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.

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.