Hairy Folkies

Went to see a fab band at The Garage the other night, The Peatbog Faeries, part of Husb’s birthday present. They’re sort of a fusion of Scottish folk/rock with trance/ambient undertones, overlaid with bagpipes. Fantastic. A get-up-and-bop-all-night band. I ached the next day! They were supported by a young local folk band, Thistledown. It’s good to see a new generation of young people making their own folk music. And it’s good for a scribbler to get to see lots of hairy faces! All in one place. They’re a bit of a pain to draw though 🙂

Them Pesky Kids!

Still struggling to draw children – they’re soooo weird. Funny little faces squished into great big heads. And they won’t keep still. And you’re not allowed to tie them to chairs. Nanny State Nonsense! 😉

Just Some Faces

Just some faces scribbled when I’ve been out and about the place. The older man was scribbled this morning as I was having a nice cuppa with my friend in Waterstone’s bookshop cafe while we were waiting for Illtyd the Charcutier from Pontyates to deliver our sausages and faggots. mmmmmmmmm

The Ghostly Velocette

This evening was a bit overcast but warm, so we took a drive to Oxwich Bay on the Gower Peninsula, one of the most beautiful beaches in Britain set in Britain’s first designated area of outstanding natural beauty – and just a short drive away.There is a long road down to the beach, down a steep hill with some spectacular bends at the bottom, sweeping around large areas of saltmarsh. When I was a young biker, local lore had it that in the dim and distant past, a local motorcycle racer went for a spin on his new Velocette racing machine in the moonlight, took one of the bends too sharply and spun out of control into the saltmarsh, where he and his motorbike lie to this day, never seen again. It was said that during a full moon, the sound of a ghostly Velocette engine could be heard carrying over the marshes. I can remember a few of us riding down to Oxwich one night, after a few pints. I was young and very scared of the dark. We didn’t hear anything.

The tide around here goes out a long way and the beaches tend to be shallow, so when the tide is fully out, you can walk miles and explore the shoreline from the sea side rather than the land side and see lots of quite steep exposed rocks with wonderful rock pools, covered in many different weeds and full of anemones and fish. Here’s Husb looking down into one of them. The limpets make the smooth rocks look spotty.

ps I’m not advocating drinking and riding. I was young and daft when I did it.

The Man In The Next Bed

 

I’m getting quite pally with the elderly man in the hospital bed next door to my relative. He’s what my Nana would have called, ‘Not Backward In Coming Forward’ and quite right too. He’s worked all his life and he’s entitled to what he needs in order to remain independent. His eyesight is now very poor so he mobilised the relevant people and had a visit from the optician a couple of days ago. He showed me the catalogue they left with him. “I can’t read it though, bach, I think they missed the point“‘ and laughed uproariously. However, he managed to make out a very comprehensive list of what he needed and showed me some of his booty bag this evening. Impressive haul. Here he is listening to one of his new audio books, happy as Larry. 🙂

 

Still Deads

I spent the day at Swansea Print Workshop doing a short course in subtractive drawing with the new artist-in-residence, Aoife Layton. Pretty hard going, partly because it’s very different to the way I normally scribble, using a fine pen into an A6 sketchbook. Today we used A2 cartridge that had been prepared with three coats of rough gesso. We had to coat one with charcoal, rubbing it in well with our hands – lovely and messy! The other was coated with graphite block which was then wiped in with a rag soaked in white spirit. We used an odourless one, but there isn’t a satisfactory alternative to white spirit.

Then we had to begin to remove the black pigment with various drawing materials such as sandpaper, wire wool and craft knives. We had a variety of objects to choose from for our subjects including a large sweet jar full of dried corpses of lobsters and crayfish. I used some of these, Still Deads rather than Still Lifes. The top drawing is the charcoal one, the bottom, graphite. I think the one below looks like some strange crustacean Danse Macabre.

When I was in school, we were taught to always fill the page with a drawing, but these days I prefer to position the image carefully within a space, isolating and emphasising it.

Grumpy Old Man

Husb needed some new clothes. This meant spending a couple of hours in the city traipsing around the shops listening to him complaining, “They’ve taken a perfectly good jacket and written STUFF all over it!”

“Have you seen the state on these trousers! They’re down around their backsides!”.

“Look at the cut on these jeans!!!!! They make you look like you’ve got RICKETS!!!”

“HOW MUCH???!!!”

Husb has been in training to be a grumpy old man since his teens. He’s awfully good at it. I try to get him home after a couple of hours, in case he has a stroke.

So when we got back, he decided to do some DIY. I’ve no idea why. He detests DIY as much as shopping. At least it gave me a chance of a spot of scribbling. It was surprisingly difficult because he was bent over his Black & Decker Workmate [he’s got all the gear, even though he hates DIY], so I was trying to draw him from some very awkward angles and he kept moving around. But I managed one half decent sketch of him. With his jeans down around his backside :D!

Then he chilled out with a nice cup of tea.

Fleshpots Of Llandysul

Today we had a drive around West Wales, going to a new exhibition at Waunifor and exploring the fleshpots of Llandysul. Only there are no fleshpots in Llandusyl :). So I wasn’t inspired to do any drawing. That’s an excuse; I just wanted a break. So here’s one I did last week, when the Olympics was still on. There was a giant screen and deckchairs in Castle Square in the city centre and we stopped there occasionally for a rest and to catch up with the Olympic news. I’m not normally into sport, except for Rugby Internationals, but there was something special about this Olympic Games,  Danny Boyle’s amazing opening event and all those sweet sportspeople – Jessica Ennis, Mo Farrah and Usain Bolt – terrific. I wasn’t expecting even to watch it let alone enjoy so much.

Dying, Dozing and Da Vinci

In the last few years of my dear uncle’s life, I’d go round to visit and shout from the front door, “Hello Uncle. How’re you?” He’d shout back, “Dying, but apart from that I’m fine.” The first time he said that, it was like a knife ripping through me and he could see my distress. He said, “I’m nearly ninety. I’ve got heart disease and cancer. But I’ve had a great life, I’m happy and at peace with myself. Don’t worry about it.”

I realised that he was taking his responsibilities seriously and doing his job, bringing up the young ‘uns. Yeah, I know we baby boomers are now middle-aged, but to our parents generation, those that are left, we’re still the kids. And he was trying to get me to understand that there comes a time when death isn’t daunting, but something natural and even something to joke about. He died peacefully a few months ago. He was a good man.

Tonight, visiting at the hospital, I drew the same elder that I drew last night, as he dozed. I’d treated myself to a new Pentel V5 pen earlier and scribbled into my little leather-bound recycled sketchbook. He woke shortly after and we had a chat about the audio-book he’d been listening to – The Da Vinci Code. He thought it was a ripping yarn. So did I 🙂

Visible Elders

Back to the hospital visiting routine, keeping an elder relative company. The elderly man in the next bed, although very ill and frail, was having an animated conversation with his visitors, thoroughly enjoying their company. It’s so easy to see elders in a negative way and forget that they have a voice that should be heard; that they have as much right to be visible as younger people.  Our media are obsessed with youth. It’s so fake. We shouldn’t have a society that turns away from our elders and shuts them up in homes and hospitals and doesn’t represent them in the media, except through thoroughly patronising images. Look at the self-portraits of Rembrandt as he got older. So much more interesting, more powerful, extraordinary.