Art-In-A-Box

17 box 2

I’ve not blogged for a couple of days. Dad-in-law’s funeral was yesterday and I haven’t really felt like doing anything arty but last week I was working flat out on this piece-in-a-box for Art’s Birthday – which is TODAY. Organised by Locws International, my work has been installed along with 9 other pieces-in-boxes in the Oxfam bookshop in Castle Street in Swansea. It was based on some drawings and digital photographs I took of the Berlin holocaust memorial in deep snow a couple of years ago.

17 box 1

I did a drawing in Faber Castell Pitt pens (various sizes in black) onto Mark Resist (Mylar) film, 20 inches square and mounted it about one-third inside the box. I printed out a lightened version of the first drawing I did of this topic, a couple of years back, and stuck segments of it to the interior walls, leading the eye into the main drawing. Finally I printed out the original digital photograph and stuck it onto the side of the box. Oh and Husb mounted an LCD light inside so it can be seen at night. Very different from my usual work.

Pregnant Nude – parental guidance

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I was lucky enough to be able to draw a pregnant model a few months ago. It’s a rare chance and I’ve only worked with one pregnant model before, some years ago. However, I’ve had huge problems getting these works seen. Nudes are contentious anyway but there seems to be particular discomfort about naked pregnant women. I don’t know why. I think she is beautiful and joyful. I’ll probably use some of these drawings as the basis for full colour monotypes. Here’s a 15 minute sketch in dip pen and ink, brush and wash and conte crayon in white for the highlights onto a tinted sugar paper.

 

Love And The Labyrinth

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It was a bright, sunny, though cold, afternoon and Husb and I strolled up the hill to Rosehill Quarry to walk the labyrinth. It’s based on an ancient Cretan design and is cut into the grass, the incised path filled with crushed cockle shells that are a by-product of the local seafood industry. It’s an important place for Husb and me because this is where we met twenty seven years ago. Back in the 1980’s, Britain was in the middle of a terrible economic recession, there was mass unemployment, especially affecting young people and graduates and there was a Conservative government in power. Sound familiar? Husb and I were both out of work and ended up involved in a job creation programme that paid unemployed people to work part-time on community projects.

Local residents had started a group to reclaim this amazing inner-city wild space and turn it into one of the first urban wildlife refuges in the country. The Cretan labyrinth is a lasting legacy of their vision and foresight. And Husb and I have been together ever since :). This was scribbled quickly – it was so cold – into my small Khadi hand-made paper sketchbook with conte crayon in white, sanguine and black, with highlights and lowlights picked out in oil pastels and compressed charcoal. I had previously prepared the paper with a random wash of dilute Indian ink.

If you’re in the Swansea area, please do visit Rosehill Quarry and walk the labyrinth for yourself. If it isn’t walked regularly, it will simply disappear. Here it is on Google Maps.

 

By the way, this is my 500th post 😀 😀 😀 Thank you for reading x

Aunty Nin’s Antimacassar

antimacassar

My dear Aunty Nin loved to crochet and she made me some antimacassars. I’ve had them for decades and they’re still going strong. I don’t need to use them on the backs of the chairs as men don’t wear macassar any more so I drape them over the chair seats to protect them from a more modern menace, the cats, who think they have a divine right to sleep anywhere they like. There’s Sparta, the psychokitty, sprawled on one, glaring at me balefully as I scribbled.

Making Marks

studio shot

I’ve been asked to provide a piece for an exhibition to celebrate Art’s Birthday, which is next Monday. I’ve been give a 20 inch cardboard cube and I can do what I want in it. I’ve had an idea for quite a while to develop a drawing installation so I thought this would be a good chance to try out some ideas because the cube is just a very small room. I’m basing some drawings on digital images manipulated from original photos taken in Berlin a couple of winters back, when it was knee deep in snow. The temperature was about -20C but Germany didn’t grind to a halt. The trains carried on. The schools stayed open and kindergarten children were out in the grounds making tiny igloos with their little hands. How come a couple of centimetres of snow closes Britain down?

The drawing is on mark resist acetate film (Mylar) in Faber Castell Pitt pens sizes S, F, M and B. I’ve been interested for some time in the notion that drawing and writing are both about making marks that create abstract representations of the world and this is one of the motivations behind this project. There’s so much drawing involved that I get into ‘the zone’ and the marks come naturally, each looks unique, like snowflakes. I’m learning a lot by doing it – one of the things that’s become obvious is that I’m not likely to be able to draw a room-size installation with such small pens – I’ll have to find an alternative.

It’s MYYYY Chair!

09 my chair

So I’ve had a tiring and frustrating day slaving over hot computers to earn a crust to pay for catfood and I finally get some down time and head for the living room and the telly and WHO is sleeping on MYYYY chair? Not Goldilocks! The psychokitteh, Sparta Puss. On my nice fleecy blankie. And if I move her I risk a revenge dead-rat attack. When I least expect it. She’ll get me. Oh the humanity!

The High Road – Oil Painting

This is a very interesting tecchie blog. I’m not a painter so it’s fascinating for me to see the techniques used by an expert painter.

PictureS's avatarPictureS

I’m making a conscious effort to draw with paint but not loose the connection with realism. Its all too easy to get involved with the luscious paint and revel in its interactions. Speaking of which, I did introduce a colour I don’t normally use in landscape, Alizarin Crimson, and had a bit of fun playing with this intense colour. The need for staying in touch with reality prompted me to distribute it in every area of the painting. This gave a ‘pinkish’ look to the painting. But it was uniform and not on its own in an area which would become isolated from the rest of the scene. This harmony of colour is a natural part of landscape.

I’m using Liquin and this makes the drawing with paint a lot easier. Its only introduced in the later stages, when I need lines of paint to sit cleanly on top of…

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I Love My Bed

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Horrible weather this morning, very dark and pouring with rain and I really didn’t want to get up. Husb kept nagging me but I was grasping at any excuse to stay put – soooo cosy. Little Ming jumped onto the bed and padded around to make herself comfy so I grabbed my little watercolour pad and a pencil I keep on the shelf next to the pillow and started scribbling. So everytime Husb shouted up the stairs to get up, I shouted back, “I’m doing my Art!”. Yeah, horizontally, under the duvet, in the warm – what a job, eh? 😀

Had to get up eventually though and spent the day working on a new drawing in a cold, dark, grey studio. Can’t wait to get back to bed.

Art’s Birthday

Holocaust

This is an old drawing I did  couple of years back. It’s very different to my normal style and genre and it’s based on drawings and photos taken during a visit to Eisenman and Happold’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin during heavy snow.  I did the one drawing, size A3 onto mark resist film (Mylar) with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen. At the time, I’d thought about taking it forward by developing a series of drawings but I couldn’t get a handle on it so I put my scribbles and jottings in a draw and got on with other work.

Then last week I was asked to develop a piece for Art’s Birthday, a tradition started by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou on January 17th 1963,who said that Art had been born exactly 1,000,000 years ago when somebody dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. 9 artists have been given a large-ish plain brown cardboard box and asked to create a piece on/within it. It’s not easy as I’m used to working in 2 dimensions, but I had an idea knocking around for a while that I might develop this body of work as an installation, so this is a good way of trying out my ideas in 3D. Watch this space…………

Apes And The Psychokitteh

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Greetings, Monkeys. Sparta Puss here. I have control of the pooter box while the hairless apes are chillaxin’. I’ve been hearing a lot about a dog called Pavlov who trained his fur-less monkeys to give him food whenever he pressed a lever. Not bad going for a dog, but a bit too complicated, I think. I’ve trained the brainless apes just by raising my left paw. The she-monkey is the most affected; she makes strange noises like “squeeeee” and gives me a bowl of milk. Result! The he-monkey is a harder nut to crack, so I have to do the saucer-eyes as well as the paw-in-the-air. Then I get my ears and head scratched. That’ll do nicely.

I’ve been on a roll this week and brought in two quite large rats. I dumped them on the floor in the living room. The he-monkey was out both times and the idiot she-ape ran around the place squealing and waving her arms. Oh, how I laughed. What’s all the fuss about? They were dead! Too big to keep alive for some sport – rats that size can be dangerous so I despatched them quickly and dragged them in through both cat flaps, through the house and gave them to her. hehehehehehe.

So she’s storming around the house accusing me of being a psychopath – whatever that is- and berating herself for not being a proper feminist because she’s waiting for the he-monkey to come home to dispose of the rats! Which he does – in the compost bin. Why don’t they eat them? They taste good, with a spot of that nice custard I steal off the table when the monkeys are not looking. 😀

That’s me above BTW. The she-ape’s been daubing with some dirt-in-a-stick again.