I’m not a painter. I draw, I make original prints, I experiment with mixed media work. But I rarely paint. So as far as I’m concerned, anything goes. If something doesn’t work out, I can paint over it and start again. So I don’t know what the rules are (well, some of the basic ones, but that’s it) and I’m going to do whatever takes my fancy. When I do printmaking, I prefer to work with just the three primary colours, Process Cyan, Magenta / Red and Yellow and I’m trying to keep to this principle with this painting; I’ll see how it pans out. I’m also keen on trying to draw more than paint, using very thin washes of translucent colour that flow from the brush with the sort of lines and marks I use in drawings.
Just Get On With It!
30 Jul
Just Get On With It!
I find making art really hard. People often say to me, “how lovely to work at something you enjoy“. WRONG!!! It’s blood, sweat and tears all the way for me. I get stuck in cycles of creative self-doubt which are absolutely paralysing and I’ve been in one for some months now. So today I gave myself a good talking to and told myself to just get on with it. I started a painting a few days ago, putting on a dark ground and then a rough underpainting in pale grey, so today I mixed up a fairly thin wash of black acrylic ink (Liquitex Heavy Body) and did some quite quick and intuitive linework.
Although I have an original life drawing for reference, I am trying to work without it as much as possible, and rely on my imagination and intuition. I really must snap out of this and stop being so afraid to create. After all, if I don’t like what I do, I can always cover the canvas with gesso and start again.
Another Life Drawing (Female Nude)
29 Jul
Another Life Drawing (Female Nude)…
Here’s another life drawing I did at Swansea Print Workshop’s drawing group this week. It was a thirty minute pose that I drew on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet with a free Markers app.
I started with a mid-brown ground laid down with my finger and then worked the drawing up with a light brown large brush tool, again using my finger to draw. Finally I did some fine line work, using the stylus.
Back To Life Drawing (Female Nude)
27 Jul
Back to life drawing (female nude).
I started back to life drawing group this week after a break of several months, life got in the way. I think the break did me some good, I’m a bit looser and I’m taking more chances and playing around with distorting the figure.
I drew onto my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet with the stylus and my fingers, using a free drawing app called Markers. The slideshow shows the different stages in constructing the drawing.
Practising What I Preach
26 Jul
I’ve been doing quite a bit of teaching lately and I encourage people to experiment, to loosen up, to enjoy playing with the materials and see what turns up. And I really should practise what I preach! So I’m trying to chill out and splash about with paint and not work directly from life as I normally do – although I am working from a life drawing, but very loosely. Let’s see how it turns out.
I don’t like working directly onto white so I put on a basic wash made from diluted blue, red and yellow Liquitex acrylic paint. Then I blocked in the figure with diluted white Liquitex.
An Inspirational Talk
25 Jul
Husb and I went to a talk by the veteran artist Hanlyn Davies at our local art gallery, The Glynn Vivian, this evening. I really appreciated it and learnt a lot. I’ve been trying to break away from always working directly from life, tapping into my imagination, but I’ve been finding it hard going. Watching Hanlyn run through a slide show of over 50 years work has given me a bit of confidence to let go a bit and keep experimenting. I added a bit of red paint to the canvas board I started painting last week, when I was using up leftover Liquitex acrylic paints at the end of a teaching session. There wasn’t much left this week. It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops, I’ll keep it intuitive.
The Melted Rocks
24 Jul
One of my favourite places is Paviland, a strange otherworldly cove on the coast of the Gower Peninsula which is the site of the Goat’s Hole Cave, famous for the skeleton of the “Red Lady of Paviland“, which is actually a young man. From the main road, it’s a fair walk across fields via a marked footpath before the ground drops sharply and narrows into a steep rocky valley down to the beach. The slippery and difficult rocks look as if they have been melted and are splashed with colour from mosses and lichens and veins of different minerals coursing through them. I always take a sketchbook when I visit and I made this large monotype from one of my sketches.
Returning Children
23 JulI usually work from drawings done from life, only occasionally from a photograph and this is one of the rare original prints, a monotype, done entirely from a photo. I took the original image on a digital camera when I first visited Pakistan back in 2007, an amazing, life-changing journey. We travelled up the Khyber Pass, with an armed guard, and I saw this refugee family returning to Afghanistan. The security situation was much better then and I often wonder what happened to them, whether they were able to stay or whether they had to leave their home again. If you want to see how this monotype technique is done, click here…. I’m also running a short course in it at Swansea Print Workshop, please check on the right …..
Out Of The Blue…
22 Jul

Buried Sunshine
Where do we draw inspiration from? Well, frankly, could be anything, anywhere, anytime. Sometimes it flows from a planned programme of research, other times it just hits you out of the blue. I try to listen to a TED Talk each day and one popped up yesterday by the oceanographer Penny Chisholm about the tiny species Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic species on the planet. She was describing how aeons ago, vast amounts of photosynthetic organisms, which lived by absorbing sunlight, sank below the sea, became compressed over unimaginably vast amounts of time and turned into coal and oil. Then came the phrase that hit me … “coal and oil are buried sunshine“!
WOW! I live at the edge of the South Wales coalfield which was mined right back in the 15th century; mining really took off at the beginning of Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, continuing until the 1980s, and I’d never thought about the buried sunshine beneath my feet.
Some previous drawings en plein air from Big Pit in Blaenavon.
I immediately started to imagine some visual images so I drew one straight away with Daler Rowney artist quality soft pastels onto Khadi handmade paper. While the idea of buried sunshine is beautiful, coal and oil lock away vast amounts of carbon and once they come out of the ground and they’re burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Which isn’t good. Perhaps we should leave the rest of this ancient sunshine safely buried.
You can see Penny Chisholm’s TED Talk on this video…