I has a few minutes left at the end of life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop last week so I scribbled the model’s head very quickly on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with the free Markers app.
Working Flat Out
I’m working flat out for the group exhibition I’m in next month at Oriel Ceri Richards, with Sylvie Evans, collagist and Graham Parker, painter. We’re part of a collective called 15 Hundred Lives and as well as exhibiting together, we do a monthly public access event at the Creative Bubble artspace where we open the doors to anyone who wants to come in and see what it is that artists do all day. It’s our second anniversary at Creative Bubble in August so as well as the exhibition, we’re also putting on a big arty birthday bash. That’s why I’m working flat out!
I’m doing a drawing using the manier noir technique. It’s French for ‘in the dark manner’ but I like to call it Drawing Darkly. Here’s some information about it 🙂
Faces From The Dark
I have some lovely vintage papers and I’m trying out different ways of using them. I used a silkscreen squeegee to randomly coat a few sheets with acrylic paint, firstly in black and when that was dry, overlaid with a translucent bronze. Then I sat and looked at a sheet with a piece of willow charcoal in my hand. I had no idea what to do, I sketched a few lines, rubbed them out with a wetwipe (the acrylic surface wipes clean) and then lightly sketched some ellipses. I picked up a piece of chalk and then the faces began to emerge out of the dark without my bidding.
I don’t normally work from my imagination, usually directly from life, from my sketchbooks and occasionally from photographs, so it’s interesting what emerges without any references. The preparation of the paper and the method of random drawing without a stimulus is a bit like some of the techniques of automatic drawing used by Surrealists to develop their creativity. The painter, Gerhard Richter, also used a squeegee extensively in his work, to apply paint. I like using the squeegee, it’s so random.
Ecstasy And Male Pattern Baldness
Husb and I went off to Cardiff last night to the cinema to see Julien Temple‘s new film, The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, a truly amazing film about the legendary Doctor Feelgood guitarist. Extraordinary. We arrived a bit early so I did some scribbling in the auditorium. There were a lot of men with not much hair so I decided to concentrate on drawing male pattern baldness. Why not, eh? I drew into my leather steampunk sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F.
A Night At Life Drawing
Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop, the regular Thursday night group and I am shattered, so just a quick blog from me. I focussed on the model’s face, drawing with my Samsung Galaxy Note 8, using a free Markers app. I saved the drawing regularly and put it into the slideshow below to demonstrate the different stages of the drawing.
And now, goodnight zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Why Life Drawing?
I’m often asked why I do life drawing. Partly it’s because the portrayal of the human form in European art dates back around 40,000 years to cave paintings; partly because I love to study anatomy, it’s complex and I love it; and partly because I was trained in the discipline of regular drawing exercise, which underpins all my art. Even when I veer off into abstract mark making, the practice of many years of life drawing feeds in to what I do.
I drew this with a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 using a free Markers app, saving regularly to show the different stages of the drawing.
Grow Up, Step Up
I’ve been working on a series of tiny reduction relief prints and last week I printed the first colour. Today I began cutting the second colour from the blocks. This is called the reduction or ‘suicide’ method as you systematically destroy the block leaving no room for error. I was chatting to an experienced etcher today who said he found the reduction method too terrifying. I guess I may be a masochist! It’s a risky business as I don’t work from detailed designs, I do a rough initial drawing straight onto the block and then cut instinctively so I won’t know if it works out until I print the next colour. The temptation is to cut away too much; you can always cut away a bit more once you’ve done a proof print, but you can’t add anything back.
The imagery has been inspired by a visit I made to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a couple of winters ago. It’s not a slavish copy but an interpretation of what I saw and how I felt about it. My inspiration was strengthened this evening when Husb and I went to the cinema to see ‘Woman In Gold‘, an extraordinary and moving film. My generation grew up with parents and grandparents who had been involved in massive world wars and the aftermath hung over our childhoods. As that generation of elders that fought World War 2 is dying out, there is a terrifying rise of xenophobia across Europe and the responsibility of remembering the horrors of industrial scale murder falls onto the shoulders of we Baby Boomers. We’ve had a privileged existence and now it’s time to grow up, step up and do the right thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants, we mustn’t forget what they fought and suffered for.
So Many Stories…….
A new head of an elder woman for my blog this evening. I’ve been stuck doing work on the computer all day so it’s nice to do some drawing. I’m enjoying looking through images of older women for this series of drawings in my A4 sketch book. So many fascinating faces; so many stories playing across the contours of the skin. I’ve been sticking ripped pieces of brown paper onto the pages to break up the tyrrany of the white and give me a toned background to build my sketch in black and white conte crayon with touches of carbon.
My Journey with Bobbit
It’s been 4 years since I started blogging and I’ve done just over 1400 posts. My aim was to blog a drawing a day and I’ve more or less done it, so that’s around 1400 drawings. A fair amount of art. My very first blog was about my cat, Bobbit and one of my drawings of her. I’ve reblogged it here on my anniversary. I hope you like it.
Lots Of Linos
I’ve been working at Swansea Print Workshop for most of the week, printing the first colour in a series of reduction lino prints. We printmakers often call this the ‘suicide’ method because you don’t use separate blocks for each colour, instead you cut away the first colour, print it, then cut away the second colour, print that and so on until the block is more or less destroyed. This means there’s no room for error. So I’ve printed a mid grey onto a white Shoji Japanese tissue. Over the next few days I’ll be cutting the blocks and then printing the next colour, a dark grey. The images are based on drawings I have done of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial in the snow; I visited Berlin a couple of winters ago in severe weather, it was fantastic. People skied and skated on the frozen river.
The linocuts are part of a new body of work I’m doing for a new exhibition coming up in August at Oriel Ceri Richards with the 15 Hundred Lives art collective: collagist Sylvie Evans, painter Graham Parker and me. We’ll be doing a lot more beside the exhibition. More of that later 🙂
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