Kokyou – the eternal mirror

24 April 2019

We first had some fun loosening up with some markmaking before working on the kanji character 古 ko / furui for old or ancient. Exploring the oldest bone carving style of character was really fun in addition to the tensho and kaisho styles.

鏡 Kyou/ kagami meaning mirror had a lort more strokes to work with but we enjoyed the contrast with the ko character. This relates to the old Chinese bronze mirrors.

Combining both kanji together with the resulting sound Kokyou, has a very old Chinese meaning – mirrors are the origin of yin and yang and regulate the body eternally – as well as a later meaning in Buddhism – in the ancient mirror nothing is discriminated, everything is shown.

Category: Art Groups Tags: Shodo calligraphy

Mysterious shapes and energy of trees

29 March 2019

Continuing from last week’s theme of spring growth we probed the branchy twisting shapes within trees, more easily seen before all the leaves come out.

Thinking about the graceful shapes and sense of wisdom that trees convey, we were free to make more artworks and find connections between roots, branches, seeds, shoots, buds and the energetic positive feeling of Spring.

Using coloured pencils and pens we each drew our own tree of life.

Kindly supported by Glasgow Connected Arts Network

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Maryhill Art Group

Spring growth and life emerging

29 March 2019

The buds of spring and shoots, and young green leaves inspired us over two nights at Maryhill Art Group. We used our senses to look closely at the buds, daffodils and other spring shoots and flowers we had brought in, also smelling the scents.

After some leaf like curvy doodles with organic shapes in various colours, we listened to some poetry and words about the spring, the changing season, and seeds sprouting.

single wish
to sleep a night
below cherry blossoms

Ryokan

Different types of coloured pencils were used fro drawing, some finer and more delicate as well as chunkier richer coloured ones. These were ideal for giving a sense of the delicate colours at the start of this season.

Kindly supported by Glasgow Connected Arts Network

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Maryhill Art Group

Can you read this?

28 March 2019

See if you can decode this curious creative piece of writing-drawing by one of participants, it has a rocky theme.

Kindly supported by Glasgow Connected Arts Network

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Maryhill Art Group

Expansive vistas, soaring gannets, flying marks

28 March 2019

Freedom in open spaces and big marks! Continuing from last session’s rocky theme of rocks under the earth in Glasgow, we took this into wider dimensions with more spacious scenes of sea, islands, birds.

This was influenced also by the rock and raked gravel dry gardens of Japan and China garden design, which placed carefully chosen stones of particular shapes into spaces to create a harmonic landscape world of mountains, seas, waterfalls and forest.

Fine pens as well as prockey pens and metallic pens were ideal for drawing from our expanded amount of stone – one of the participants kindly brought a beautiful collection of stones and minerals of mesmerising colours and textures.

In the second half of the group we used black ink and different types of brushes to explore totally different ways of markmaking, still keeping the textured or smooth feel of the stones, and with the spaciousness of the sea and garden spaces.   
 

Kindly supported by Glasgow Connected Arts Network

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Maryhill Art Group

Lava rising from patterns of earth and rock

28 March 2019

Inspired by the rocks under our feet in Glasgow, from the carboniferous to the metamorphic hundreds of millions of years ago. We drew and doodled from our rock collection as well as from our imagination, thinking about lava rising up through the sea to create mountains, and rocky hills lowering to valleys and streams with animals and people active below the peaks.

 
Our doodles were tectonic and very craggy.

Working on black paper with oil pastels helped us explore rocky textures, and enjoy trying out some funky colour combinations. The weight and feel of the stones and rocks helped to guide us. Some of us drew or wrote words about what rocks an rocky places meant for us.

We also had time to relax, thinking about this theme and feeling nice and grounded!

Kindly supported by Glasgow Connected Arts Network

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Maryhill Art Group

Spring experiments and lots of tensho!

16 March 2019

The primary school group on Saturday at North United Communities in Maryhill Hub tried Japanese calligraphy for the first time and had lots of fun!

To begin with we did some short meditation together, just grounding and breathing, settling, and then touching the materials which everyone enjoyed. Then we poured the sumi ink and straight away they were making marks with the fude brushes and engaging with the pictorial aspects of the characters, and the shapes of the strokes.

They were especially keen to try the tensho and kinbun styles of characters, and we chatted about the meanings behind these and how they related to our experience of being connected to nature. There was a fair bit of experimentation in this group with the children exploring the dense quality of the ink and also the hanshi paper which was is a lot thinner they are used to. 

明 akarui – bright was a nice kanji that was enjoyed, and also 春 haru – spring – and dai 大 – great – with other kanji also being worked on. The meanings and rich visual language of each character was quickly absorbed by the young people.

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Clouds and heart-mind at Maryhill Hub

15 March 2019

Secondary school young people at the Friday night North United Communities group embraced Japanese writing and Shodo calligraphy. The group had some meditative time first to feel the textures and weight of the materials, such as the types of fude brushes, suzuri ink well and bunchin paper weight, and to settle and breathe deeply, before beginning.

Kumo 雲 – cloud – was especially popular in the kaisho style. And with a few participants being anime fans such as of Natsu Dragneel, so we worked on natsu 夏- summer – as well as a bonus!

Some young people also enjoyed working on kokoro 心 – heart or mind. One young participant even worked on the hiragana syllabary which was fantastic and we explored some of the pronunciation of these as well as the kanji characters.

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Shodo calligraphy at Ruchill Community Centre

14 March 2019

We started with some discussion about the styles and type of imagery, and just a little about the history! Then after some demonstration, we worked from tsuki 月, moon, and hi 日, sun or day. The young people really engaged with the peaceful and attentive way of working, and with the tensho and kaisho styles, and surprisingly told us it was so easy! They wanted more kanji to work from 🙂

Next we worked on mountains and water, or landscape, sansui 山水, a nice simple word with two characters. Then ai 愛, love, and onto dai 大, great or large, which has a lovely balance and contrast between the type of brushstrokes. No problem for the Ruchill young folk! 

We then worked on each person’s name in the katakana syllabary, which we encouraged them to add to some of their pieces, or just try it on a single sheet of paper.　

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Sights of Glasgow painted at NUC Breakfast Club

2 March 2019

We started off sketching the main shapes of the composition – of the Clyde river and Hydro, Armadillo and Tall Ship, then added the great Glasgow icon of the Duke of Wellington with his stunning traffic cone hat 🤠 Next the Squinty bridge, Finnieston Crane, some flats and the Riverside Museum. The young folk were keen on an Irn Bru bottle being included too! We had a flurry of energetic painting and have about half still to work on soon. 🎨

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art