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.
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.
I 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 …..
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.
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…
WordPress sent me a message a couple of days ago to remind me that I had been blogging for 7 years. I’m really chuffed that I’m still at it after all this time and I’ve published about two and a half thousand posts. That’s a lot of art I’ve done and written about. I did my first post while I was sitting with my elderly cat, Bobbit, as she was dying. I’ve reproduced it here. It still makes me choke up. I had about a dozen readers for my first post and I was so pleased.
“Bobbit came into our family in July 1993 and 17 years later I’m sitting with her as she sleeps her last sleep, dying gently and quietly with familiar sounds and smells and her human and feline companions around her. If she was suffering I’d take her to the vet for euthanasia, but she’s slipping away peacefully and I want her to die here, in her home.
People who don’t have pets don’t get the relationship. A pet shares part of your journey through life and when a pet dies, that part of your journey is over and you take a new route without your companion. Bobbit has been travelling with me for 17 years and now her journey’s nearly over, mine will change.
It’s a long time for a little cat to share my life. When she arrived aged 8 weeks, she hadn’t ever been outside and we took her into our garden on a warm sunny day and she saw her first grass. She went bonkers romping around on the lawn and she’s loved her garden ever since. Yesterday, I thought she might be rallying because she managed to wobble on her poor little arthritic legs to her favourite spot on the grass. She stayed there for an hour or so then wobbled back indoors and has slept since. I think she wanted one last sleep in the sun, with the feel of the grass under her.
In those 17 years, I’ve moved to England to work and come back to Wales. I’ve had several career changes, run my own business and finally achieved my ambition of becoming a full-time artist. New little relatives and friends have been born, while loved family elders, dear friends and respected colleagues have died. Bobbit has been one of the adored cats who have shared my life along the way, moving from being the youngest (and only girl) out of four, to being the grouchy matriarch over two much younger kitties.
As I’m sitting here with her, I think about the people I’ve shared a path with; who is still a friend, who has disappeared out of my life, the important events, the happinesses, the regrets. The death of a pet encapsulates that period of time and all those experiences and sort of brings it to a close. I know that in a couple of weeks I won’t be so upset; that I’ll be able to tell stories about Bobbit and chuckle over them and she’ll take her place fondly in my memory with my other dear cats; Kat, Nellie, Banshee; Freddy Kruger; Sialco and Bola, but for the moment I’m heartbroken to let go of that part of the journey we have shared and to start on a new path without her.”
Here are a few more sketches of Bobbit, and some of her feline companions.
Husb and I went to the Glynn Vivian art gallery in Swansea this evening for their monthly late opening night. As well as the exhibitions, they put on some activities and events. This evening we had a Bollywood Dance Performance & Workshop by Sarita Sood to complement the current main exhibition, “Facing” by N. S. Harsha.
It’s always difficult to draw people in motion, you have to suspend the desire to record detail and instead draw the barest minimum to convey what’s in front of you. Very good practice though.
I joined a group of women Welsh learners at Ty Tawe earlier this evening. We’re practising to be part of the ‘Nawr Yr Arwr / Now The Hero‘ immersive art event in Swansea in September. We’ll be part of a group of one hundred female voices reciting a section from an ancient Welsh poem, Y Gododdin– please click on the link to hear it being recited by the excellent actor, Eddie Ladd. Of course, I had to have a scribble, sneaking a look around the table at my fellow reciters.
I was doing some teaching today and there was some acrylic paint leftover, good stuff, Liquitex. Waste not, want not, I thought and used it up on a canvas board. I rubbed a layer of black on first, in a rotating motion with a large stippling brush and when that was dry, a layer of diluted green/blue and finally, working from the bottom right with a blunt hoghair brush and some maroon. It’s completely random but I need to loosen up my techniques and work more intuitively. It’s also good for my students to get into the habit of using up all their materials and trying out different things.
Got to the end of a busy day without doing a drawing so I grabbed my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet with a free drawing app called Markers and did a quick digital sketch of my foot. I used mostly opaque colours which gives it a sort of silkscreeny look.
Husb and I are keen gardeners, well, no, that’s not true. I’m a keen gardener and Husb would happily fill the garden with concrete and Astroturf! Our garden is small but we also have an allotment and grow a lot of fruit and some veg. At this time of year, we’re picking our produce which means spending time cleaning and preserving it. Today we made 6 jars of gooseberry and elderflower jam and 6 bottles of loganberry cordial and picked about 4 kilos of jostaberries (a cross between gooseberries and blackcurrants), a kilo of rhubarb and a load of rainbow chard. Not much chance of doing anything arty with all this going on, but I did this drawing a while back of our local castle which overlooks the allotments. It’s an idyllic place, we’re very lucky.
Tomorrow, I’ll be jamming all those jostaberries and making rhubarb chutney.
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