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.
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.
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!
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.
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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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.
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…………
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.
Carrying on with my mini-theme of drawing everyday things from a different angle, I curled up on my chair this evening and drew the view down my legs, with my cat, Sparta, curled up next to my wonky feet. There was some serious foreshortening going on and it’s not a flattering portrayal of my gams :(. It’s good practice though – this is my third attempt – it was hard to do. And the cat kept moving, until I got the Velcro out! (No, seriously, that’s a joke. I didn’t Velcro the cat to the cushion. She’d kill me).
I try to blog a drawing a day but sometimes it gets hard coming up with something new. I don’t go to exotic places and meet exotic people every day; I just trudge through the rain between my little house and my littler studio; hang out with Husb and the cats; wander down to the beach in the grey drizzle. Not very exciting. And I get bored drawing things over again, even the cats (Sparta will make me suffer for that).
So I’m going to try and look at the same old things in a different way for a while. Here’s Husb from above. He’s playing a hashtag game on Twitter – Soviet Bands, he came up with So Solid Khrushchev hehehe – and I perched in a wobbly fashion on a stool to look down on him and draw his male pattern baldness. No, it’s not baldness, it’s just ‘Hair Light’. Honest 😀
Back to the first life drawing session of the New Year at Swansea Print Workshop this evening. I’m definitely rusty after a fortnight’s break. Our model managed to hold this post for an hour – marvellous. I used a Pentel V5 pen into an A5 spiral-bound Bockingford watercolour pad, with a Derwent watercolour pencil to do the shading behind the figure.
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