Another vista from the old church, a spooky corridor beyond a heavy door. It was a dark and rainy day when I took the photos, no artificial light and precious little natural light which added to the atmospherics of the place. I decided not to use a flash because I wanted the deep shadows and high contrast, the effect of chiaroscuro. I used the simplest materials – a small white conte crayon into a Daler Rowney spiral bound A4 Ebony sketchbook. Nothing fancy.
Yesterday I drew a nook in the old church and today I drew a cranny. I was lucky enough to be able to take some photographs in an early 20th century church a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been drawing from them using white conte crayon into my Daler Rowney Ebony sketchbook. It’s pulling me away from my usual reliance on fine, detailed line and into intangibles, atmospheres and emotions. I’m so enjoying it and getting ideas for manier noir drawings and mezzotint etchings. I’ll be doing a lot more of these sketches I think, I’m finding it very stimulating.
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.
http://womenintheactofpainting.blogspot.co.uk/
Excellent artblog, lots of visuals
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.
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.
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.
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.
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