The Spiral Stair

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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.

The Dark Old Church

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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.

Cake, Tea, Art

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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.

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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.

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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.

Working Together

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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.

Ripping And Sticking

 

 

monster birth

 

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.

 

 

 

Sunpan And Gong

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.

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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.

I Ate A Snail

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Today I ate a snail for the first time. I won’t bother again. It tasted like earth in garlic butter with the texture of one of those rubbery sponges you put make-up on, if you wear make-up. Husb and I went to a posh French restaurant for his birthday meal. His birthday was in August but it took a long time to get a reservation. Apart from the snail, it was lovely but now I’m stuffed and I don’t want to do any drawing. What a lazy mare. Here’s one I did earlier this year, in the rain on Swansea Beach. Now off to bed, like a beached whale in a duvet.

we wish you a merry creative sketching workshop

Ooohhh! Something for the artist in your life

pete scully's avatarpetescully

Creative Sketching Workshop US cover 1Christmas is coming boys and girls. Hey you know what would be good for those of you who like to sketch (or know those who might), a great book featuring twelve urban sketchers from around the world demonstrating a variety of different approaches to various urban sketching subjects. INCLUDING FIRE HYDRANTS. My book “Creative Sketching Workshop” was published recently and is a whopping good read. You can get it in the UK at bookshops and from the amazon, (currently ranked 153 out of all books on Art Issues, down from the previous high-mark of 22) and in the US you can also get it from north light publishing (they have lots of great art books, several by fellow sketchers), also bookshops and also amazon.com, where it is currently ranked as the 90,075th book out of all the books (let’s break that 90,000 mark dudes!). Learn a…

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Random Folk

st judes

Husb and I went to a meeting in our area this evening, a group of like-minded people looking at the feasibility of raising money to convert an empty church into a community arts / cultural facility. It’s an historic Victorian building, Grade II listed by Cadw and it would be a shame to see it remain empty or to be used for something that would take it out of community use. Of course I had a quick scribble, very quick, just a couple of minutes as I had to concentrate on what was going on. I sketched into my Peter Pauper Press A5 sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen.

 

Here’s the old church, St. Jude’s on Terrace Road in Swansea.

St. Jude's church
St. Jude’s church

Wish us luck 🙂

 

Three x Two

three Melvyns

Getting back to basics with some quick scribbles in my sketchbook. I nobbled Husb as he was watching TV this evening and did three sketches, each about 2 minutes, with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size S, into my little Peter Pauper Press notebook.