but through imagination we can gain some insight and that art and writing may offer passage to the being of another.
The man who did the cinematography for The River was Jack Cardiff. He also shot Black Narcissus and one of the documentaries which led me to look for more by him on youtube and it was from watching one of those, Temples of India, that i began to think of columns and stories carved onto columns, because learning how to tell stories is another aspiration i have come to university to learn. 
Thinking about columns made me put a long sheet of lining paper up on my studio space wall that i could start to scribble on , first with water soluble graphite pencil, then glue (uhu), then paint, then varnish, and more paint, and more varnish (some with sand mixed in), and collage, and more paint and so on. It ended up a big ugly mess but it didn't, it doesn't, matter because doing it made me think of stories and how they layer up and change and how bits get missed out and bits get added on and who knows what the story started out like at the beginning and maybe it doesn't matter. And all that connected to my reading and watching half a dozen retellings of the Ramayana, all of which have key connecting points and characters but all of which have varied here and there. And from painting, the ugly painting, i then was inspired to draw some of what i was thinking about on the back of secondhand copper etching plates and one was the column in my head with a turtle which is one of the incarnations of Vishnu who also incarnated into Rama to save the world from Ravana. And some of this i know from reading the Ramayana over and over again, and some of it i know from reading Ritual Art of India by Ajit Mookerjee which was a brilliant introduction to Indian culture along with Tantra Art also by Ajit Mookerjee which i'll confess i've still only just dipped into and also Tantra Song by Franck Andre Jamme which i've also only just browsed. Because time, time, runs away with itself.
At the beginning of my MA i felt like a snow globe that had been shaken up, forgive me if i'm repeating myself, it was an overwhelming impression. Now i'm aware of how i have had to keep my foot down on the accelerator pedal just to achieve the little i've achieved. Sometimes i think i've achieved a lot and then other times i think how so much time has passed and still i'm only just beginning and haven't made any work that is more than a scribbled idea. If i get another lifetime as an artist i'll try to get cracking sooner. i wish i had learned to print at 18 or 19. But i didn't so that's life and i guess it's better late than never. 
This term i've been learning inks and papers and process. I've tried sugar lift as a way of making a mark on an etching plate and next week i'll try at least one other way. And i've tried using more than one ink on a plate because one of the 2nd year students i chat to was doing it and so i asked Jess, the technician, and so i've begun and can now plan to do that if i'm thinking about what to make and i know that it's called a la poupe. And next week i'll maybe try chine colle which will add a collaging element to my printmaking. I must read more about it before trying. 
In the screen print room i have learned how the tables work. And in theory how to register the print with tabs of masking tape. I need to try other papers for screen printing and to think in layers of image and how to be more careful with my lines so that i get the picture i want at the end. My first screen printing was really just learning the basics, how to mix inks, the manners of the print studio, how to be part of the space, how to be competent at the process not worrying too much about the work i was producing. My second screen was full of itsy bits that then took ages to print and so i tried to make a three layer print which felt like new learning, and was, but i rushed the lines i drew and so the finished picture is clumsy, so next term i will try again in the hope that i can make something i'm more satisfied with. 
I'm going to stop soon but i just want to add into this blog post that after feeling disheartened by my tutorial the week before i raised my sadness with my tutor and he was lovely. I realised that his job is not to pat me on the head and say very good but to get me to learn as much as i can while i'm on my MA, that that is some of what i am paying for, a critical eye, and tho it is uncomfortable sometimes it has to be that way. If learning was all easy it would be less precious, less hard won. Those are my thoughts not thoughts he put into my head except perhaps by being my teacher and pushing me to be my best.  
Later in the day after i'd spoken to him, we had a group crit with most of the full-time MA fine art students and we looked at everybody's work and the teachers talked about it and asked questions and it was so interesting to see and learn about fellow students work and process. At the end Desmond aka Mr Desmond said that all of us need to look at more modern contemporary artists and the idea of a dream exhibition was also mooted as we fell a little short on our knowledge of contemporary artists who weren't ourselves. I think looking at and seeing others, other's work, other's lives, is a way to avoid becoming too narcissistic and self absorbed.
I love the idea of a dream exhibition and i've been mulling over who i would have in mine. Who would you have if you could have any half a dozen artists, some living, some dead ? It has got me pouring over books and the internet to see who inspires me and made me ask who i am making work for apart from myself, what context do i see myself in, why am i doing fine art instead of illustration or creative writing if story telling is what i am interested in. I have discovered Kiki Smith and Laura Owens as a result of my search.    

Because i'm not an academic my day to day life does not call for Harvard referencing but doing my MA does. It's something i find difficult. I think i am more forager than farmer by nature, with all sources of sustenance. But, i figure that while i'm studying it may be sensible to have a bibliography blog entry that i can easily amend and update as i go along. i think if i do that it will make things easier when i come to write essays and will allow me to track my inspiration pathways. Tracking is mapping & i love mapping so even if it feels a bit of chore now, the chances are i'll like it later. So this blog is my referencing for the term to 12/12/19. Forgive it being a bit sketchy to start with, i'm learning how to do it  

Books
Chetwynd, M.G. (2014) Bat Opera. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig
Hughes, T. (1967) Poetry In The Making. London: Faber & Faber Ltd
Lewis, J and Rigby, P. (ill) (1976) The Chinese Word for Horse. London: Bergstrom & Boyle Books Ltd
Okri, B. (1996) Birds Of Heaven. London: Orion Books Ltd
Sattar, A and Zohra, S (ill) (2018) Ramayana: an illustrated retelling. New York: Yonder
Jacabon, B. (2015) Ay! Mi Amor. France: Benoit Jacques Books
Patel, S. (2010) Ramayana: Divine Loophole. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books LLC
Hegley, J. (2013) New and Selected Potatoes. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books
Journals


Webpages
Swansea University (2019) Research as Art: available at https://www.swansea.ac.uk/research-as-art/ (accessed 25th November 2019)
Firer, S. (2018) "Transubstantiation": available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/transubstantiation (accessed 25th November 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Rachel Cusk: You Can Live the Wrong Life : available at https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/rachel-cusk-you-can-live-the-wrong-life (accessed  3rd October 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Jan Grarup: The Dark Side of the Lens: https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/jan-grarup-the-dark-side-of-the-lens (accessed 29th September 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Erkan Ozgen: When Language is Not Enough: https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/erkan-ozgen-when-language-is-not-enough (accessed 1st October 2019)
Christies (2019) Quentin Blake on doing things a writer can't do: https://www.christies.com/features/Quentin-Blake-a-retrospective-forty-years-of-alternative-versions-9274-3.aspx?lid=1 (accessed 2nd December 2019)
Hass N (2018) Kiki Smith & the Pursuit of Beauty in a Notably Unbeautiful Age: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/t-magazine/kiki-smith-artist-profile.html (accessed 26th November 2019)


Films
Kar-Wai, W (dir) (2008) Ashes of Time redux (DVD) Jet Tone
Zecca, F.  (dir) et al (2012) Fairy Tales: Early Colour Stencil Films from Pathe (DVD) BFI 
Trueba, F. (dir) (2012) The Artist and The Model (DVD) Axiom Films
Renoir, J. (dir) (1951) The River (DVD ) London: BFI
Boyle, D (dir) (  ) Slumdog Millionaire (DVD)
Van Sant, G (dir) Elephant (DVD)

Paintings

You Tube
BFI (2010) Temples of India: available at https://youtu.be/VI-l-dn_hFA (accessed September 2019)

BFI (2009) A Road in India: available at https://youtu.be/cOsv6kWGxGI (accessed September 2019)

This is the end of this terms MA units December 11th 2019 ... the bibliography is incomplete and no doubt full of mistakes but i have started to think about how to reference. At the weekend i will start a new bibliography for the next terms units and hopefully i'll make a better fist of it. Just as with my degree it seems like there are skills that will be learned beyond the making art malarkey. It's value for money really, an added extra, learning how to research, learning what i'm interested in, and how to lay markers on my trail that allow me to see how i have got from A to B. 

New post ... keep going. This is my reflective journal. This is my notebook for my MA. If i keep saying it and making myself write it down maybe at some point i will understand what I'm thinking and feeling.
I think my MA honeymoon may be over. I am still over the moon to be studying to have landed in the place i'm at. But reality has hit in. I wrote my first draft RIPU essay and it is rubbish. I'm not exaggerating it rubbish-ness, it's wooly and ugly and says nothing of any worth. Back to the drawing board. Research essays come out of real time research. I think i am researching but have i been sitting back expecting to use what i already know ? 
One of the things that has been hard from the start of the MA has been separating the ASU from the RIPU. We have RIPU lectures in the morning and ASU in the afternoon and often the ASU wipes away the RIPU. So now i am faced with layer on layer of eaten up but not digested learning from RIPU. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the ASU is going well although i know i have learned quite a lot this term and i feel like i've made headway but is it visible ?
I have learned how to use the screen printing tables. I had screen printed on fabric before but it's not the same as screen printing on paper. The process is different, the feel is different. They are sisters perhaps who may look similar but if you get to know them you find their likeness is quite superficial. 
I still have lots to learn about screen printing and i intend to continue but as i was exploring the oil based inks print studio i have discovered etching. I had not thought to get to etching quite so quickly in my studies. I had thought it would be beyond me. But i fell into it by accident.
I began with mono printing. Jess, the technician, showed me how to print from the glass table and then how to print using a matrix (an aluminium plate) that then goes through the press creating a different kind of print to the hand pressed table print. By chance after a morning of experimentation that ended with using the matrix and drawing with my finger tip and white spirit i produced a print of a monkey, very loosely drawn and maybe not clearly a monkey to all or many. With art i find that there is a moment when my heart says yes, i make an awful lot of bad art, stuff that leads up to the yes art but which isn't worth much or any looking at but when something works a gut instinct kicks in and i have a feeling of jubilation. 
So my monkey print worked but being a mono print there was only one. At this point MA fine art and curating students had been told that in a couple of weeks we'd be putting up an exhibition which was a bit of a holy hell moment. Coming into the MA with the intention of learning how to print starting from a base of pretty much no knowledge my printmaking skills were slight to say the least and making work that felt exhibition worthy was a challenge. 
I should perhaps explain why i have monkey's on the brain. As my seed topic for this term's work i decided to use the Ramayana. It's not a story i know much about but had i read Daljit Nagra's epic poem a couple of years ago and loved it and wanted to make the story part of my knowing. Different cultures grow up knowing different stories. In England, in a casually practicing christian family (my mother goes to church) i grew up with bible stories. And on top of that  folk and fairy tales and some of the great children's books; Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, The Narnia stories, The Secret Garden and so on. But I'd missed the Ramayana as it goes. 
In the Ramayana there is a monkey character called Hanuman who is a key player and hence my mind has been following monkey tracks. I have a feeling that Hanuman has introduced to me a character within myself that i will take away from my reading of the Ramayana and beyond my MA. This monkey character is perhaps the monkey in man. I will sit with him, it seems to be a him, and see what he has to tell me over the course of the next few years i daresay. 
Monkey in me was found by my finger tip when mono printing, unleashed perhaps. I was thinking about using the image as a screen print over the screen prints that i had made from my son's old maths homework and a circle that came from a sanding disc i'd found. But because time on the screen printing tables is limited to availability and i was not sure how it would work i turned to photo etching. This was my path to etching. Now i am hooked. 
From photo etching i went to sugar lift etching using scrap copper plates. Using camp coffee an image is drawn on the plate, left to dry, and then painted with black straw-hat varnish. When the varnish is dry hot water is poured on the plate to lift the sugar up and wash it away which leaves a negative image, this image is then processed with aquatint and acid. That is just making the plate. After making the plate comes printing and in my arrogance i'd thought that would be easy, just put some ink on and run it through the press, but oh no no no, it's easy to rub off too much ink or to rub it off unevenly, it's a skill i'd not clocked that i'd need to learn. And even something as simple seeming as making a black and white print asks the printer to choose the black, the print room has half a dozen blacks on offer. And what paper ? I plumped for snowden white for my test prints my working proofs of the sugar lift because when i printed out my monkey photo etching i'd tried several and snowden tho' not the most beautiful paper is cheapest and gives a clear line but now that i know how they print on that i'd like to try them with other colours on other papers.
Aah and now it is time to get up and go again and i haven't written half of what i hoped to write but this week is looking like a catch up on writing week so i'll be back to this blog desperately trying to note down two and a half months of thoughts and happenings that i wish i had set down sooner. 

I'm mad at myself for not having blogged my MA from the start. Maybe i would feel less edgy if i had. I jumped into my course feet first, excited to be learning again. But out of the loop of learning i find that i was unprepared and now i feel like i'm floundering, anxious about my documentation, is my work good enough ? will i pass ?
The course is divided into two threads RIPU and ASU. The names are enough to make a mind wonder what is going on. I think RIPU is Research into Practice unit and ASU is Art Studies Unit. I imagine this was explained to us right at the beginning but right at the beginning my head was spinning with all the new, new acquaintances, new teachers, new learning, new being. 
For me my MA is my first major step back into life since Jon died. My "i am alive" affirmation, my "life goes on". And it is certainly giving me that affirmation i already feel miles away from where i was a year, two years, five years, ten years ago. I feel like i am passing through a fire ritual, coming out cleansed and beautiful. By beautiful i am not so much talking physical beauty as being beautiful, being spiritually beautiful. It's perhaps not for me to say whether this purification by fire is succeeding but it is my hope and the feeling i have right now. 
The course began slowly. We were enrolled on a Thursday and then there was a week before our first lectures. I'd wondered if one day of teaching a week would be enough but it turns out to be plenty as it leaves four days to make use of the studios and to learn from the technicians who man the studios. The generosity and patience of the technicians i've met at NUA both now on my MA and before on my BA is enriching. They give their knowledge away with such heart warming kindness and show respect for our work and desire to learn even when what we turn out is unoriginal, ugly or unsuccessful. And when we succeed, when we make something that makes us happy, that gives us a "yes", they let us know they see our happiness and it makes a difference. Being witnessed in joy is a gift. 
I am trying to catch up on a term's worth of knowledge in this blog and i know i will fail to get it all in so i may jump from moment to moment as moments pitch up in my mind while i'm writing. If i try to go carefully day by day i think it's likely i will struggle to keep my momentum. I think i will be a monkey leaping about in tree canopy rather than a more earth bound creature like a deer, an elephant or pig rootling on the forest floor. But maybe i won't. I never know how words will fall out of me when i blog so to fetter myself with an identity is perhaps unhelpful. 
After enrolling i went into the studios and wrote and drew on sheets of paper on a table in the corner that was not then my studio space but is now. I say it was not then because being the only one in the studio it wasn't really my place to give myself a specific corner without the agreement of the other students sharing the space but it came to be my space because no one minded that i kept it and i was happy to stay there. For three days i went in to the studios and saw pretty much no one. It was very odd. It was cold and as i wrote in my notebooks and scribbled on paper and tried to feel like i belonged and was meant to be there i could hear the working life of the university going on a round me. I felt separate then. Now i feel like part of the university body. In a year i will no longer be part. Now i walk through the big doors swipe my card to get into buildings that for this one year belong to me and to which i belong. It's a good feeling. It feels like coming home. It feels like i am amongst people who understand to a point, whose minds may also be filled with ideas that in other worlds seem off beat or weird. I am amongst people who get excited about a mark on paper, a line, a dot, a sound, a smell, a shadow, a body, a thing of small consequence that maybe matters an awful lot for an instant.
Being in such a world takes a little getting used to after being out of it for a while. Suddenly every sense is alert and it's easy to feel a little skinless, or whippet-skinned as opposed to great bear-skinned or pig-skinned. There's a desire to do everything, every which way there are enticements, i briefly went through a phase of feeling like a child in toyshop told she can have anything. This was somewhat closed down by a tutorial in which i was given instruction to refine and draw in my exploration. 
Tutorials are strange. I have felt sad and disheartened after both my tutorials with my tutor. He is kind and he is polite but after we've spoken i find that my confidence takes a dive, that my trust in my process is diminished and it takes me a little while to pick myself back up. I am not sure if this is a teaching technique and i wonder if maybe it's part of the course that in tutorials i will have my practice torn open and questioned, that tutorials are not where i will receive affirmation or approval and that maybe they will be easier if i accept that is not the point of them. Formal education has a form, it would be a shame if at the end of my MA i was making the same work as i was making before i started it would be a shame if i had not moved on and perhaps the pulling apart is part of the process, the journey from interview, acceptance and enrolment to, hopefully, graduation and working life after graduation.
But the MA course is designed well, i think, because before we enrolled we were asked to create a manifesto for ourselves and when i feel knocked back i refer back to mine which is a "snakes and ladders" manifesto. I let myself feel the slide down the snake but know that it's part of the game and that with a new dice roll i'll be back up and running and to remember the joy of the game is playing and that when i reach a hundred the playing will be done. 
Perhaps I'll end this blog post here to come back to later, later today or tomorrow, or the next day. I'm aware that i'm on a catch up but for a moment maybe i need to pause and draw breath and get back to tackling the first draft of my RIPU essay which is giving me a headache and making me worry that i will fall at the first hurdle. 

Back to my blog after an absence and thinking to again change the way i use it. I began it way back in 2012 when i was in the second year of my BA. I used it to catalogue and document my creative process back then as suggested by the tutor in a class session about blogging. He also recommended that we limit our blogs to our creative practice and not post personal stories and i pretty much kept to that for the duration of my degree but how do you keep creative practice and personal separate ? i think for those with a mathematical mind this is easier than it is for those who are more sense & felt experience responsive. 

Regular readers of my blog will know that in 2017 when faced with the death of someone i loved i used my blog to scream my grief, my pain, into the ether. I needed to give voice to my feelings and my blog was a safe space for me to open up and give voice, all the boundaries that others were giving me could be abandoned and i could express at least some of my need to speak, to tell my story. It belonged to me. My blog belonged to me. My story belonged to me. i abandoned the notion of right and wrong feelings which i think helps with grief and let myself be who i needed to be in that time. Now my grief has softened, it's still there but now i am more at peace with my broken heart and i don't need to talk about it so much.

Before 2017 i had used my blog to explain the process behind work that i was making for exhibition or sometimes to just muse upon life. Often story telling the journey i took with the seed of an idea to it's flowering as a piece of work in exhibition or not, sometimes just watching it grow.

 I wonder if this is something that others have found when blogging that their blogs evolve to suit their needs in much the same way a home evolves to suit the needs of those who live in it. 

Once upon a time my home was full of children, now my children are all grown up and as my youngest said a few years back on a brief visit it is now pretty much all art studio. He's right. Before my children were my life, now my work as an artist, be it good, bad or indifferent, is my life. The river keeps on rolling. 

Now it seems that i need to jiggle up my blog again. Almost to return to it's original being as i am studying for my MA and my MA has become the most demanding factor in my life. I am about six or seven weeks in to my one year course and time seems to be rushing rushing rushing by. It's fun and exhilarating but also i have a sense of if-i-am-not-careful-i-will-lose-things-in-the-rush. So it makes sense to use my blog as my reflective journal. 

I have tried notebooks and no doubt will continue with them, but they start off neatish and then become unreadable scribble, and maybe my thoughts on paper tumble out so completely unregulated by contemplation or consideration it is unreasonable to ask anyone to read them particularly some poor soul whose job it is to look at my work. I guess i will hand them in but i'd like to have something easier to read and access to give to my assessors and for me to refer to later when my MA is done. 

Also writing by hand on paper is not the same process as writing on a screen. I am a little more aware of needless words on screen. If you think i waffle here you should see my notebooks. And then also if i write a blog i can then post it to my social media platforms and may get response especially if i ask for a response and in my next blog i hope to begin to ask questions of my readers that if they are happy to give response i will be pleased to receive.

So what is this blog ? This blog may be a grandiose announcement "behold, look at me" but it's also a statement of intent meant more for me than any reader, i am changing, i can feel myself changing, i can feel myself sloughing off one skin to become a new being and my blog may be part of that sloughing off process.