Husb and I visited the very talented glass artist, Deanne Mangold, at her Open Studio today. Deanne is working up a new panel based on one of my drawings of Neolithic and Bronze Age standing stones, this one in Dinas in Pembrokeshire.
It’s very flattering that another artist finds inspiration in my work and it’s fascinating for me to see how she has interpreted my original. Deanne’s Open Studio continues tomorrow (Sunday 15th July) from 10.00 to 1.00.
The influence of Japanese printmaking on European art…. https://wp.me/p3x4lI-1wO
These images are from one of the exercises I ran at a women’s creative group last weekend. I called it ‘Drawing for the Terrified’ and it was a, hopefully, fun two hours that nevertheless did some serious drawing exercises.
My idea was to help inexperienced artists to gain confidence and skills while experienced artists had a chance to play and try things that maybe they hadn’t done for a while. For this one, focusing on colour and mark-making, I asked everyone to think of three significant events or people in their lives, positive or negative, and assign to each a colour and a type of mark and then to draw them onto a large, collective sheet of paper, as big or as small as they wanted. Then we took pre-cut mount (matte) boards and placed them over sections to look at the new images that emerged.
By connecting colour and mark with significant people or events, they became associated with an emotional response.
Yesterday I blogged about the Action Scribbling exercise I did on Sunday, today I took some pre-cut mount (matte) boards and placed them over different parts of the large roll of multi-coloured scribble, isolating small areas from the whole and focusing attention on the detail in each of these smaller pieces. They have an amazing depth and jewel-like intensity to them.
There’s a feel of Abstract Expressionism about them and they could be framed up and hung as individual pieces of art in their own right but I’m thinking that maybe they would be good to use for collage.
I spent last Sunday with a lovely group of creative women in North Gower, gorgeous surroundings, and I ran a 2 hour art session called, ‘Drawing for the Terrified‘, where I aimed to demystify drawing and help people to feel comfortable with it. I started of with a group activity I call ‘Action Scribbling’. I taped a roll of paper along a table and put a few boxes of drawing materials out – chalky pastels, oily pastels, compressed charcoal and chalk and I asked each of the dozen participants to choose two, one for each hand and then we started to move very quickly around the table, scribbling onto the paper with both hands as we rushed around for 5 minutes. It was fun and at the end we had a table full of colour and movement, rather like a work like Jackson Pollock. I gave everyone a small mount card and asked them to find the smaller pictures within the larger one. It’s surprising what we discovered – landscapes, seascapes, beautiful abstracts…..
I spent yesterday evening with a group of really lovely women at a creative arts workshop in the beautiful surroundings of North Gower. We went for a walk in the glorious sunshine and some us us did a ‘Walk And Draw’ which really focuses you on being very selective as you can’t draw everything in front of you – you’re on the move – and there’s way too much to draw in an ever-changing landscape anyway. It’s a good opportunity to get a bit abstracted and develop a shorthand of motifs for different features, a sort of storyline. For example, a sun-drenched path might be translated into a bright crescent swirl of white, an interesting building morphs into a few dynamic diagonals….. I used compressed charcoal, chalk and a soft ochre pastel onto brown parcel paper.
Here’s a fascinating painter’s post about colour mixing. I love all the techie stuff
I draw you when you sleep! Not creepy at all, oh no. Poor Husb, what he has to put up with ………
Last weekend I did a short course in making a screenprinted book and part of the process was the covers. I did the designs with black acrylic paint brushed onto acetate and then scratched into the surface with a nail when it was dry. The hand lettering was done with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen.
The design on the acetate was transferred to a photo-sensitive silkscreen and printed in white onto a dark cloth. Then the cloth was cut to size and glued to pre-cut boards before being glued onto the concertina screenprint to form the book.
The gluing process on the left and the finished back cover on the right.
There’s a new exhibition at Volcano on Swansea’s High Street called Print Explosion! It’s the annual show for members of Swansea Print Workshop and I have 8 original prints in it. The opening party is on Friday July 6th, 6.30 – 9.00 pm and the show runs until Saturday July 28th. If you’re passing, please drop by 🙂
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