The Museum Cat

I wandered into Swansea Museum yesterday and met a gorgeous, large ginger-and-white moggy. She’s a frequent visitor; she lives in the local pub on the corner and trots up to the museum most days and her name is Megan. She sat on the receptionist’s counter for a few minutes, just enough to let me do the briefest sketch and then trotted off after a group of small schoolchildren, who squealed with delight as she followed them.

It’s not a particularly good sketch, but sometimes you only get a minute or two to get something on the page and it’s better than not doing it. Even a scruffy little scribble has the capacity to evoke memories in a way that you don’t get with photographs.

My Chair??!!

Had a hectic couple of weeks and decided to spend a few hours slobbing in my favourite chair. But someone else had bagged it. So I had to stand and scribble instead as Sparta snoozed. In comfort. On MY chair!! We are their slaves…..

And Balloons In Bristol

Following on from watching pale, wobbly Brits stripping off at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, we had loads of entertainment watching the incredible hot-air balloons taking off, landing, dancing around the arena and finally, late at night, glowing in sequence to music, like gigantic torches. It was a grand day out.  I did two scribbles with the balloons in the background. It’s good practice for getting a sense of scale, because the human crowd was so tiny in comparison to these behemoths of the sky. [Wow, where did THAT phrase come from?].

I like the skinny chap in the centre with the baseball cap – he’s a good contrast to the big, fat, round balloons. Drawn in Faber Castell Pitt pen size S into my recycled leather-bound A6 sketchbook by Artbox.

Brits In The Sun

Had a few days away from the computer, entertaining some young relatives from abroad. On Thursday we travelled up to Bristol for the annual International Balloon Fiesta with scores of hot air balloons taking to the skies and lighting up and dancing to music in the dark. It was a scorching hot day and thousands of people did that typical thing when Brits get a bit of sunshine; strip off and expose white, alabaster flesh to the burning midday sun, quickly turning marbled red and pink, like acres of large lobsters in the skimpiest imaginable shorts. Not me – I have a HUGE hat and sunglasses and I stay resolutely covered up – I don’t like to have skin like pork crackling 🙂

And the other thing we Brits do in a heatwave? We find the tea bar and sit in the searing heat sipping boiling hot tea.  I was always brought up to drink the hottest possible tea when the weather resembles the inside of a volcano. I don’t know why. But that’s what we do.

Bambis Bowling

Have some young relatives from abroad staying this week and it’s a bit hard to find time to draw when you’re entertaining and feeding sturdy, growing teenagers, so I fitted in some scribbling during a family bowling evening. I noticed that people generally stand where they are for a while to watch their bowling ball make its way down the aisle. And everyone has a different way of standing. So it was a great opportunity to practice some speed sketching and analyse different stances. The adult is sturdy, but the adolescents have impossibly skinny legs, like Bambi, which bend at odd angles. Each figure is a composite, sketched many times in between the bowling bouts. I lost. By a mile 😦

Rinascere

I have an exhibition coming up and here is an invitation, just in case you’re anywhere near Swansea, UK. I blogged about this a few weeks ago but unfortunately the exhibition had to be delayed. ‘Rinascere’ is a new body of work comprising a series of solar plate etchings and the small, Renaissance-style drawings that inspired them.

‘Rinascere’ is an Italian word which means ‘to be reborn’ or ‘to revive’. I chose it because I have been deliberately working with Renaissance techniques and materials for some time and the word ‘rinascere’ is the root of the word ‘renaissance’. I also identified with it’s meaning ‘to revive’ in the light of the current art trends which have moved away from traditional skills such as drawing and etching. As anyone who has read my bloggage for a little while will know, drawing is at the heart of my artistic practice and I draw every day, usually blogging what I’ve scribbled, unless it’s an absolute stinker! Which happens 🙂

The etching above that I’ve used for the invitation is based on the tiny drawing below, which I did using a traditional dip pen and Indian ink and an ink wash, onto hand-made heavily-textured paper that I pre-coloured randomly with a sepia wash. I also used a bit of compressed charcoal.

I work with profressional models at the life-drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop and I work directly onto the paper with ink pens; I don’t sketch it out in pencil first. That’s for wimps 😉

If you’re around, please look in – the exhibition runs until November.

The Gym On The Beach

Have a couple of young relatives visiting from abroad and being a pair of old fogeys, we’re at a bit of a loss what to do with them, so we took a picnic and headed for the beach which has an outdoor gym courtesy of our local council, thinking it might wear them out a bit. The gym equipment trails along the promenade and off into an area next to woodland, so it’s a lovely scenic walk too. The sun was shining, although we saw huge storm clouds that dropped torrential rain just a few miles away.  I stopped for a scribble, walkers and their dogs with the twin breasts of Mumbles in the background.

Did they get worn out? No! Did we? Oh yes! Shattered now.

For The Wheelie King

Social networking media get a lot of criticism, but I’ve loved them from the start. I have to be strict or I could spend my entire life playing Scrabble on Facebook or hash tag games on Twitter, but I’ve made many interesting acquaintances and professional contacts as well as meeting up with long lost relatives on the other side of the world. I met an intriguing character on Twitter called Willy Wheelie Bin, who purports to be king of all the wheelie bins in Britain and lives in the green mountains of Norfolk. A very entertaining Tweetychum.

I recently took part in a two-hour public art event called Disruption II – I drew a record of the goings-on. One of the performers was telling stories of people’s pasts through a megaphone. She was stationed behind a rather fine grey wheelie bin. I thought of King Willy and how unacknowledged wheelie bins are – they are everywhere but how often do we stop to notice them and their stalwart work, keeping our streets clean? So here’s a drawing dedicated to King Willy Wheelie Bin and all the other wheelie bins across the land 😉

Ruskin And Chocolate

Here’s one I scribbled yesterday when I took my little nephew to the top of the Swansea Tower, Wales’ tallest building. I’m getting a bit better at drawing the cityscape; I’m developing a shorthand of marks that are individual to me so I don’t slip into doing an architectural drawing. I did a short course on the Ruskin style of topographical drawing a few years back and although it was interesting (it was in his house, Brantwood, in the Lake District) and also good discipline, that style of drawing isn’t for me. I had a fair bit of time to sketch – the boy took ages to come to terms with his huge glass of hot chocolate and chocolate brownie. He bounced for hours after.

Stripey Jimjams

One of the good things about keeping a daily sketchbook is that no two days are the same and as I flick back through them, all the memories flood back in a way that is much more real and emotional than looking at photographs. A couple of days ago I was sketching at the funeral of my dear aunt; early this morning I watched my little great-nephew fast asleep in his new snazzy stripey pyjamas. Two days, two entirely different set of emotions and memories. Both precious.

Drawn with my Pilot V5 pen into an A6 ‘artbox’ leather-bound recycled sketchbook.