Mungo Walk #1

The walk from Culross to Glasgow is going to take me four days at about 10 miles a day. On the walk I'll be taking photos, posting to Instagram, recording audio, and collecting samples. 

So without further ado, my first trek is complete!

My walk started at Saint Mungo's Chapel, built 1000 years after the event of Mungo's birth, but now a complete ruin, However this was the location of where Saint Mungo was born.

The chapel stands back from the shoreline of the Forth where Mungo's exiled mother in her coracle was washed ashore in the sixth century. It was very contemplative to stand at both places and know that 1500 years ago these events were unfolding where I now stood.

I continued up the hill to the ruins of Culross Abbey. Again this building was built long after Mungo and his mother were taken in by monks. The original monastery on the site is long gone, but the sense of wonder still remains.

My path then took me west towards Alloa, through paths in the woods where Mungo himself may have trodden.

Walking in the Footsteps of Mungo

My theme for my Honours year at college surrounds Saint Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow. His story is fascinating and I felt I wanted to bring the story to life in a way that hadn't been done before. So I settled on the idea of physically walking his walk myself. 

Saint Mungo on Undiscovered Scotland
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usbiography/m/saintmungo.html

Born in Culross, he walked from here to Glasgow on the first part of his many journeys, and founded the first settlement and church on the north side of the Clyde where Glasgow Cathedral now stands.

There are four miracles that surround Saint Mungo concerning a bird, a fish, a tree, and a bell. Imagery of these is throughout Glasgow, and also on the Glasgow Coat of Arms. This imagery has it's place in the story, but as I want to bring something new, it is not likely to play a large part.

My first task is to visit the key sites in the story, which are: Traprain Law in East Lothian, Culross, and Glasgow. I intend to walk from Culross to Glasgow, following Mungo's footsteps as closely as possible. 

The map below, from the book, traces part of the route from Culross. How accurate this is I'm not sure, but this is a starting point.



What I do know is that at this time, the Romans had retreated from this area and left several droving roads which Mungo would probably have used in his journey. My task is to identify these roads where they still exist. I am aware of the existence of one such road which ran parallel to the Antonine wall through Cumbernauld, so again this will be part of my investigation.

Back to college!

My final year started last week! can't believe I've almost completed an honours degree in Contemporary Art Practice. The last 3 years have just flown by, but I've loved every minute!

I do have some ideas for this final year that I'll reveal over the next few posts. However I have been reading and writing quite a bit over the past few months for my dissertation, which is on the topic of graphic designer Saul Bass. 

Here's a few snippets of his movie poster work....

Calderglen Exhibition

With just four days to go until our Calderglen Exhibition finishes, here's a views of some of the exhibits:

Fran's wall

John's miniature watercolours

Some of my paintings

Susan's collection

John's wall

Some of Fran's alcohol ink pictures

Calderglen Exhibition Open!

A few of my works on display...

Calderglen Poster

Created this today from a picture of one of Fran's paintings...... 

To frame or not to frame

Some people like to buy unframed paintings, choosing a frame to match both the painting and their home decor. Others like to buy the full package, painting and frame, as a ready to hang package. So where does this leave the artist?

Well there is no easy answer. So what I'm doing at Calderglen, is to offer both options. I'll have 3 framed paintings, and hang the rest unframed, but will have two prices of each. 

Here's one that I'm getting framed.....

Countdown to Calderglen

One week to go until we open the doors to our exhibition at Calderglen Country Park. 

"We" are Fran Alexander, John and Susan Ralston and myself, and we all have very different artistic styles, which will make a very diverse exhibition.

I intend to bring along some of my college artwork, and I also have 6 new paintings to show. I'm also hoping to paint more this week to add to these.

Here's a couple for starters....

May 2016

Left Behind

As Creative Processes completes, this is the culmination of my work for this module for the year. 11 clear acrylic panels, paying homage to the Heidelberg print presses that are being left behind once the college moves to it's new building.

April 2016

Blythswood to The Barras

I decided that the map that I painted on the studio wall needed to be created in 3D, so I started planning.

I ended up deciding to create a folded representation of the map of Glasgow City Centre in MDF. I cut out four 6ft MDF panels with a jigsaw, leaving only the roads and the river.

The final structure was painted black, and won two awards at the Craftex 2016 exhibition!

March 2016

Sandblasting and Projection

Our exhibition at The Old Hairdressers went very well.
This is a shot of my piece: It's was created with sandblasted glass and a video of a print press button. The colours changed subtly through a whole spectrum over about two minutes

February 2016

Maps!!

Our new module, entitled "Appropriation" set us off on a trail to find something existing and to make it our own. I chose maps and started to draw & paint the map of Glasgow City Centre on the studio wall....

I decided not to draw all the streets and to leave it unfinished in places and unlabelled. It became an abstract.

January 2016

Prints of the Print Press buttons

The culmination of Creative Processes 1 was a set of prints created in various ways:

1. Acetone prints: 

Laser prints reverse printed, then placed face down onto watercolour paper. Acetone is the painted over the back of the print and the image transferred by rubbing through the paper

2: Acrylic Transfer: 

Again a reverse laser print is used, and the print and receiving acrylic sheet are coated in acrylic medium. Once the medium is dry the paper is soaked and rubbed off, leaving the image on the acrylic plate.

3. Sticky back transfer

Not sure if this is an official way of doing a transfer, as I found it by experimenting! Sticky backed plastic is firmly attached to a laser print, and the paper soaked and rubbed off. The image remains stuck to the plastic. I coated the sticky side in a few coats of acrylic medium to produce a clear plastic image.

December 2015

Print Press Buttons

With the college moving next year to a brand new building, a "Super Campus", our Creative Processes brief required us to look at this transition, and to respond to it in an artistic way.

I struggled with this one initially, but eventually homed in on our current building's history. The building was formerly the "College of Building and Printing" which was opened in the 1960s. It now stands as a Listed building and this listing includes several of the original print presses.

I chose to look at these print presses as a possible subject as two of them are not being taken over to the new building. They could be migrated artistically!

The presses had several buttons which started various processes or performed actions within the press. These buttons were labelled with symbols, which to the untrained eye were a little like hieroglyphics.

Some modified pictures below...

November 2015

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht"

Our next brief was "The Stranger". I looked for inspiration in my past, when I might have felt like a stranger myself. This took me back to my family's move to Scotland in 1972. I arrived in Scotland at the age of 12 years old and felt very much like a stranger in a foreign land. I was already a shy kid and being plunged in to a small local community in the middle of Ayrshire was, to say the least, a shock to the system. My then Blackpool accent was something to be mimicked at school, and I became very concious that I was an outsider.  And then there was the issue of the dialect in this part of Scotland (Darvel / Newmilns), which was (and I guess still is) fairly broad even though the major towns of Kilmarnock and Ayr were not far away.

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht" was a phrase that the locals tried to get me to repeat. I was a shy 12 year old English kid, and it was obviously a bit of fun for them, and I don't think they meant any malice in the request. However the result was that it just made me feel even more alienated, self-conscious, and that I didn't fit in.

Anyway, to cut a long story short my artwork for this brief emerged as a protest poster in a Russian Constructivist style.

Detail from the artwork.

The work is constructed from 3 colours of card, which is layered to achieve an almost 3D look

It's been a while!

My Facebook page Alan Loach Art has been my place for posting my recent art news recently and I've been neglecting this blog. So it's now time to bring it up to date.... Starting from where I left off....
  
October 2015
My doodles were carried on to the next project called The Book. The requirements were to produce an artist book. So I came up with the idea of doodling the whole class in their favourite colour. I then had a small book printed with the doodles.