TIM BAKER

As I mentioned in the last Inktober post, I created my own version of Inktober called MynkTober independent of Inktober inspired by Stuart Semple’s Pinktober protest. I just used a random word generator to create prompts, and only intervened when a word seemed to specific or not inspiring and then just clicked for another word. But most of these words were first time suggestions amazingly – and yes that includes Radio and Clash *ahem*.

The rules are the same as Inktober apart from two things: no pre-work, you start work on the day, and don’t memorise upcoming days. I have a terrible memory so the second is easy for me!

Oh and I know other challenges pay lip service to taking the Inktober prompts loosely but these were selected to have plenty of double meaning and artistic license…so I’ve told myself *ahem* to use that to the fullest, and keep it expressive. And not every day has to be a Sistine Chapel either – short sketches or long, alternating styles, technical and loose, mix it up, don’t slog it, it is supposed to be fun.

And when I first suggested it, it was a unique ‘Googlewhack’ tag, no-one else was using it. Glad to see others are now using the tag in the spirit of DIY. Vive la revolution!

First up was ‘Radio’ and I wanted to draw an old radiogram or radio like the one my parents had, big dials and glowing. I was attracted to the space age optimism of the Philips Saturn, also a brand I had actually heard of!

Two things went wrong: I used the sketchbook paper which wasn’t good enough for this level of ink painting and I didn’t allow the first black Jackson’s dip pen and brush layer to dry as it was getting late and John wanted to go to bed….I didn’t have time to let it dry. I managed to fetch it back a little with the ubiquitous white pen, but if the paper had been more appropriate I’d not have to.

Also my framing was off, slightly…dunno why I started up there. An OK start but I’ve done better. Too rushed.

Next up was ‘Palace’, I’d just been drawing and painting Hampton Court Palace so this was a no-brainer. Thing is I am a stickler for rules so didn’t want to use previous work and cheat, so I headed out into the slight drizzle…which soon became a deluge. There aren’t many places to shelter looking at Hampton Court, even less in lockdown apart from trees and the first lot I found were too leaky…and I was running out of light wandering around looking for a spot.

Eventually I found it in Home Park, under a denser sort of tree. Still was wet though and despite using fast drying ink, some of those splots aren’t intentional! I learned that it’s not worth forcing it if it’s raining…unless you know there is reliable shelter, i.e. manmade.

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You spin me round like a record baby….or a painting. Spin was the next one, and given the preponderance of spirals in my current abstracts this was an easier one. Although I still screwed up the first one, forgetting to draw with the candle first and it got rather dark and dull. Fun with hake brushes though! I think the second is far more successful…the first was overworked due to the ink spreading and mixing too much, not having the wax bits to separate it.

Day four was ‘Feather’ – time to dust off the quills! I must’ve had it on my mind because the night before I heat treated some feathers I’d found and some older quills that had gotten mangled, and on the day made and remade some quills from a swan’s feather and the turkey feather ones I had left over from before. So I drew this still life of a turkey feather with the swan feather, with the help of a brush. Less spreading with the A4 Daler paper but still some fun trying to coax shadows to behave. An exercise also in more gentle shading with the feather itself.

The fifth prompt was ‘Addition’ and given this was the day the news broke about the scandal of the Test and Trace Excel spreadsheet missing nearly 16,000 new infections due to a limitation in the older version of Excel. People are already unhappy with the expensive and badly run farrago that is the Serco Test and Trace – not NHS it’s run by the idiots at Serco and Dido ‘Failed Upwards From The Disaster That Was Talk Talk’ Harding.

This turned out to be a Public Health England error but really, the whole thing is a clown show. Excel should never be used for important life or death data like that…So like my previous Inktober collage I printed out medical spreadsheets and Excel data errors, pasted them on A3 Daler paper and attacked it with brushes, marker and even I think the quill. This unsurprisingly took ages to dry, and is also a political extension of the ZEBRA abstracts.

After these longer pieces I wanted to do something akin to cinema verite. Inking verite? Sketch decisif? The prompt was Live which having no desire to draw plugs or cables had to be taken the other way – lived in, even. We live in strange times, and although I believe in permanent revolution, I also see that survival in a pandemic is also radical and revolutionary especially when others want you to die.

Hence the title of the sketch I did in 10-15 minutes in my local kebab shop, unlike what Gil Scott Heron said the revolution won’t be live, it will be lived, to be live is momentary. History has taught us those radical revolutionary moments are fleeting and easily undone, so we need to implement them in our everyday lives, attacking at every level.

A reminder of this was the conversation about a strange homeless guy that came in without a mask, to be told to go get one, he asked where he could get one…he came back later, and got a kebab after arguing over the price. It was the conversation after with the kebab shop worker and a customer who triggered this line of thought. The customer said ‘we’re all homeless in lockdown’ and that we are all struggling in this pandemic. Wise words.

This was created with a new pen – a generic brass pen from China, a clone of Kaweco’s Sport Brass with an improvement, it is slightly longer which means normal ink converters can be used. Price? £3.15. Given the Kaweco Brass is around £70-80 this is amazing. And it’s very good, not as smooth as Kaweco but like my plastic Kaweco the nib needed grinding to take out baby’s bottom….so now after a bit of work it’s possibly better than my genuine Kaweco!

The nib doesn’t flex at all, that’s one drawback but I got the wider nib. I also used this pen on the next piece for ‘Positive’.

These two related pieces highlight something I have been trying to do during the lockdown, document it as an artist. Not always successful in this although it has affected all my work in some way, good or bad. The next prompt being ‘Positive’ can be taken both ways, many people now know the reality what was discovered by us queer people in the 80’s’ – that to be positive can be a negative when it comes to viruses.

So I looked around for a sign (brother) and found this pavement vinyl sign by the river giving the edict ‘Give Each Other Room’ which given space is a premium in lockdown for some of us, it is almost philosophical. Like a lot of my recent watercolour pieces, it’s an experiment in mixing tertiaries from secondaries – here orange and purple. And yes, from my ‘little boxies’.

And finally we have something I haven’t done for a long while – an ink painted still life. Ink painting might seem like watercolour but it’s actually much harder to use, you have to build up layers or get the gradations correct – you can’t adjust them after. Also spreading is a real problem with cotton papers, because of that lack of adjustment. I like how ink spreads – some hate those ‘blooms’ but I love them, but it’s a high risk strategy.

The prompt was ‘Tie’ so I decided to draw my ties with a dip pen and then paint them with Dr PH Martin’s Bombay Inks. I don’t wear ties, I just have these for events I don’t want to go to – weddings, funerals, business meetings and interviews. Not sure why like my suits I keep them, they are part of the whole patriarchal drag, ties are just male peacocking and I don’t like the feel of them or what they represent.

They can be beautiful things in their own right though, despite all that. The blue green one – one of my favourite colours in fact – has a purple sheen which I tried to represent although the red dried light, not sure why.

I think that aside this is the most successful Mynktober piece so far – but I think I feel so much more comfortable doing my own thing, and you can see the range of work, it’s not locked into one problematic idea of ‘ink’. Liberty!