Greetings bald apes. Sparta the psycho-kitteh here. I’ve been helping the furless she-monkey tonight. She likes to make marks on paper with coloured dirt. I don’t know why. She could be doing something more useful, like licking me clean or hunting rats. I’d do much more interesting things if I had opposable thumbs. I’ll never understand the workings of the monkey mind.
Here she is playing with woody sticks and water. And here I am directing the whole thing. She wasn’t very grateful. Idiot.
Yesterday evening was the launch of the 15 Hundred Lives group show which features 14 of my monotypes and some of my sketchbooks. I was lucky enough to sell one. WOOHOO!!!! It’s called AlCefn and it’s a large monotype, about 50 x 80 cms which started out as a life drawing in chalk and charcoal onto brown wrapping paper. I made a tracing and reversed it onto a light box and, using a perspex sheet inked up in yellow oil pigment, I drew into it with cotton buds (Q Tips), rags, coctail sticks and hoghair brushes, put a sheet of BFK Rives 250 gsm paper on top and put it through the Radcliffe Press at Swansea Print Workshop, giving me a yellow print. Then I cleaned the persepx, coated it thinly in red pigment and repeated the drawing stage, overprinting the red plate onto the yellow print on paper. Finally I did the same with blue.
The overlay of the three colours gives a huge range of hues from a rich, velvety, warm black through all the primary, secondary and tertiaries to white. Magic!
I’ll be running a one-day course in the technique later this month at Swansea Print Workshop, if anyone fancies learning how to do it. Either contact the print workshop by phone or email or get in touch with me. It’s a great technique for artists who draw. 🙂
Feeling better day by day and went out for lunch with Husb to a local cafe, which does really nice home made food. I looked around for someone to scribble and saw this very elderly man, in his eighties, dining with some friends. His hair, although thin, was down almost to his shoulders and over his dapper striped shirt and tie was a rockin’ leather waistcoat. Cool.
Sparta the psycho-kitteh has been chewing the bead on the end of the ribbon page marker on my little sketchbook. As if catching rats wasn’t enough……….. 😡
Another dead rat in the hallway this evening and one very proud psycho-kitteh strutting around, well pleased with herself. We’ve had a spate of dead rats in recent weeks, some of them quite large and we found out last week where they’re coming from – our compost bin. Husb noticed that our kitchen waste was breaking down very quickly – too quickly! He poked around and found a network of tunnels through the compost. Rats have been burrowing in and scoffing our kitchen scraps…..and Sparta has been lying in wait and killing the rats. Well, that’s what our species domesticated the little furry ones for; protecting our homes and food from rodents.
Although I sometimes think that WE’RE the ones who’ve been domesticated! Husb has secured the bottom of the bin and there doesn’t seem to be any more rat action inside the compost, but this evening’s corpse shows that they’re still coming round to take a look. I’m amazed that she can drag a rat through two cat flaps, across a large kitchen and down a long corridor in her tiny little jaws. She’s a very small cat. The top image is a photopolymer plate etching of Sparta and the lower one, a drawing from one of my sketchbooks.
It’s cold and sunny and I’m feeling well enough to go out for an hour or so as long as I don’t overdo it so today I popped down to County Hall to renew our parking permit. I spotted these ladies opposite while I was waiting. They had very similar distinctive noses and chins and I think they might be sisters or even mother and daughter. Drawn with my Pentel V5 pen into my little A6 blue silk covered sketchbook, used across both pages. Came home absolutely corpsed but after a snooze wrapped up in a blanket and then a cup of tea, I got up and made a tray of peanut butter chocolate brownies for The Husb 🙂
These will give landscape artists a heart attack! I don’t often go out into the ‘wilderness’ and I don’t often use watercolour. Here’s what happened when I did.
I think maybe I went to too many wild parties back in the 1980’s 😀
The place is Mewslade Bay on the Gower Peninsular. Absolutely gorgeous valley and beach.
Still got the lurgi but managed a couple of hours out of the house this afternoon with my fellow artists to set up our group show in Swansea Grand’s Artswing, which opens this coming Friday from 7pm. I’ll be making some lush cakes for the event.
Sylvie Evans, Graham Parker and yours truly form a small artist collective, 15 Hundred Lives, and we’re exhibiting with guest ceramicist, Heather Lithgow.
I’m exhibiting a substantial amount of my large monotype nudes that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. About half of them are in the show and it’s great to see them hanging in one place. Here’s some geeky stuff about how they’re made…..
If you’re in the Swansea area on Friday evening, please come and join us for a drink and some cake and art. The show runs for the following week as well.
Have a cake 😀
Still wrapped up in a blankie indoors getting more and more fed up, which probably means I’m on the mend. I’m fed up drawing the cats and fed up with my drawing pens so I had a scribble with Ming The Merciless into a larger A3 sketchbook and used some Derwent Academy watercolour pencils for the scribbling action. Now I’m not a big fan of pencils, or watercolours, but it’s a good exercise to break out of your comfort zone occasionally.
Derwent makes its pencils in the lovely Lake District town of Keswick and it is the home of the national pencil museum. Seriously, it’s a great place with the country’s longest pencil, some World War II RAF covert pencils and a factory shop. It’s brilliant. And so’s the Lake District.
The dreaded lurgi is getting a little bit better each day but I’m still finding it hard to do much and that includes drawing. My brain’s like mush and doesn’t want to tell my hands what to do, so I’ve been searching through my old sketchbooks to blog some blasts from the past. About 5 years ago I went through a Marvel / DC phase of life drawing, putting my models into a comic book format. I liked the effect but it was a hack of a challenge to draw because if I made a mistake, the whole thing was ruined. Good discipline! Here’s our tattooed model who is a retired science teacher, drawn into an A3 sketchbook, using the double pages.
This horrible lurgi has lasted so long that I’ve missed three weekly life drawing sessions at Swansea Print Workshop. I’ve been cataloguing old work and coming across stuff I’d forgotten about. I went through a phase of drawing with oil pastels into A3 canvas pads, mainly because I’d been given canvas pads for a present. Here’s one from about 5 years ago. I was surprised that I was using such decorative backgrounds. I still have quite a few canvas sheets left – I think I’ll dig them out and use them – when this darned lurgi lets me get back to work!
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