Manthrax And The Kitteh

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I’ve got the dreaded lurgi! I hate being ill and I’m every bit as miserable and whingeing as the stereotypical man with ‘Mathrax’. There’s not a lot I can do about it except wrap up in a blanket, have lots of  hot drinks and an array of remedies including decongestants, throat lozenges, cough medicine and cherry vanilla icecream. Strictly for medicinal purposes you understand.

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It’s sooooo frustrating not being able to do very much. Sparta the psychokitty spent some time on my lap, sharing the blanket, so I managed to do a few scribbles of her – she joined in.

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Kara Seaman’s lovely collagrams in North Wales 🙂

Pollards

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I went for a stomp about in the twilight, still freezing, and came across this row of pollarded trees near the Guildhall with a half moon with a frosted ring hanging in the sky above a bright planet. The practice of pollarding is often criticised because it makes the trees look ugly but it dates from medieval times when trees were pollarded for livestock food or for fence posts. Nowadays, it’s usually to keep them to a reasonable height in an urban environment. I like the look of them, especially in winter without their leaves.

Cold Scribbling

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Husb and I trekked up Constitution Hill a couple of hours ago so I could go and draw in the twilight in Rosehill Quarry. The Hill is extremely steep and cobbled, cycling races are held on it, and we had a good workout. The Quarry was still covered in snow. I find it useful to draw when it’s really cold because it forces me to be very quick and capture the essence, or an impression, of what’s there instead of labouring to do a topographical landscape drawing, which has always been my problem with trying out landscapes in the past.

I drew this into my 15cm square handmade Khadi paper sketchbook with compressed charcoal, conte crayon and white oil pastel over a grey ink wash. Now we’re off to a restaurant and a party. Still some life left in the old dogs yet 😀

Fluffy Tracer Bullets

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So we were supposed to have snow. I didn’t believe a word of it. We hardly ever have snow in these here parts because of our micro-climate and the Gulf Stream. But today, it happened. There was snow. Not a lot. Just enough for Husb and I to get in a brisk walk to the beach in a horizontal gale with white fluffy tracer bullets stinging our eyes.

I made the poor man cower behind a statue out of the wind while I scribbled furiously into my little Khadi handmade sketchbook with contes, pastels and compressed charcoals in various shades of black, white and grey, which just about summed up the landscape. Almost monochrome. And freezing.

It was fun scribbling the snow on top of the smudged drawing of the beach – almost calligraphic.

Art-In-A-Box

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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.

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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

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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

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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.