Somewhere Special To Look At Mobile Phones

chalking 2

Husb and I just got back from Oriel Ceri Richard’s Gallery, at Taliesin Art Centre, which has been at the centre of protests in recent months because of plans by Swansea University to close it. It was opened in 1984 and named after Welsh painter Ceri Richards. It has showcased local, national and international artists, living and dead, over the past two and a bit decades. When we arrived, there was no art on the walls but lots of photos of artists who have exhibited there over the years; there I am above with the 15 Hundred Lives collective, fellow artists Graham Parker and Sylvie Evans.

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Someone had brought some coloured chalks so I started scribbling, of course. It’s like being a kid again but without grown ups to tell you off 😀 Once I started drawing I was oblivious to anything else. The University wants the space for ‘an enhanced student experience’. The artist’s impression shows a playgroup-type space with lots of students sitting around on boxes looking at their mobile phones. Because they need somewhere special to look at their mobile phones, don’t they? It’s such a shame that a gallery with such a good reputation is being lost to the area. The University seems to have forgotten that the Taliesin Arts Centre, which houses the gallery, was mainly funded by Swansea’s local communities through a public Development Appeal Fund in the 1960s. And now the public is to be deprived of it.  Here’s a petition if you’d like to sign it.

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Fanny Eaton, Pre-Raphaelite muse

 This is a fascinating blog I wanted to share. Worth a look.         http://wp.me/p6qHAP-iG

Barbie Poop And Twin Peaks

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So, my young niece sent me a link to YouTube a few months ago and asked if I could make her a rainbow unicorn cake like the one on YouTube for her 18th birthday. It looked easy enough. So her birthday’s here and I’ve been cooking for a couple of days to get her cake ready and all went well until it came to putting on the icing and making it look like a unicorn. Then it sort of went pear-shaped. The pound and a half of buttercream icing on the outside looked too bland so I threw handfuls of different coloured shimmer sugar crystals at it so the unicorn became a sparkly piebald, which I don’t think unicorns are supposed to be.

Then the icing kit I’d bought to decorate the top of the cake with lovely pink and white stripey rosettes didn’t quite work out for me and it ended up covered with little piles of what looked like Barbie poop. You know, like the ‘poop’ emoji but pink and white instead of brown. poop emoji

So I  smoothed it down with a knife but then I had to find some real flowers to decorate the head around the horn that I’d bought specially. Luckily, a friend had brought me flowers when she visited a couple of days ago and I used a few of those. Finally I had to cut some attractive eyelashes from black paper but mine went all sort of sinister and I ended up with a mutant unicorn cake that Husb reckons looks “like something from Twin Peaks“. I think that’s meant to be a compliment?

Luckily, when it was cut open it looked a lot better and tasted nice too.

Unicorn 2

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

A Gallery Visit

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Husb and I paid a visit to the lovely Workers Gallery in Ynyshir in the Rhondda Valley today. I am one of the gallery artists and I wanted to change the work I’m displaying there. Each gallery artist has a bit of wall to display their work. The Workers also has a Main Gallery for curated exhibitions. It was the last day of Susan Zeppellini’s sculpture and drawing show, “The Crows Descend”, which is fantastic.

The Crows Descend by Susan Zeppellini
My work, ‘Scrutiny’ in top right corner
The Workers Gallery in Ynyshir

I’m exhibiting a large monotype titled ‘Scrutiny’ based on drawings I did working with a life model.

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

A Last Little Quickie

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And here’s the last of the very quick watercolour sketches I made recently, sitting in the sunshine on the clifftop in Southgate overlooking the sea. I concentrated on capturing the flow of the colours before me, rather than recording details. I’ve never been particularly into land / seascape art so I don’t have any hard and fast rules to influence me. I’m just hanging out doing my own thing. I used Winsor & Newton half pan watercolours with a glued block of Waterford watercolour paper from St. Cuthbert’s Mill.

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

Just Back ….

Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop and I am pretty tired now. I was working with a marvellous young model this evening,  using my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with the free Markers app.  I used my finger to draw as much as I did with the stylus and kept overlaying tones one on top of the other. I made a simple sponge cake for our tea break, filled with home made gooseberry jam, made with fruit from our allotment. 

Quick Little Pastel

pastel

Today I was giving someone some tips for using pastels, so I thought the best way was to have a bit of a scribble myself. It’s so nice to work onto proper pastel paper; the darker tone of the paper and the toothed texture make a huge difference. That’s half the battle with art, using good quality materials that are suited to the job. I just did a quick post-impressionistic semi-abstract landscape in my usual scribbly style.

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

Another Quickie

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I’m so lucky to live near the sea and Husb and I are often strolling along the beach, or we’ll go for a short drive to walk along cliffs or along an estuary path. I’ve started to carry my Winsor & Newton half pan watercolours and a Waterford glued block of watercolour paper to capture some quick fleeting impressions. It’s nice to play with the materials and not get bogged down in fine detail, always a dilemma I think with watercolour.

 

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

PsychedeliCat 2

Psychedelicat 2

Not quite as psychedelic as yesterday’s PsychedeliCat but still pretty colourful. I have a miserable summer cold and my brain has turned into cotton wool so I’m entertaining myself doing little pencil drawings of cats onto my Waterford watercolour block and colouring them in with Winsor & Newton half pan watercolours. I’ll get back to some serious work when I shake off this rotten cold.

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

PsychedeliCat

Psychedelicat 1

I did a small drawing in pencil of this cat back in December, onto my Saunders Waterford watercolour paper block, and have only just now got round to painting it. I can’t move onto the next sheet of paper because it’s one of those glued blocks so I have to finish everything on it before peeling it off and starting the next one.

I don’t want to do a realistic painting. I was a child back in the 1960s and loved the psychedelic art around at that time. I have a few of these cat drawings to paint so I’m going to make them all psychedelicats. I’m using Winsor & Newton half pans.

 

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you want to buy one, you can see them by clicking on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis