The Laundry Blues


The Laundry Blues

 Do you remember the icy water bucket charity challenges of 2016?
Well it's a bit like that living in Ullapool.

 It appears not to be raining so you venture out and immediately you get dowsed in freezing cold rain or, even today, hail!  
You scurry for shelter and dive into the nearest doorway, shop or cafe and everyone stares as you create a large pool of water round your feet. And they look pointedly out of the window and it's not raining.  Until I put my head outside again.
The course director says it rains so much here that Boots runs out of Vitamin D from the first week in September. 


 And yes that is snow on the nearby mountains.

For four days each week we work from 9.30am to 4.30pm with a short break before many of us are back in the studio until 9.30pm. 
From Friday to Sunday we work on set projects and are expected to organise our own schedule. I love my little home here. It is a wonderful light space but there is no washing machine nor room for one so I took the opportunity to go to the laundrette on Friday morning.

 Good decision. A fast wash was just 30 minutes.

 Since the sun had appeared  for the first time in days, and on the advice of the laundry lady, I decided to chance the weather and took the wet washing home to peg on the line.

 Very bad decision. Twenty minutes later the heavens opened and it rained torrentially for two days and nights.  There was nothing I could do. My little house is a beautiful space but there is nowhere to put a load of sopping wet washing.


By Sunday night  I was able to get most of it almost, but not quite, dry. Pegging out is not something I will be attempting again.

The weather was no help with our weekend project either as we were asked to sketch four pages of views of Ullapool. From life not from photographs. More ducking and diving as rain stopped creative work, our sketchbooks got wet and the charcoal dissolved!  Still over the two days I was able to do some out of doors sketching - from the front seat of my car. (Don't tell the tutors.) 

                            
And on Sunday we had to take lots of black and white photos print them out, cut them up and create tonal collages of buildings real or imaginary,  using the bits of photo.  
                                         

 Took a bit of puzzling to get my head round the idea but I did it in the end well enough for the local hotel to ask if they could use the one of their building for their Christmas card design. 


 That should be worth a bottle of wine at least.


Comments

  1. Unknown12 November 2017 at 02:07

    I love your blog spot Michaelle. I find it fascinating and such a different lifestyle. I was looking to go to the north of Scotland to see if I could catch the northern lights and it was then I spotted where Ullapool is! It's the end of the earth!! 😂 It's there anything there? Have you seen the northern lights yet?

    ReplyDelete
  2. RK16 November 2017 at 14:59

    I remember having the same problem with laundry in Jamaica (it was the rainy season). My landlady took one look at my sodden bed linen hanging in her garden and remarked blithely that a soaking would do it good.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Step we gaily on we go. Heel by Heel and Toe by Toe

Image
Step We Gaily, On we Go, Heel by Heel and Toe by Toe We are already at the end of our first week. We have just seven weeks left of this four month experience. It has gone incredibly fast. Between New Year and our first day back I had to come up with a personal project. I fiercely rejected life drawing. I can't see the point and it has no interest for me.  There, I said it...now I am just waiting to be struck down by a wrathful classical artist.   One of our themes is Identity so I dithered over that for a while.  Should I concentrate on a subject I know really well? Me, myself and I? Did I really want to expose myself like that? What about archetypes?  O r portraits? The museum has a lovely quilt made in the 1990's by twelve women from the village. I bet I could make a lovely art quilt based not on the village but on the women who made that quilt. I distracted myself by making a couple of artists books roughly on the theme of Identity. I...
Read more

Bullocks Bottom and Boots

Image
Bullock's Bottom and Boots Sue's h usband has brand new RED power sawing boots. I am supposedly working on a project about shoes. I had not been out of the village for eight weeks and the  village is largely closed down until the first of March now that Hogmanay  is done and dusted. The weather has been awful: three named storms,  snow, ice, hail, rain and more snow and rain and hail.  The first dry weekend I escaped to stay with Sue, one of the students who has turned out to be a soul mate. She lives in a very beautiful home with her husband, seven chickens and 64 rare breed sheep on the outskirts of Inverness. Phil h ad been practising his manly moves wearing said boots in the hopes that I was indeed the foot fetishist of his fond imaginings. Trees on their land needed sawing, he was the man to do it a nd I was supposed to be the artist imm ortalising him.  Their house is unusual in that they have two private railway crossings on their l...
Read more

Freezing Cold Print Week

Image
Freezing Cold Print Week                       Print week went well due in part to the fact all three of our teachers are professional print makers and that we had a professional  printing press in the studio and did not have to resort to potato prints and a spoon to burnish the print onto the paper.  Well okay, in the name of scrupulous honesty I confess I did resort to potato printing actually and  thought it was really rather effective.   We had to come up with our own theme and as I live by the sea in the south of England and I am living on the coast of North West Scotland the beach was my theme. I took a bin bag onto the beach and gathered lots of seaweed, shells, dead crabs, dead gulls etc. No-one else wanted to work in the studio except James who didn't seem to have a strong sense of smell!!       I now know the difference between relief printing and intaglio having ...
Read more