Chalk Nude [parental guidance]

I spend a lot of time doing life drawing and studying anatomy because my practice is figurative and representational, although I take some liberties: I like Egon Schiele, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh and the German Expressionists so taking liberties comes naturally. But now and again I take a BIG liberty and head towards the abstract. It happened during this particular drawing session. The model, the pose, the brown paper sketchpad I bought in New York, the set of conte crayons; all were in the right place at the right time to scribble this little abstract nude. It reminds me of petroglyphs I saw high up in the Karakoram Mountains when I visited Pakistan. They’re over 10,000 years old, picked out of the rocks with primitive tools, but they contain the essence of humans and animals, despite their abstraction. I’ve tried to work in this style since, but it’s very hard. people often look at abstracted art and say, “a child of six could do it” – they have no idea how difficult it can be.

A Highly Coloured Man [parental guidance]

Just got back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop – went a bit mad with the oil pastels tonight and had a good scribble all over the sketchbook pages before I started drawing the figure. I’ve been doing it a lot recently to break up the intimidating neatness of the plain page. Blank pages are like bullies and they intimidate me. So I show them who’s boss! And then it feels as if the drawing is emerging from the background, rather than me imposing it onto the page. Does that make any sense? This is our older male model. I like drawing him, ageing bodies are very interesting. Drawn with pastels and compressed charcoal into an A3 cream Bockingford sketchbook, using both pages. Now I’m going to bed 🙂

Dystopian Man

I haven’t done much sketchbook work for a couple of weeks because I’m working flat out on a painting – sort of. I’m not a painter but I’m entering an international painting competition and I decided I’d push the definition of painting a bit and approach it as a scribbler and printmaker. The theme, broadly, is Utopia or Dystopia and of course I’ve e gone for the dystopian viewpoint. I’m very close to finishing but it’s taking all my time and energy, no time for sketching or printmaking until the deadline, which is this Friday.

It’s on quite a large scale, about four times the largest I normally use and I’m working onto primed heavyweight cardboard with litho/relief inks [oil-based] applied with squeegee, roller and pallette knife and using oil bars for the detail. So it’s sort of paint. But I don’t use a brush – ever. It also involves a lot of rubbing off with rags and scraping with all sorts of implements. I’m having a good time. This is a detail. The finished piece has three figures – male, female and child. This was the man as of last night. I’ve done a lot more work on him but I forgot to take my camera in today. It’s a pretty grim image but that’s okay because I wanted to see how far I could portray a concept, a state of being, using just human figures with little else to contextualise them. It might fail miserably but I’ll know by Friday.

BTW I’m using cardboard because Toulouse-Lautrec used it and if it’s good enough for him ……….

Drawn To Print

Just got back from an excellent talk by the new artist-in-residence at Swansea Print Workshop as part of the year-long ‘Drawn To Print’ project. Her name is Ros Ford and she’s primarily an etcher, working on huge copperplate etchings of urban industrial landscapes. I did a quick scribble during her talk, which doesn’t do her justice so I hope she doesn’t see it. She’s with us for a couple of months and she’s running some workshops, starting this Saturday, with one designed mainly for artists who draw, but don’t print and it’s aimed to ease them gently into printmaking. All Ros’ practice is based on drawing from life. If you’re around this Saturday and fancy doing this workshop [or one of the future ones] you can book online on the Print Workshop’s website.

Memento Mori

I spent some time last year working on mixed media pieces, trying out different combinations of materials and techniques. This one combined drawing, watercolour and screenprinting. I started with an A1 sheet of Somerset 250gsm and squeegeed some acrylic System 3 paint, mixed with Acrylic Medium across it, giving a randomised background colour. Then I made a photographic screen of repeats of a drawing I did of a human vertebra and printed it on top in a lighter colour, making a rather macabre wallpaper effect. I separately did two drawings in pencil and watercolour, one from a life model I work with regularly at the life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. The skull is drawn from a female skeleton who lives at the Elysium Studios. Her name is Felicity. I cut the screenprinted paper and mounted the watercolours from behind.

The piece is called ‘Two Women’ and is in the spirit of ‘Memento Mori‘, a tradition in European [and latterly American] art, dating back to Roman times, where the viewer is reminded that death is the inevitable consequence of life, typically by including a skull. Memento Mori often overlaps with the similar tradition of ‘Vanitas’ in European art. By putting the dead and living heads in the same pose, I try to emphasise that ultimately the two women are linked by death.

Pêcheurs, Matelots et Mamelles

Husb and I went to The Vojon for a curry earlier this evening and felt a bit portly afterwards, so as it’s a rather lovely evening we went for a long walk along the beach. Swansea Bay is now a lovely golden sweep, very different from the murky, polluted beach of our youth. I stopped to draw some of the fishermen who were strung out along the shoreline in little knots of two and three. On the horizon are the twin islands of Mumbles, a little fishing village at the western end of Swansea Bay [and where Catherine Zeta Jones lives when she’s in town]. Legend has it that in the dim and distant past, French matelots sailing into the Bay saw the islands and exclaimed ‘Mamelles! Mamelles!’ [Breasts! Breasts!]. The name Mumbles is supposed to have come from this. I’ll leave it to you to decide how bosomy the islands are.

A lovely, funny cat post. Just like all the cats I ever had lol.

Boots And Bumpers

Sometimes I just don’t want to do any drawing in my sketchbook. I spent a few hours in the studio, working on a large piece with oilbars and wiping most of it off with bits of rag and I really didn’t want to sketch. But I forced myself to, because it’s a completely different sort of drawing to the studio work and I think it’s good discipline for me. It doesn’t have to be a detailed, finely wrought piece of work, it’s just chilling out and having a scribble. So I did a quick sketch, just a few minutes, of mine and Husb’s booted-up feet lounging together on a footstool [there’s romantic]. He’s wearing his well-worn walking boots and I’m wearing my new Converse bumpers. I don’t know what they’re called these days. When I was a kid they were daps, then bumpers. My parents called them gyms. I bought them a couple of weeks ago when my 12 year-old great niece dragged me into a posh shoeshop and ordered me to buy some decent shoes because, apparently, my fashion sense is ‘awful’. That’s news to me. I didn’t know I had any fashion sense.

Creepy Alien Children!

Here’s one of the life drawings I did last night. It was a 15 minute pose and there was a lot of tension in the body which was quite difficult to draw. I’ll definitely work on it some more; it has potential. I was pootling about on Facebook earlier and came across this example of a child’s skull, showing all the teeth – the visible milk teeth and all the ‘teeth-in-waiting’ – absolutely gruesome. No wonder they have such enormous heads! That’s why they’re so difficult to draw. It’s hideous and fascinating at the same time but I won’t be able to look children in the face and go ‘aaaahhhh’ any more because now I know they’re a cross between Alien and Predator under that cute little visage!

It comes from an interesting science oddity site.

I might draw this. It would look good on a T shirt.

Pimp My Monument

Pimp My Monument.

Another bonkers and hilarious skit about poor, unsuspecting Tenby! 🙂