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One From The Archives 10: Fan Girl

Here you can see the original (below) and the finished painting (above). I usually have no idea how I will be using the original life drawing when I first get it down on paper. At that point it is often just a case of describing what I see in front of me using line and shade.

Often I will combine the figure drawing with other sketches from incredibly diverse sources. In this case a poster for a rock band and remembering those teenage crushes on pop stars – I LOVED The Monkees – and how so much of my time was spent day dreaming about them. Where did the time come from? Not enough hours in the day now!

As part of my artistic practice, I like to study and build upon my theoretical base. This is one of a series of small oil paintings inspired by re-acquainting myself with Johannes Itten’s colour theories.

Using the theories enables me to work up a full colour painting from monochrome sketches. Not having the distraction of the real colours of the scene allows me to develop paintings so the colours are more harmonious and satisfying to the eye.

If you want to find out more technical details about techniques I use please click here to go through to the technical section on my website. The painting Fan Girl is available for sale on Artfinder here and if you’d like to find out more, please click on the link here to go directly to it or click on the link on the right hand side of this blog to see other works for sale.

Blue Sunday

A while back I began a new piece of artwork, quite an ambitious one using some of my sketchbook drawings of older women and a Victorian corset pattern to create a 3D piece in cyanotype, an archaic photographic technique. I cut the pieces from some lovely Somerset Velvet paper, 12 in all, and scanned and printed some of my drawings onto sheets of acetate (after reversing them in Photoshop so they are negatives). Yesterday, I coated the pieces of Somerset with the cyanotype chemicals and put them to dry overnight in a lightproof cupboard. And today I took them to Swansea Print Workshop to develop them in the UV Unit.

After exposing them for 6 minutes, I washed them face down to start the developing process then turned them over – you never know if it’s worked until this point. I’m delighted with them. They were drained for 10 minutes then I put them between sheets of tissue paper between low-density fibre drying boards.

Next step is to assemble them and get them ready for the exhibition. More about that tomorrow……..

Listen And Look

Here I am drawing while David Pitt plays gong at The Bagpuss Window on Swansea’s High Street. Just a very short video showing the manky old shop when we got it and the still quite manky artspace it is now. It’s being knocked down in a few weeks so everything we do in there is ephemeral, it will eventually only exist in our photos and videos.

As well as the huge drawing on the wall, I’ve been getting into making little tableaux in the window. This one features tiny handmade books by Bud Francis and drawings by me.

And in this one, Robodog Ralph shows Bagpuss how to paint (it’s actually by Tim Swain. AI isn’t that good yet. Not round here anyway).

Having A Play

I started this piece a few weeks ago. It’s for an exhibition, “A Victorian Tapestri” which starts on September the 25th. I cut the 12 pieces of lovely Somerset Velvet paper from a vintage pattern for a Victorian corset. I will be coating each piece with an image in cyanotype, an archaic Victorian form of photography invented by John Hershel. The paper cannot be sewn to make up a corset so I intend to attach the pieces to each other with eyelets and ribbon.

I laid the pieces out on the floor in sequence to take a photo and I quite liked the pattern they made, so I had a bit of a play on Adobe Photoshop. Nothing serious, but sometimes it’s good to relax and play around, it helps the creative process.

One From The Archives 9: The Cushion

Surrounded by symbolism, the interplay of shadows describes the form of the nude. This is an etching of one of the female models I work with and is developed from a nude study drawn with Renaissance materials, inspired by artwork I did for a television series about da Vinci.

This type of etching allows me to translate my line drawings into a more permanent medium. It gives me the freedom to be as expressive as I like and to draw using a fast, energetic style. The fact that I am taking a drawing onto another stage of development means I can introduce additional elements of design. The objects on the wallpaper behind the figure look like a a simple decorative pattern at first.

Look closer and you can see that they are skulls and petroglyphic animals, without being too arty you could see these as symbolising the brief life of the individual versus human culture; which can last for tens of thousands of years.

One of the main reasons we create art is to attempt to live beyond our allotted life span in some way. This coupled with the enormous emotional impact death has on the lives of each and every one of us makes it a massive subject.

In this piece I am also recalling the Memento Mori, a tradition in European [and latterly American] art, dating back to Roman times, where the viewer is reminded that death is the inevitable consequence of life, typically by including a skull. You can see a previous blog featuring one of my other ‘Memento Mori’ here.

If you want to find out more technical details about the printmaking techniques I use please click here to go through to the technical section on my website. The etching “The Cushion” is available for sale on Artfinder and if you’d like to find out more, please click on the link here to go directly to it or click on the link on the right hand side of this blog to see other works for sale.

Drawing And Gonging

Coming up to the end of the second week at The Bagpuss Window and I’m getting on with the gigantic wall drawing, worked mostly intuitively. I’ve been pushing out of my comfort zone. I normally work directly from life, small, with fine pens and my drawing can be very tight and controlled. I want to use these few weeks in the old shop to experiment and loosen up my drawing as much as possible.

The past few days, we’ve been joined by David Pitt who, amongst other creative activities, plays gongs. Wonderful instruments, such incredible music. He was playing today as I was drawing and I got right into ‘the zone’, carried away by the incredible sounds and drawing automatically. When I looked at what I’d done, it was markedly different to the drawings I’d done earlier in the week, much freer. I used my fingers more, smudging the sparse features rather than fretting over details and doing loads of cross-hatching.

It’s been a really good experience so far and there’s so much arty stuff happening locally that Swansea’s being called the new Montmartre.

Popping Up

This evening I did my third stint in a little pop-up studio at the Taliesin Arts Centre. I’m a member of an artist collective, 15 Hundred Lives, and we have an exhibition at Oriel Ceri Richards Gallery until the 26th of September. We’ve been given some space in the Taliesin foyer/bar to do live art, so I’m there on Wednesday evenings throughout the exhibition’s run and collagist Sylvie Evans is also doing some sessions. You can see her collaged sail installation hanging in the stairwell.

I started when the bar was fairly quiet which gave me a chance to draw something other than people. I don’t like drawing architecture and interiors, really hard, much prefer to draw people and animals. So this evening was good practice for me. I used a double page from my A4 hardbound sketchbook that I’d prepared with brown wrapping paper glued in with Pritt stick. I drew with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and F.

Eventually the bar filled up with people come to see this evening’s film and I had some great conversations with those interested in what I was doing. I took along some completed sketchbooks for browsing. It’s a good opportunity to publicise my work, hand out business cards and direct people downstairs to the gallery to see the exhibition. Only one more pop-up studio session to go, but I’m going to be doing an artist walk-and-talk around the exhibition on Saturday the 26th. More about this soon.

Here’s a short video about our exhibition showing the three of us doing our art and you get to hear me speak.

One From The Archives 8: The Mirrors

I like this style because it allows me to pick out the most essential aspects of a scene. The drawing style I use most is the ‘continuous line’ method, where I keep the pen on the paper without taking a break and restarting in another part of the drawing. I also hardly look at the paper at all.

That method of drawing lends itself particularly well to direct line monotypes. A detailed description of which can be found here. In this monotype I have taken a very busy and colourful life drawing and focussed in on the emotional centre of the piece; a woman lost in her thoughts, seemingly alone.

By outlining the woman and her reflection boldly, I hope to draw the gaze to the hard exterior we all sometimes show to the world. Individual limbs and even her face are softer; more delicate and almost blend in with the background. The image shouts “leave me alone” in a way that the more colourful original never could.

If you want to find out more technical details about the printmaking techniques I use please click here to go through to the technical section on my website. The drawing “The Mirrors” is available for sale on Artfinder and if you’d like to find out more, please click on the link here to go directly to it or click on the link on the right hand side of this blog to see other works for sale.

Heston And Husb

I’m carrying on with the ephemeral wall drawing I’m doing down at The Bagpuss Window, the pop-up artspace in a shop about to be demolished in Swansea’s High Street. The drawing will be demolished at the same time. I wrote some text, “The older you get, the more dead people you know” and this is inspiring the whole piece. I’m using charcoal, chalk and conte crayon.

The door has been open and people pop in for a look. One chap came in and asked why I was drawing “….that telly chef, Heston Blumenthal“. It’s Husb! Same hairstyle though 🙂

One From The Archives 7: Rinascere #7

The pose a model strikes can lend a lot to a piece of work. It is one of the reasons I work from life as much as I do. When I look at this, I see a person who is relaxed and confident as she sits in contemplation of her future. I might be reading that into the pose but our body language says a lot about us and when making decisions about how to represent someone artistically, it can often be the dominant feature.

The difficult part is creating an atmosphere in the rest of the drawing which enhances it. Here I have given the fabric she is sitting on a bright, chequered pattern. This allows me to use the full range of tones to lift the mood of the piece. Browns and blacks are not naturally uplifting shades but using the checks gives me the ability to introduce a bit of lightness into the work without the seat dominating the composition at the expense of the figure.

To the same end, the wash fades to white towards the top of the frame to reveal her head and shoulders as if they were in a pool of light.

If you want to find out more technical details about the drawing materials and papers I use please click here to go through to the technical section on my website. The drawing “Rinascere #7” is available for sale on Artfinder and if you’d like to find out more, please click on the link here to go directly to it or click on the link on the right hand side of this blog to see other works for sale.

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