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.

Wonky Feet

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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).

 

Hair Light

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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 Life

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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.

50 Shades?

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When I first heard there was a book called “50 Shades Of Grey” I thought it was about British weather. It sounds like a typical drizzly day in Swansea Bay. Like today. Here’s a few shades of grey.

I drew this in my 15cm square hand-made Khadi sketchbook, prepared with a grey wash of Indian ink, applied with a natural sponge. I closed the book immediately and left it to dry and the wash went speckled, which is quite nice. I drew with compressed charcoal, black and white conte crayon and white oil pastel.

 

Blowing The Cobwebs Away

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New Day, New Year and it’s uncharacteristically dry and sunny here, although quite cold and bracing. After the sad week we’ve had, Husb and I decided to blow the cobwebs away and walked down to the beach. Husb went off on a 5k run and I power-walked a couple of kilometres then stopped for a spot of scribbling. I’ve set myself the task of getting more practice with land- and sea-scapes this year. I’m very comfortable drawing people and cityscapes and I need to push myself out of my comfort zone otherwise I’ll get complacent.

The brilliant sunshine gave the view a lot of contrast which was easier to draw than the usual multilayered grey gloom of a Western European coastal winter. I used compressed charcoal, conte crayon and white oil pastel into a 15cm square handmade Khadi paper sketchbook that I’d prepared with a random wash of dilute Indian ink, applied with a natural sponge.

It’s been a good day and a lovely start to the New Year. Loads of people on Swansea Bay and promenade, far more than we’ve seen for years, enjoying the sunshine, walking dogs and children and packing out the new cafe on the waterfront – signs of a new renaissance along the seafront maybe?

That’s Mumbles in the background, so named because some French sailors, upon seeing the twin islands, exclaimed “Mamelles” which means breasts in French. Those French, eh?

Last Visit Last Page

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I haven’t blogged for a few days. My dear Dadinlaw died earlier this week and I haven’t had the heart to do anything much. I had my sketchbook on me on my last visit to the hospital and found some consolation sketching through the window. I wondered why hospitals always seem to have a large chimney. At the top of the hill in the distance is the local psychiatric hospital, also with a large chimney. My final visit to the hospital coincided with the last page in my purple silk recycled sari sketchbook. It’s packed with scribbles from hospital visits; we lost so many people we loved over this past year.

Dadinlaw died peacefully after a long illness and the nursing and medical staff caring for him were so kind to him and our family and treated him with gentleness and dignity. Sometimes things go wrong in the NHS and we shouldn’t shirk from complaining and making sure that problems are confronted, but when things work as they should, and mostly they do, the care is exemplary and we should be proud of what Dadinlaw’s generation set up, for it was they who created the NHS, pensions, free education, all the things we take for granted. They grew up in the poverty of the Great Depression in the 19320’s and ’30’s and made sure that their children and grandchildren didn’t suffer as they did.

And now we’re in danger of losing their marvellous vision through the idiocy of ignorant, overpriviledged politicians who have no idea of the reality of poverty nor the moral compass to want to do something about it. We can’t afford to be complacent; we owe it to the generation that is now dying out to keep their legacy alive.

Seen And Heard

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Hospital visiting again this evening. It’s very hot there and hard to stop from nodding off; sketching is one way to keep awake. It’s been very quiet over the past two days; everyone who could go home was sent out on Xmas Eve, but a whole new intake of elderly frail men arrived today. Drawings like these might be disturbing, but this is reality for some people and I’m not the sort of artist who only draws the prettier side of life. Elderly people deserve to be heard and in my opinion, they deserve to be seen as well.

 

In The Dark

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Just because it’s the holiday season doesn’t mean I get away without doing any scribbling. I wanted to do something a bit different so I prepared a small square Khadi handmade paper sketchbook by sponging an Indian ink wash randomly over the pages. I’m going to draw at night, as it’s dark by about 4.30 at the moment and it’ll get me out of the house for a bit of exercise as well. I went down to the seafront near The Tower this evening and scribbled away with compressed charcoal and black and white conte crayons. I don’t normally draw landscape, but it was easier at night because I couldn’t get distracted by detail; I had to work in monochrome blocks which is quite exciting. Well, that’s my idea of exciting, scribbling in the cold and drizzle on a deserted beach in the dark on Xmas Eve – sad isn’t it? 😉