Because I sketch so much I’m always looking for things to draw and my poor, long-suffering husband fits the bill a lot of the time. It’s easier for me because wherever we are I can just tell him to keep still ….. and he does! Brilliant. You can’t usually do that with strangers. Here he is on the London underground with someone else’s arm in the foreground. He’s quite tall so when I’m sitting down and he’s standing I get some nice foreshortening out of him as well. I think of it as one of his marital duties 🙂
I understand that Lucien Freud exploited his family for his art too, so I’m in good company. This is drawn in Faber Castell Pitt pen into an A6 sketchbook.
I take my sketchbook travelling with me. I haven’t always done so, I used to take photos but I ended up with loads of images that I never looked at, especially after I started using a digital camera. Sketching takes me longer than snapping so I have to stop and immerse myself in the moment. It’s more of a communion with what’s going on around me than taking a photograph, which I’ve always found to be a bit detached.I also get a more rounded and vivid memory when I look at my travel sketches; the act of remembrance is much more intense and I often get memories of smells and sounds and action as well.
I’ve been to New York City a few times and Grand Central Station is one of my favourite place – it’s in the film Madagascar which I love! My husb took some terrific black and white photos of this scene while I scribbled it – very film noir – and I noticed a woman posing in the foreground. I don’t know if she spotted us but it seemed so. It’s a very quick sketch, just a couple of minutes, but I spent quite a lot of time sitting in the dining concourse, which is beautiful, sketching people at length.
There’s really no excuse for not drawing, but I find it almost impossible to draw everyday, I’m just too lazy. Also there’s only so much you can draw the husband, the cats, the chair and the feet without getting totally bored. I was feeling a bit guilty today as I haven’t drawn for a couple of days [I’ve been cutting blocks for prints so I’ve been doing something arty]. I was sitting in one of our little art deco chairs and Sparta our tortoiseshell [calico] cat came and sat on the arm right up close to me. I grabbed a sketchbook [I’m never far from one] and started scribbling away with a biro. Although she was fairly still, she kept moving her head so I just went with it and kept the line going over and over the ones below.
I think it’s important not to try to get the ‘perfect’ drawing all the time, because you can end up with work that looks rather lifeless and also because it can be inhibiting – and time consuming. Although these drawings are nowhere near perfect and won’t be appearing in any exhibitions, they are quite lively; they captured that little moment of quiet with my kitty; and they got me off my backside to do some sketchbook drawings [although I was sitting on it lol. In my little art deco chair].
I shared a few thoughts about the artist as voyeur a couple of blogs back and looking through my sketchbooks, I realise that I spend a lot of time spying on people and drawing them. One of my favourite places is a first floor cafe in Waterstone;s bookshop which has a large window overlooking the street and a seating area opposite. I try and find time to get there, not as often as I’d like, to sit, spy and sketch. What is it about we artists? Are we professional curtain twitchers? 🙂
Today, husb and I took down our last exhibition at The Brunswick after three and a half years of curating! It seems like just a few months ago that we were putting up our first one with Mike Mainwaring and Kara Seaman. I looked through the list of artists who have exhibited during that time – 40 of us [plus a Lifelong Learning group show] and I thought ‘That’s a damn fine group of artists there!’ It’s been a blast working with them all and having the privilege of showing such a wide diversity of work, showcasing so much talent. It’s also been a pleasure to work with Allan, Helen and the staff at The Brunswick pub, who are genuinely interested in art and who put in a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make it happen. We think it’s Wales first, maybe only, serious art pub [there’s also fab real ale and home cooked food, live music and a pub quiz].
I took over the gig from artist Bruce Risdon, which makes it an amazing SEVEN years of exhibitions at The Brunz. When he first started it up, there were very few places for artists to exhibit in Swansea, unless they were very established or fitted in with the very narrow requirements of the few private local galleries. Now The Brunz, along with Elysium and Llysglas, Framework and Oriel Bach, Ex One Zero and Supersaurus, Artawe and Swansea Print Workshop are showing what it’s possible to achieve when artists take the lead and do it for ourselves.
I’ve handed The Brunz gig over to Tim and Lucy Kelly who will be continuing to showcase contemporary artists with original artwork and are keeping on the tradition of cake-fuelled opening parties! If you’re in the South Wales area this coming Wednesday [that’s South Wales U.K. not Australia lol], the opening party for Tim and Lucy’s first curated exhibition is on from 7pm – with cake!!!! I’ll be concentrating on making and exhibiting my own work now that I have finally taken the plunge to go back into the arts and have my own studio with Elysium Gallery Studios. It’s only 32 years since I graduated! I’m obviously a slow burner.
The poster is from the show we took down today, our last one. I put in some ‘skull attack’ block prints and a set of oil paintings of nudes. I rarely paint but when I took over my studio in May last year, I decided to do a series of technical exercises to bring my standards up to scratch and that included forcing myself to do some painting. This is one that I exhibited over Xmas.
Oil painting: The Yellow Towel.
I’m lucky to be living in Swansea which is such a rocking place for art [and music, drama and writing]. There’s been a lot of debate in the professional arts press about how artists can survive during the recession and I think what’s happening in Swansea is an indication of hope for the future of the arts, with artists banding together and doing things collectively, with little or no public funding and bypassing the conventional gallery system. All power to us I say 🙂
It’s Saturday evening and husb and I have a dreaded lurgi. Nothing serious, just one of those nasty bugs that make you feel achey and miserable. I spent most of the day at the Print Workshop, proof printing a couple of blockprints I’m working on [I posted a bit about them a couple of days ago]. It went reasonably well; one of the blocks is fine and doesn’t need any more cutting, but the other needs a bit of tidying up. What I really wanted to find out though is if the concept worked and I’m pleased with it, so next week I’ll cut another 13 blocks. They’re quite small, only 15x15cms so it shouldn’t take too long.
Anyway, because it’s been a long day at the printshop and I’m feeling yucky with the lurgi, I’m cheering myself up by posting one of my blockprints of my psychokitteh, Sparta. When she was a kitten she used to run up our voile curtains. One day I grabbed a digital camera and took a load of photos. Some of them captured her throwing some weird shapes, so I made drawings from them and cut a series of 5 woodblocks, which I editioned. This is one of the series. It really emphasises the flexibility that cats have. She’s stopped running up curtains now because she’s too BIG. Because she’s found pensioners to exploit and she’s getting quite tubby.
I wandered round the Green Man festival near Crickhowell with my sketchbook a couple of years ago. It’s a great situation for drawing because most people are so engrossed in music or dancing that they don’t notice you and are perfectly natural. These two guys were dancing away for ages – a specific dance that involved keeping hold of their beer cans and not spilling a drop – the One Hand Can Dance. It’s sort of like Dad’s Dancing, butwith a beer can and outside in a field 😉
The man on the right had his little girl on his shoulders for hours. She was dancing away too which probably wasn’t comfortable for him but he didn’t put her down. That’s dedicated parenting. I really liked the Green Man – it was big enough to feel like a festival and small enough to be friendly and intimate.
Drawn in Faber Castell Pitt pens into an A5 bound Daler Rowney sketchbook.
I often think of artists as voyeurs, spying on and recording what’s around us. We had a lovely sunny day in the middle of last week and I opened one of the big windows in my new studio and looked down at the pavement three floors below. Suddenly, someone walked past beneath me and I noticed what an odd shape they made. Then a couple of people stood almost directly below me. Again, really odd shapes. I grabbed my digital camera and snapped away for the next 15 minutes or so and downloaded the photos onto my laptop. Nobody noticed me snapping them – my camera is quiet and people rarely look up for no good reason.
drawing, tracing, redrawing....
I spent a bit of time over the next few days converting the images to black and white and simplifying them by cranking up the contrast [in Adobe Photoshop] then I drew a series of them onto tracing paper using some good quality Derwent pencils in B, 2B and 4B. I cut some 15 x 15 cm blocks from an offcut of polycarbonate [signwriters] foam. I turned the drawings over and placed each onto a piece of foamblock. Using a 4H sharpened pencil, I drew over the lines, transferring the drawing onto the surface of the block. Then I picked around the outline with a small sable brush and black Indian ink. Finally I worked into the image with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens [sizes S and F] and a little grey inkwash. I still have some more drawing to do on this image. Once I’m satisfied, the next stage will be to cut it and then, hopefully this Saturday, I’ll print it down at Swansea Print Workshop. There’s a lot to printmaking!
I like sketching in public. I think it’s good for people to see artists at work and it’s a good technical exercise to just get on with it wherever you are. It’s too easy to get precious about art and try too hard to get perfect studio conditions instead of just doing it. I like sketching at gigs because it’s dark. Yeah that’s right. I like drawing in the dark. Partly because the people you’re drawing don’t notice like they would in broad daylight, so they don’t get self-conscious and also because it’s a challenge to draw when your vision is restricted. I did these two sketches at the local Monkey cafe/bar a couple of years ago. I couldn’t get a good view of the band so I drew people in the audience. The young woman was a photographer who came with the band. The young man next to her was bored enough to keep texting throughout the evening. I went to Madrid last year to see Roger Waters perform ‘The Wall’ in a stadium. It was incredible but there was a guy a couple of rows in front who spent most of the performance texting. Apart from missing one of the greatest music / theatre performances of all time, the tickets cost an arm and a leg so was he just some rich idiot showing off?
Another ink sketch at a gig.
Drawn in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into a spiral-bound A6 Cotman watercolour sketchbook.
Here’s a sketch I did quite a while ago in one of the weekly life drawing sessions at Swansea Print Workshop. The model is a retired biology teacher and very colourful character who has beautiful and unusual clothes and jewellery. She came to this session with a magnificent embroidered kimono with dragons all over it. We asked her to pose with it on as it was so lovely and it’s also nice to get a chance to draw the models clothed occasionally. The technique I used is mostly continuous line, constantly checking the figure against what’s going on in the background. I used Faber Castell Pitt pens and drew into an A3 spiral bound Cotman watercolour sketchbook. There was a special offer at our local arts and crafts store and I bought up a load very cheaply. I still have a couple of tiny ones left – they’ve lasted me about 4 years. I really like the boots the artist in the background is wearing.
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