What’s In My Handbag?

At last, a break in the appalling weather, sunshine and a trip to Tenby! I’ve been to Tenby so often recently that I should buy a house there, I love the place. I went with some of my family, three generations of us, and we decamped to the beach for a picnic and a few hours play on the sand. It’s a great beach, lovely clean sea, golden sweeping sand, cliffs with nooks and crannies, caves and plenty of climbing opportunity. Loads of flora, but unfortunately the local fauna is mostly huge, aggressive, voracious seagulls. So big and nasty we kept the baby covered up – just in case! The little town was very busy hosting a bicycle race and the beach was full but not crowded – just nice.

I wandered off to supervise some of the great nephews and nieces who were scrambling over a small cliff face up to a cleft in the rock and saw a lad trying to climb down from the small cave. He was having some trouble, although not in any danger, so I whipped out my little A6 Winsor & Newton Medium Surface Cartridge Pad, a box of  Aquarelle pencils, a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen [size S] and my reservoir brush from my handbag. If anyone’s wondering what a woman carries in her handbag – well that’s what’s in mine.

I only had a couple of minutes tops before he worked out how to get himself down so I scribbled quickly in pen, then added colour with Aquarelle and the reservoir brush – really strong colours from lichen [yellow/orange], Sea Thrift [purply pink], wild cabbage [greens] and what looked like small Michaelmas Daisies [purply pink also]. I like my reservoir brush, it sounds like something from a Tarantino gangster film 🙂

 

Colour, Vibration, Reality

I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite art books, Victoria Finlay’s ‘Colour: Travels Through The Paintbox‘. Most of my books on colour are dry and rather academic but this is a rare book – well researched, informative, intelligent AND beautifully written. She’s a social anthropologist turned journalist with a passion for art and that passion shines through in this book. There’s a bit in it about how what we see when we look at colour are actually vibrations, wavelengths of energy, electrons excited when light falls upon them. I’m absolutely fascinated by this and am trying to represent this in someway in my art. She also spent some time with Australian Aboriginal artists who explained that what we perceive as the real world actually lies ‘like a blanket’ over the reality of existence and this duality is what they are representing in their art.

I’ve been working on this piece for some time. I blogged the initial stages a couple of weeks ago and this week I’ve been overlaying the basic drawing and colour washes with a layer of white oil bar, thinned with a translucent colourless oil bar. Then I’ve removed some of the oil pigment with cotton buds [Q Tips] to create a vibrating mass of patterns across the surface of the figure. When you get up close, you can see through the surface pattern to the underlying ‘reality’. I feel like I’m getting somewhere with this.

 

 

 

 

Comfort Eating

I know the British summer is notoriously fickle but today takes the biscuit. It’s been so cold and wet that Husb and I went to the Continental Cafe for a full roast dinner at lunchtime, and lashings of hot tea, wrapped in layers of jumpers and raincoats. And now this evening there’s a storm going on outside with gale force winds and torrential rain. It’s the school holidays and summer festival season – Download and Hay-On-Wye have started and they’re getting washed out. Awful!

Anyway, here’s a couple of people also eating winter fodder in the Continental earlier. The chap, a policeman, had an interesting way of holding his fork in front of his face while he chewed . He had his summer uniform on. It’s a popular cafe, good, unpretentious food at very reasonable prices, very old school, always full. It’s been there a long time. You can’t beat it really, especially in the sort of climate when you might need comfort food at any time. Like we do.

The Fall of the House of Frolic

It’s been one of those typical British Summer days – cold and pouring down with rain, so husb and I have been following a typical British Bank Holiday tradition of Do-It-Yourself and we wallpapered the bedroom. I’ve spent nearly all evening filling out an online application for the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers first Open printmaking competition. These things always take much more time than I anticipate so I’ve done no arty stuff today at all. So I’m reposting a very funny spoof history of a little Welsh town from a series being written by a local writer. Hope you enjoy it and back to some art tomorrow.

The Fall of the House of Frolic.

ps if you’re a printmaker, there’s still time to submit work for the competition. Oh and there’s a transit of Venus happening soon – not that we’ll see anything here in the pouring rain lol

I Don’t Do Nature

I draw people and occasionally, at a push, animals but I don’t do nature. I’ve just finished Martin Gayford’s book about his conversationas with David Hockney and he discusses his new-ish paintings from the countryside surrounding his home in the north of England, so I thought I should break out of my comfort zone and give nature a go. He talks about how artists interpret what we see, rather than slavishly copy it and how we decide what to focus on, what marks to make, what materials to use in order to interpret, and when he put it like that, it seemed less intimidating. I think that when I’ve tried it in the past, I’ve aimed to be too representational and tried to do something like botanical drawings and really, that’s a whole different genre in itself and not something that particularly interests me.

So I had a bash today using my Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen [size S] and Aquarelle watercolour pencils into an A6 watercolour pad. This is a corner of our new ‘pond’ down on the allotment, which is an old bath and a plank of wood. We’ve had it a fortnight and already the native flag iris and pondweed I transfered from our garden pond have established themselves along with a newt and loads of insects. I’m going to draw reguarly from nature for a while and get some practice in.

A load of Frolics

Oh dear, *wipes my eyes*, more mad historical misinformation about little Welsh towns hehehehe

 

A load of Frolics.

Saturday Night Curry

Went for a Saturday Night Curry with a friend and his little girl, to celebrate his birthday. Best birthday present if you ask me. The food always takes a while at The Vojon, but it’s worth the wait because it’s lovely. They take good care of children too. I sketched the little one peeking from behind the glasses and dishes. She’s a tiny little thing with huge eyes. Once again, I have a problem drawing children because the proportions are so weird; they STILL look like aliens to me. Albeit quite cute aliens. There was a HUGE man in the background with virtually no neck.

I drew it into my little A6 sketchbook, the cat-themed one by Paperblanks [Mediterranean Cats] which I had for Xmas. Only a few pages before I finish it.

Frolic ye not

Oh dear, another madcap history of a little Welsh town. This time it’s Newtown’s turn to be at the receiving end of Notsogreatdictator’s bonkers view of history 😀

Frolic ye not.

A Lovely Line [female nude]

I had a nice life drawing in my sketchbook and decided to take it a stage further into a fully worked-up drawing and then, eventually, into a full-colour reduction monotype. I stretched a sheet of Bockingford 250gsm and gave it a couple of coats of rabbit skin glue, then washes of acrylic paint in yellow ochre, permanent rose and cerulean blue. That was the easy bit. When I rework a sketchbook piece, I don’t just scale it up, I adapt it to fit the shape of the monotype plate, correct any bad bits in the original and aim to get a lovely line, even if that means altering it.

I’m pretty happy with the linework on this new drawing; there’s a bit to do on the hands and hair still, and then I’ll start working in some highlights and tones into the body and darken the background. So far I’ve just used willow charcoal, but I’ll probably develop the piece now with compressed charcoal and white and transparent oil bars. I’ll do the monotype from a linear tracing, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. It’s taken me two half-days to get this far; I can’t keep it up for a full day because I stop being able to see it and need an overnight break to look at it afresh.

Man In A Black Square

Some time ago I took some digital photos from my second floor studio window, looking down on the people walking past below. I worked them up into drawings and I’ve been gradually cutting them into blocks for printing. I’m planning to do a series of nine block prints, all square and the same size, with the figure offset within the square. It sort of ties in with my feeling that artists are voyeurs, spying on the world to record what they see. Well, some of us are anyway. Once I’ve done all nine, I’ll exhibit them in a 3×3 square formation so that the black squares make the most impact and also to emphasise the isolation of each individual imprisoned in their own dark square.

I cut the image into a recycled piece of signwriter’s foamboard, I think the brand name in Britain is Floatex. I use it because it’s free and gives a very fine line that I can’t get with lino or wood. I used it extensively to teach block printing to people with drug problems; some have blood-borne viruses and the last thing you want is a cutting tool injury. The foamboard doesn’t have to be cut – it can be incised with a 4″ nail or even a biro.

I printed this today using Daler-Rowney block-printing medium and lamp black oil paint, using a Japanese baren to take the print without a press onto Fabriano Accademica 120gsm paper. I’m going to have to do more experimentation because I only had one good print out of 5. I might try it out with a Zercoll paper or adjust the ratio of paint to medium until I get it right. Ho hum, that’s my fate sealed for the bank holiday. [Holiday? Don’t make me laugh :)]