Pavement Scribbles

man with hands

This is another piece currently in an exhibition, one of the drawings I’ve overlaid on top of solvent transfer prints. The image in the background started as a digital photograph of some strange markings on the city’s pavements. Every so often, a machine goes around the city, scrubbling chewing gum off the paving stones. This leaves odd patterns and I was there with my camera to record some of them. Then I zipped them through Adobe Photoshop Elements: Filter: Adjustments: Posterise. Once they’d been transferred using acetone and an etching press, they give an ethereal look. It’s odd sometimes where artists get imagery from.

 

The Dancer In The Hairy Slippers

The dancer

Here’s a piece I finished earlier this month for the exhibition I’m currently in at The Brunswick in Swansea. It’s a combination of a solvent transfer print overlaid with a drawing that started life in one of my sketchbooks. I went to an avant garde theatrical piece by Marega Palser, who also does performance drawing, and sketched this when she sat out for a while as other dancers performed. She wore strange, oversized hairy slippers. The image in the background is a piece of graffiti on a very old factory building, part of Swansea’s Industrial Revolution past. The exhibition runs until next March.

The Artist’s Feet

14 feet

Not mine this time. I often scribble my feet when I’ve reached the end of the day and I haven’t done a daily drawing, but today I drew the feet of my chum and fellow artist, Melanie Ezra. Poor Mel tripped earlier in the week and fractured her foot. Today, she kindly offered me her feet to draw. The unfractured one is very slim and pale pinky-white but the broken one is swollen, misshapen and livid colours. It’s far more interesting to draw someone else’s feet.

I used a piece of Bockinford 250gsm paper, pre-coloured with yellow System 3 acrylic paint mixed with a little acrylic medium. I drew with black conte crayon and Winsor & Newton oilbars in white, cobalt blue, crimson and hookers green rubbed with a rag dipped in linseed oil.

The Grand Dude Rocks

The Grand Dude

It’s been a tiring week but after tomorrow I’ll be able to have a bit of a break from arty stuff and enjoy some time off. On Wednesday evening I was at the opening of a group show I’m in at The Brunswick. It’s been a long haul as I have work in 2 other exhibitions at the moment and it’s been a lot of effort to get all the pieces finished and framed. But it’s all done now.

This is one of the pieces in the show, ‘The Grand Dude Rocks’, a transfer print overlaid with an original drawing based on a sketchbook scribble. I saw this chap when I was visiting at the hospital last year. He was rocking on his headphones. Brilliant. 😀

 

 

Some Days You Got It…..

…..and some days you don’t. And I just couldn’t get a handle on life drawing tonight at Swansea Print Workshop, so I switched from the full figure to a portrait, which worked better.

12 ben 1

This first figure was a fairly quick pose, about 10 minutes. There was a high spotlight on the model, throwing strong shadows, so I tried to focus on the chiaroscuro in the figure rather than linear detail.I’ve used a heavily textured hand-made paper that’s given a very fuzzy surface. I pre-coloured it with blue-black drawing ink and drew with black and white conte crayons.

12 ben 2

My next drawing failed completely and I’m not even going to show you! I switched to this portrait that took about 35 minutes, again focussing on light and shade. It’s a lighter, smoother paper, pre-coloured with pink and blue-black acrylic paint. Again, I used black and white conte crayon but added some extra strong lowlights with carbon.

Cardboard City art trail – it’s my turn!

I’m reblogging this from Collect Connect’s blog because it shows my piece for the Cardboard City art-trail along London’s Southbank. Hope you like it 🙂

 

http://collectconnect.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/rose-davies-palace-corner-advent.html

 

Street Sleep

10 street sleep

I had an early start today and walked across the city to do some shopping to make cakes for the exhibition opening tomorrow and on my way back I spotted these two men asleep on the pavement down a side street. It was about 9.15 am and I was quite shocked. There’s one regular street person who tucks himself down every evening; he’s been doing it for decades and refuses offers of housing, preferring to live on the streets. But I’ve never seen anyone else out in the open like this. There are all sorts of reasons why people might be in this situation, but really, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it isn’t right. Why haven’t we cracked this problem yet?

On a lighter note, I’ve just finished the lemon butterream cake for tomorrow’s opening party for the group exhibition I’m in – the chocolate brownies can wait until tomorrow. I’ll post photos in tomorrow’s blog 🙂

 

Shades Indoors

09 shades

Why? What’s the point? Maybe some people have medical reasons to wear sunglasses indoors, but surely not as many as I see out and about. This middle-aged dude was in Waterstone’s cafe where I stopped for a pot of tea and a scribble. He had fancy wrap-around style shades and a smart leather blouson jacket.

Drawn in my clothbound A5 sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F.

New Direction

crib sheet image

This morning I was helping to set up my new exhibition at The Brunswick in Swansea. I’m showing with members of an arts collective I’m in, 15 Hundred Lives, and we’ve put together a show of painting, photomontage and drawing / printmaking. I’ve done something new for this exhibition.  For years, I’ve been wandering the streets with my sketchbooks, a set of drawing pens and a digital camera, recording what I see in front of me. This combines my digital images with my sketchbook drawings. I made solvent transfer prints of the digital work onto top quality art paper and then, using my sketchbook drawings as my source, I drew on top of the transmuted imagery, either with traditional dip pens or Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens.

The original drawing here was done while I was queuing at the Civic Centre. These two women sat opposite; I think they were related. The transfer print in the background was taken locally in Wind Street and then digitally manipulated before being used in the solvent transfer process. It’s a big change from the nudes that are normally my subject matter and the monotype and blockprinting processes I usually use in my work. It’s an interesting new direction for me.

In Dylan’s Park

07 cwmdonkin

Had a lovely day, first at Uplands Outdoor Market, bought loads of wonderful local produce and some hand-made Xmas presents – result! Then picked up the little nephew and went to ‘A Child’s Mystical Xmas’ in Cwmdonkin Park.  It’s just around the corner from where Dylan Thomas grew up and he played in it throughout his childhood; it features in some of his work. The old bandstand has been turned into a very nice little cafe where we sat outside, it’s surprisingly warm, and had tea and Welsh cakes; I resisted the Christmas Pudding with Joe’s Icecream advertised on the chalkboard. I sketched the boy with his hot chocolate. He’s 9 now and his features are changing quickly, he doesn’t look so much like an alien and his nose is almost an adult shape.

Later on, we made lemon curd for more Xmas presents and Husb and the boy decorated the Xmas tree. Sparta the cat subverted them every step of the way. She’s delighted to have a tree to climb indoors 😦