The advantage of a “Friend of………………” card is that you can call in more than once to see exhibitions and view them therefore without time pressure. I write this the day after a delightful first viewing of the newly opened Royal Academy exhibition The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. On my return, I picked up an email from Ann Rutherford asking for some more newsletter contributions. She mentioned talking about our work or how we work. A day later, I reflected further on the visual and the verbal.
I now regularly write about my textile life. A couple of weeks ago I made two new textile diary covers for 2010, one for me and an identical one to send to a textile friend in North Yorkshire. I started with this diary practice three years ago following the disbanding of an exhibiting group and just before my good friend moved north. To begin with, I kept monthly dated computer lists of everything I did that was textile linked in some way, experiments, completed pieces, exhibitions, talks, workshops and so on. I printed these out at the end of each month as a hard copy and added extra pages with more photographs notes and samples, all in A5 format. This then became a non-internet blog that I sent off fortnightly, receiving in return another, compiled and presented very differently but keeping me well up to date with someone else’s textile thoughts.
Last year I changed the format of my diary by compiling it all with Microsoft Publisher software. I dropped my monthly listings and instead I just keep to pages of experiments, thoughts, completed pieces, exhibition visit reflections, articles I have written and other input of potential later interest. I have a template to work on which saves a time so the whole creation process is short. Also I do not need to keep looking at my nightmare handwriting as I type most of the text. The diary cover is Craft Vilene based. The pages are printed on A4 sheets of thin card and then cut in half. Cover and pages can be hole-punched as they are created and simply held together with Ryman’s ‘Essential – leaf rings loose’, in other words with a loose leaf file mechanism without the file! Pages can this way be added and or subtracted with great ease.
I have found the whole process of doing this very positive. I always want to do something to put in my diary! I would do it whether or not I had anyone to send it to. I never sink into the trough of “Oh, I haven’t really done anything this week/month/year” or “I haven’t anything I want to work for”. Some friends have recently begun nurturing their interest in textiles. We meet monthly. To me it matters not how much they do or what they do but I have encouraged them all to keep their own distinctive styles of textile diary as a confirming way to view their personal textile achievements.
To return to Van Gogh, I so enjoyed the letters he wrote to his brother, describing his work and how he felt about it. I am sure he used them to process his thoughts as much as to communicate to Theo. I commend the process of writing alongside creating the visual and the discipline of making it a regular event. For anyone who has good handwriting, all that is needed for a diary is some illustrations, photographs, postcards or samples to write on the back of or alongside. Just in case you are thinking “A good idea, but I will have to leave starting it to next year”, I started my first diary in April!