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Another Beautiful Boomer

As I scrutinise the faces of my sitters, all Baby Boomers, all born between 1946 and 1964, it’s obvious that beauty shines through from within, it’s not something that sits on the surface of the skin. It’s a shame that cosmetic surgery is so popular because it’s the life that is lived and reflected upon a face that gives a person beauty, not the surgeon’s knife. This beautiful Boomer is number 82 out of the 100 I intend to draw by the end of the year.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Beautiful Boomer

I’ve been working at the lovely Galerie Simpson on Swansea’s High Street today, drawing more Baby Boomers. I’ve now drawn over 80 and I’m enjoying the sketching and conversations. Now that I’m on the home run, I realise how much I’m going to miss these when I reach number hundred. Here’s another beautiful Boomer.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Creative Learning

I had a great day, working with a group of fellow artists to deliver demonstrations to primary school teachers in a lovely school on the Gower Peninsula. I showed a selection of printmaking techniques suitable for younger children including two kinds of monotype – direct line and reductive, blind embossing and colour printing with collagraph plates, and a quick bit of block printing. It was a whistle stop tour to hopefully whet their appetite for further training. This is part of the Welsh Government’s Creative Learning initiative to expand the creative education received by children in schools in Wales over 5 years.

I did some of the printing in the demonstration with my little pastamaker press – here’s a video (with my cat) showing how to convert a tabletop pasta machine into a serviceable miniature printing press.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Reconnecting

Baby Boomer number 80 from the one hundred I plan to draw by the end of this year! I’m getting excited at the prospect of finishing the sketches and planning what to do with them, how to develop the next stage. It’s been wonderful talking as well as drawing. I’m reconnecting with many people from years ago, as well as meeting new ones and working with friends, colleagues and relatives.

I’m also continuing my “en plein air” journey of discovery with prehistorian Dewi Bowen and filmmaker Melvyn Williams as we travel along the route of the legendary Boar Hunt, Y Twrch Trwyth, from the story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, the book of Welsh mythology, researching, filming and drawing the ancient stone monuments along the way.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Profiled

This is the 79th sitter out of my target of drawing 100 Baby Boomers before the end of the year and only the third to be drawn in profile. I really like doing this because we rarely look closely at people in profile during our everyday contacts.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

On A Roll!!!!

And here’s my 78th Baby Boomer – I’m on a roll now. Only 22 more portrait sketches to go. A while back I set myself the task of drawing 100 people, relatively quick sketches, 30 minutes maximum into my sketchbook. I wasn’t sure at first how I would choose 100 people. Would they have anything in common? Would they be just random? Eventually I decided to draw my generation and I started just over a year ago, building up a portfolio of ‘Baby Boomers’, people born between 1946 and 1964.

An important part of the whole experience for me is the series of conversations I’m having, discussing the landmarks in our lives, the things that are iconic, the experiences we had. It’s odd that the Baby Boomers are now more or less the elder generation, it seems hardly any time ago we were partying in our velvet loons and platform boots back in the 1970s (and 1960s and 1980s).

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Cooler Boomer

I’m continuing my odyssey of Baby Boomer portraits at Galerie Simpson on Swansea’s High Street this month. This sitter is my 77th out of the planned hundred. One thing that strikes me is the Boomer’s large age group, the oldest are 70 this year and the youngest 52, ranging from those who grew up with Rock’n’Roll through the 1950s to the Punk music and culture of the 1970s. Many Boomers challenged society’s expectations and norms when they were young and many still are, refusing to conform to stereotypes of middle aged and elderly people. Which is really cool. I think so anyway.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Ripped Abstraction

Another drawing en plein air from the summit of one of the ruined cairns of Carmel. It was precarious climbing to the top, the stones are uneven, unbalanced and wobbly and I tottered with my drawing materials in a high wind. We start off at the bottom of a hill in fine sunshine but the gusts get stronger as we climb, not easy to negotiate with a large drawing board and portfolio, but I had some help from my collaborators.

I worked onto some prepared paper that I had initially soaked until it almost disintegrated and developed tortured rips in its fabric, then I gessoed it, smeared with yellow ochre acrylic, charcoal and more gesso. I sat on the pile of stones, more uncomfortable than you can imagine even though I’m pretty well-padded, and used Daler Rowney artists’ soft oil pastels to apply thin lines and streaks of the colours I saw around me in the landscape. I became completely dissociated from reality and produced the most abstract piece of art I have ever done.

I’m continuing my journey of discovery with Dewi and Melvyn as we travel along the route of the legendary Boar Hunt, Y Twrch Trwyth, from the story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, the book of Welsh mythology, researching, filming and drawing the ancient stone monuments along the way.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

Stingys!

When I was a kid, we always called Stinging Nettles “Stingys”. I hated them because they always managed to find me and sting me. I also have unhappy memories of my younger years as a biker chick, looking for somewhere to wee in the middle of a field at night at a bike rally and ending up with red and sore nether regions because I couldn’t see Stingys in the dark. In recent years, as an allotmenteer, I began to appreciate them for the nutrient rich liquid manure made by steeping them in a bin of water – one of the foulest smells ever but good for the plants. And this evening I discovered another use for them – hand made paper.

I went to a short evening workshop at Swansea’s Community Farm led by local papermaker Bryan Collis. The workers and children at the Farm harvested sackfuls of nettles for Bryan to turn into pulp and then to paper. Luckily for us, Bryan had removed the ‘stingy’ from the nettles before we got our hands on them. The paper sheets I made will dry for a couple of days between boards before I get to use them.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

The Ripped Land

Walking and working with prehistorian Dewi Bowen and filmmaker Melvyn Williams on a series of drawings of Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments, we fetched up on a hilltop near Llanfihangel Aberbythych, not far from Carmel in Carmarthenshire where there are the remains of three stone cairns, unfortunately badly mutilated by years of quarrying.

Now, cairns are piles of stones and that’s what they are. When they’ve been moved and degraded they’re not particularly imposing or interesting to draw so I sat on top of one of them, incredibly uncomfortable and more than a bit dangerous, and drew what I could see from the rocky summit. In the distance, the land is ripped by the quarry so I chose some paper which had been prepared with charcoal, gesso and walnut ink and went to work with artist-quality Daler Rowney soft pastels. The result is an abstracted and emotive study of the stratified and scarred landscape.

There’s more of my art to be seen in my online Gallery in Artfinder, please click on the image below to take a look. Thank you.

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