Is it a nook or a cranny? Here’s another very quick sketch based on some digital photos I took last week in an old church that is up for sale. It’s surprising how many nooks and crannies there are in old buildings. From the outside, it doesn’t look like it’s been extended but inside, this strange little corridor was tucked away at the back of the building and doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose. It’s only about a hundred years old so I’m guessing that an architect was involved, so I find it a bit odd that the weird little places dotted around the church were designed in the first place.
I sketched into my A4 Daler Rowney Ebony sketchbook with a piece of white conte crayon.
A little while ago I made a group of cyanotype prints from some original sketchbook portraits of older women. Each was printed onto a piece of heavyweight Bockingford paper cut from a pattern for a Victorian corset. I assembled them originally in the sequence that would assemble the corset, tying each together with purple ribbon and hanging the sequence from the wall. I am submitting these for an exhibition in the New Year and the gallery wants to exhibit prints ‘off the wall’ so I have had to rethink how I put this together. I took it all apart and tied it to a clothes horse. The clothes dryer represents a traditional female role, the corset would have been dried or aired on something similar. The way I tied the pieces was significant. I tried tying the ribbon with bows but it seemed too soft so I tied it with tight knots which seemed more in keeping with my title of the piece, ‘Constrained’.
I’m continuing to develop this piece at The SPace, at 217, High Street, Swansea. It’s open next week, Monday to Wednesday 11.30 – 5.00 and Thursday, 11.30 – 4pm if you want to pop in and see it.
It was the life drawing group’s annual Xmas curry last night at the excellent Vojon curry house. I had a Handi Lamb Polongwala with a Gobi Aloo – no rice or naan as I’m cutting back on refined carbs for a little while. I was still stuffed until lunchtime, a very late lunch too. Because there was a large group of us, we had to wait a while for our food, they cook everything fresh, so I did some quick scribbles to take my mind off the hunger pangs. The food was well worth waiting for though.
I used a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen into my little Peter Pauper Press ‘Cat’s Meow Journal’. It’s a very sweet sketchbook, i really like it. Sparta Puss doesn’t seem too impressed though. She’s studiously ignoring it.
Here’s another drawing from my visit to the old church yesterday. It’s one of those rambling churches in the Victorian tradition, although it was actually built around World War 1. The fabric of the building is pretty sound, but there is a some deterioration to parts of the interior. There is a consortium of different community and cultural groups pulling together to buy and adapt the old building and give it a new lease of life.
The church is full of nooks and crannies and this little bit of a spiral stone staircase is behind a heavy wooden door at the back of the building, leading up to the top of the bell tower. I took a load of digital photos without a flash; the inside was dark and gloomy with little natural daylight coming in from the rain-soaked December afternoon outside.
I used white conte crayon, chalk and compressed charcoal into a Daler Rowney Ebony A4 spiral bound sketchbook. I like drawing onto black paper and I especially like the difference in the blackness of the paper and even more darkness of the compressed charcoal.
I went rummaging around in an old church earlier today. There were no working lights and the natural daylight was very dim because of the torrential rain outside, so it was dark and spooky. I did some sketching into my Daler Rowney Ebony sketchbook with white conte crayon and chalk. The church is no longer used and it’s up for sale for around £50,000 but it needs about another half a million spent on it. A consortium of groups – artists, musicians, community organisations, performers, is trying to raise the funds to buy and develop it.
I loved being in there in the dark, absorbing the spooky atmosphere. I took a lot of photos as well so I’ll probably do a few more sketches from them and I might develop them into manier noir drawings over the coming weeks.
The opening crowd at The SPace spied through my developing installation using my new rubber stamp and some Shiohara paper.
After three weeks of painting, cleaning, drilling, humping furniture, doing risk assessments, form filling, dealing with bureaucracy, getting rained on, labelling and putting artwork onto walls and into browsers, Swansea’s newest artspace, The SPace, formally opened with a Welsh tea on Friday evening.
Some of my artwork, silkscreen prints and drawings, on the left. My work is available for sale through Artfinder, please click the link on my blog or search for Rosie Scribblah on Artfinder
It was great! Such a lovely atmosphere, lots of really lovely people, gorgeous art, Swansea Print Workshop’s new book (fully illustrated and a snip at £9.95), Welsh teatime delicacies bara brith and Welsh cakes, along with jammy tarts, chocolate brownies (gluten-free), mince pies, vol-au-vents (retro!), cheesy biscuits and lashings of tea and a spot of mulled wine as well. Lovely.
Home-made Welsh teatime treats
It’s an offshoot of Swansea Print Workshop; a temporary collective of 14 of our members getting The SPace together for 12 weeks in a property owned by Coastal Housing Group at 217 High Street. The SPace is open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 11.30 – 5.00 between now and mid-February. Please pop in and see us if you’re in the city, or visit us at Swansea Print Workshop’s Facebook group here.
I spent a second day at the Creative Bubble artspace with fellow artist Sylvie Evans. We started with no plans except to collage on top of recycled paper. I’ve very little experience of making collages and I’ve discovered that it’s far more complex than I ever thought. It’s been an interesting experience, working intuitively with someone else in an unfamiliar medium. I like the imagery we’ve come up with, I’m getting ideas for doing drawings from these and maybe develop some prints – possibly woodcuts. It’s a new way of working for me, a new way of developing ideas.
Time to play is important. I can’t constantly be trying to produce a fully worked up piece of art, or focussing on technical practice. It’s exhausting and inhibiting. Inspiration and ideas must come from somewhere. And they often come when I relax and spend some time playing around or doodling. Today I joined fellow artist Sylvie Evans from the 15 Hundred Lives collective for our regular monthly 2-day session at the Creative Bubble artspace.
Last month we did a Big Draw and had a few rolls of paper that had been drawn over. We decided to recycle them by using them as the basis for collages. Sylvie called into the local free bookshop and picked up some colour magazines and we did a load of ripping and sticking. I hardly ever collage so it was fun and interesting to do some. I played. It’s not great art but some of the images have started to generate ideas which will probably eventually end up in my sketchbook.
The Bagpuss Window, a semi-derelict anarchic artspace, flashed into existence for three short weeks in September (2015) and then ended as abruptly as it started as the wrecking crew moved in to demolish the building. Fellow artist Melanie Ezra and I took it on at very short notice from developers Coastal Group and opened it up for artists, musicians and poets to see what happened. It was fabulous. Creative people from across Swansea and beyond wandered in and used the space to develop new work, ideas and collaborations. Film maker Melvyn Williams and I recorded what was going on and Melvyn has been editing the footage into short videos to show what happened.
Here’s the first, featuring Sharon Edlington-Douglas and David Pitt who bumped into each other one day and started playing their instruments, Sharon with a Sunpan and David with gongs. The door was open into the High Street, we were having a glorious Indian Summer, and the extraordinary sound reverberated along the road. I became absorbed in the music as I drew on the wall of the decrepit old shop and people wandered in to walk a labyrinth made from bark chippings by David and local archaeologist Dewi Bowen.
Dewi has written a book about ancient stone monuments in Siluria, South Wales, you can find out about it here. David is involved in keeping alive the Mari Lwyd in the Swansea and Gower area – you can read more about this fascinating tradition here.
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