Mucky Little Kid

Ink and graphite sketch.

When I was little, Swansea beach used to be packed all through the summer. there were no cheap package holidays and most people couldn’t afford to go away; a bus trip to Barry Island if you were lucky. So there’d be thousands of kids on the beach, changing into those funny little shirred swimsuits behind towels and we’d run screaming down to the water with our Mams shouting, “Don’t go in the Granny’s Custard!”. Of course, we all made straight for the Granny’s Custard. It was black, cool, silky and squelched between your toes. Once it dried on your skin it was really hard to get off. I remember Mam scrubbing me with a nailbrush in the bath trying to get me clean. It hurt, but it was worth it.

When I grew up I went to Art College and on our Ceramics module we had to go to the beach and dig up …….. the Granny’s Custard. Turns out it’s a lovely smooth terracotta clay. We learned how to clean and process it and we made small pots, fired with a white tin glaze.  I did this sketch for someone yesterday and didn’t have my nice digital camera so used my phone camera for the first time. It’s rubbish. Won’t bother again. It’s little Me squelching through the Granny’s Custard with a look of ecstasy on my face 🙂

Rhubarb And Compost

I spent a few hours in the garden this afternoon, potting up some peas, leeks and mange tout ready for the allotment and tidying up after the winter. We collected some large compost bins from Swansea Community Farm last summer, put two onto the allotment and kept one for the garden and I had a look through the hatch today and there was loads of nice crumbly compost, not smelly at all. I love compost. I’m a bit obsessed with it. I like to visit the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth just to look at their compost corner. They experiment with making compost in different ways and I find it fascinating. Well, it keeps me off the streets 🙂

I dug some out and spread it around the rhubarb which is growing away very nicely – might have some for crumble in a couple of weeks. It grows really well in the back garden but didn’t like the allotment at all when I tried it. It’s really expensive in the shops these days but we get so much of it each year that I have to make chutney. It’s delicious. Here’s the recipe.

Rhubarb chutney

Great with cold meats, cheddar, cheese on toast, smoked fish, curry.

For each kilogram of washed, roughly chopped rhubarb, add –

  • 250 g of sultanas
  • 850g white granulated and 150 g dark brown sugar
  • 300 ml cider vinegar
  • 10 peeled, chopped cloves of garlic
  • 30g sea salt

Put everything into a very large pan and bring to the boil.

Cook at a good simmer for at least an hour until it is thick, stirring occasionally.

Pour into clean, hot jars and screw the lid on immediately (use waxed and cellophane jamming circles if you have some).

Label and date and store for at least a month before using, if you can resist it.

The drawing was done with Faber Castell Pitt pen size S and a lump of graphite. I have a twisted hazel [corylus avellana ‘Contorta’] in a large pot in front of the rhubarb patch and I drew through some of the little twisted branches. In the background are a couple of Spanish bluebells [hyacinthoides hispanica] spearing through the ground. They were already here when we moved in and although pretty are also very invasive.

A Bit Like New York?

Yesterday was the official opening of the new Elysium Artists’ Studios on Mansel Street. We’ve all been working on the building for the past couple of weeks to get it ready for the public and I did my best to tidy up my own studio and get work up onto the walls. It was good to spend some time going through my work and decide what to put out and also to rediscover pieces I’d forgotten about.

Here’s the view through my North-facing window after I’d tidied up. The old plans chest is one of the most invaluable pieces of furniture I’ve ever owned. During the opening, I used it for serving mocktails and home-made cake, assisted by my poor long-suffering husband.

Here’s the view from the window end, facing the door with some of my work displayed in the corridor outside. Later on that evening the place was jam-packed. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere so crowded. It was brilliant. Someone said it was more like New York! I don’t know about that, but I haven’t been to anything quite like it in Swansea before.

Here’s some of the work I displayed; on the left a series of blockprint portraits done from my travels in Pakistan a few years back, along with some linoprints of petroglyphs carved into the rocks of the Karakoram mountains. On the back wall, two more recent full-colour monotypes. It was a terrific night but so busy that I didn’t have enough time to speak to everyone, so if you’re one of the people who came along, thank you ever so much and I’m sorry I couldn’t spend more time with you 🙂

Open Studios Coming Up.

Charcoal and chalk drawing.

 

Getting into some serious drawing lately, using fairly large discarded prints because the paper is good quality, usually Somerset or Bockingford, along with charcoal, compressed charcoal, chalk and transparent oil bar. I worked up this large [A1] drawing from a tiny life drawing in my sketchbook. I covered the paper with loads of random scribblings before starting to shape the image within it. It’s one of the ones on my wall for the Grand Opening of the Mansel Street Studios this coming Friday. If you’re in Swansea between 7 and 9.30 pm, be sure to come up and see my etchings 🙂 . The main stairwell and corridors have been filled with an exhibition of work from the two groups of Elysium studio artists, there’ll be wine and nibbles in the exhibition and I’m serving cake and mocktails at my studio. Would be lovely to see you.

Chooks At The Vetch.

Had a nice diversion this afternoon after picking up my niece for babysitting. We went down to The Vetch Field, Swansea’s old soccer ground in the city centre, which has now been cleared and turned into allotments. There are chickens there too and the sprog and I spent an hour with sketchbooks, charcoal and pastels drawing the allotments and especially the chickens. Vetch is a type of wild legume and the field was transferred from The Swansea Gaslight Company in 1912 to the newly formed professional football team. It’s nice that now it’s been cleared, plants flourish there once again. Not all of it is allotments so maybe vetch will reestablish itself once again. The drawings are done in charcoal and oil pastels into a heavyweight cream Somerset sketchbook. I’ve never drawn chooks before – they don’t stop moving!

A Comb-over In Tenby.

Ink sketch: A combover in Tenby.

Had a busy day today visiting Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire with an old friend. It was a glorious day and after stopping off in Pontyates, Carmarthen and Narbeth, we ended up in Tenby, walking along the lovely beaches and strolling through the old town, which is partly Medaeval, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian. We stopped for a nice pot of tea in a little cafe and I immediately started scribbling in my usual antisocial way. There was a family sitting by the window, father and son both had spiky hair and some of the old buildings were visible through the open door. The chap at the front of the drawing had a radical comb-over, fair do’s. It takes dedication to keep hair so firmly in place. I’ve never managed it. He was lost in thought as his wife chatted to him.

The Furry Face Of Evil!

Pastel sketch: Sparta the kitten.

 

Sparta Puss here. I’ve snuck onto the computing box while no-one’s looking. I’m a feline goddess and I share my life with another feline goddess called Ming The Merciless and two fur-less monkeys who serve us. The monkeys are strange creatures but quite entertaining. Do you know, they clean themselves by immersing themselves in a tub of ….. WATER! Yes. Can you believe that? I pace around the edge of the tub shouting at them ‘Get out you idiot. You don’t clean yourself like that.’ They laugh and flick bubbles at me. Damn cheek. I try to show them how to clean themselves by washing on top of them while they’re in bed, but they don’t get it. I’ve even tried licking them myself, but they taste of ……MONKEYS! Quite horrible. I tried licking a dog once. It tasted of …… DOG. Also quite horrible.

Anyway, the fur-less she-monkey wastes a lot of her time smudging paper with bits of coloured earth instead of doing something sensible like sleeping for 22 hours.  I sort of recognise the smudges she makes. They look a bit like me. The monkeys tell their monkey friends that I have very beautiful markings and then they all do their excited monkey chattering over me and smooth me. I approve of this. Apparently the markings on my forehead look like an evil Death Head Mask. I have no idea what that is.  It’s Spring here in Wales and the mice families are out and about and I’ve caught two mice over the last two evenings and brought them in and thrown them onto the big pretty floor cushions the monkeys put on the floor for Ming and me, so we don’t have to tire ourselves out jumping onto their comfortable vintage furniture. They don’t half screech and chatter and run around when they see a mouse. HAHAHAHAHAHAAH. Such good sport.  Then they catch the mice and put them outside. What a waste of a perfectly good mouse. Don’t they realise how good mice taste? Unlike monkeys……………

In The Footsteps Of Marco Polo.

Ink drawing: The Old Silk Route.

I travelled around Pakistan about five years ago in a bus with a handful of other artists from Wales, some Pakistani friends and a sizeable group of Vikings. It was wonderful and it was the first time I had made a real effort to use a travel sketchbook instead of  taking photos. I’d had a digital camera for a while and I found that I was using it less than I used to use my old Minolta SLR. Digital  just doesn’t seem as selective or satisfying as a film camera, but it gave me the kick up the backside I needed to record my travels with drawings.

We were travelling up the deadly Karakoram Highway on our way to the Hunza Valley and stopped at a roadside cafe for some tea. We sat on some rocks looking down the dry river bed, it fills when the glaciers melt, and in the distance saw a ‘ribbon’ on the mountains opposite. It’s part of the old silk route, the one Marco Polo travelled along on his way to China. Ancient history there in front of us.

Reduction monotype: The Old Silk Route.

Returning to Wales, I did a masterclass in three-colour reduction monotype with Vinita Voogd and used my original sketch to produce the print above. It was my very first one using this technique and I’ve been developing my style ever since. It’s in Intaglio printmaker Litho ink in process yellow, red and blue, onto BFK Rives 350gsm paper. You can see how to do this technique on my blog.  It’s very geeky stuff 🙂

Little Orange Kitty

Lino print: orange cat.

 

Mostly I work with human figures but now and again, for a bit of light relief I use animals as my subjects, usually cats because they have enslaved me and I get plenty of practice drawing them. This is a small lino block print I did of Sparta. It’s a reduction block print, a technique that printmaker’s often call the suicide method because you cut all the colours from the same block which destroys the block in the process. If something goes wrong, you can’t go back and redo it. I’ve used three oil colours on this on top of a creamy coloured Zercoll 145 gsm paper.

Sparta is a small tortoiseshell [calico] cat who specialises in doing high fives, being cute and wholesale murder. She also likes to dump dead [and sometimes not dead] animals on top of me when I’m asleep in bed in the early hours of the morning and sitting on the stairs and smacking people in the head when they walk past.  And biting my toes. And sneaking into bed on cold nights and sticking her icy paws in the middle of my back. And persuading local pensioners to spend their pittances on her. Maybe it’s my fault for calling her Sparta. Perhaps I should have called her Tiddles. Or Fluffy. Whoever heard of a serial killer called Fluffy?

 

An Assyrian Kneecap

Ink sketch: An Assyrian Kneecap.

 

So this is my last sketch from my trip to London last week. When I’m in the British Museum I like to wander around and just happen on stuff. I was having a good look around the Egyptian section and turned a corner and discovered The Assyrian stone friezes. Totally mind-blowing. Such beautiful and perfect carvings from, what – about 3,000 years ago? How did they achieve such remarkable beauty without all our mod cons, workshops, power tools etc… It bears out what Grayson Perry goes on about, extolling the extraordinary virtues of craftspeople throughout the ages.

At each end of every section of the frieze stood a guardian eagle spirit, with an eagle’s head, wings and human torso. However, although they had human legs, most of them has an eagle’s claw instead of a kneecap and a couple had a human fist in place of a patella. I drew one of these – I wonder what it signifies? The hand has only three fingers alongside the thumb, which is a convention used by modern cartoonists.