I’ve not done much artwork the past couple of days, it’s holiday time and I’m trying not to fall into the trap of not taking time off, which is something a lot of self-employed people do. I had a lovely time with an old friend, lunch at Bizzie Lizzies and an afternoon pot of tea at the legendary Kardomah Cafe, beloved many years ago by Dylan Thomas and his bohemian chums, The Kardomah Gang. It’s still as it was when I was a child, very retro and original. Coincidentally I went for a curry last evening to celebrate a friend’s birthday and met a lady who has leased Dylan Thomas’ old house in Cwmdonkin. You can’t go far in Swansea without tripping over Dylan.
But I couldn’t keep away from the studio and wandered in around teatime just to sit down and chill out and do a little drawing. I’ve posted photos of my studio before but today I’m posting a sketch of my studio, sitting in my comfy chair, looking at the big window with the hillside in the background, a couple of large drawings on my table. Just can’t keep away from this arty stuff.
When I’m at life drawing group I prefer poses that turn the body in on itself in some way, I guess that reflects me and my somewhat dystopic view of life, the universe and everything. I like to draw ‘off-the-page’ and have done so for as long as I can remember, since I was a small child. It’s as if I’ve always felt that people are boxed in, that there are invisible boundaries around us. Some of my lecturers at art college used to try and persuade me to draw an entire figure within the one page, but I rarely managed it. It doesn’t matter how big the piece of paper – and I’ve worked on some huge ones, the figures are nearly always cut off by the edges at some point.
This is our soldier model. I’ve drawn him in two different grades of graphite – 6B and 9B into an A3 Bockingford sketchbook over the double page. I’m pleased with this and I think it may make a good full-colour monotype so I’ll take it into the studio tomorrow and work it up into a full-size drawing, probably onto some Somerset Velvet or Fabriano paper. Our model is exceptionally fit. This was a tortuously twisted pose, rather like a contraposto in Mannerist art and he held it for a full hour. At the end, he had weals across his thighs from the edges of the chair.
These are large monotypes I did from original drawings from the life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. It takes me a full day at the print studio to do each, plus about half a day to work up a scale drawing from my original sketch, which is usually done into a sketchbook. The middle one will be in an exhibition at Art Matters in Tenby in May and the one on the right will be showing in Walcot Chapel Gallery in Bath, July 9 – 15. Other monotypes will also be included in both exhibitions.
I’ve been nominated for a WordPress Versatile Blogger Award by Drew Kail and and Jackie McSween at Pointsthruprose. This is lovely – thanks so much Drew and Jackie. Drew is an exceptional printmaker working mostly in block printing – amazing work. Jackie coordinates a collective arts blog.
The rules for the award indicate that I must nominate 15 blogs I think are deserving of the Versatile Blogger Award. All of the blogs I have listed are tremendous and I recommend checking them out.
My nominated blogs are:
1. Rayya the Vet Moving diary of the life of an Australian vet and her varied patients
2. Doodlemum – Daily drawing blog about a Welsh Mam and her husb, three children, cat and dog. Funny and whimsical.
3. Charcutier – fascinating blog about starting a high class charcuterie business in a remote part of rural West Wales
4. Dave Cropley – lovely life drawings from this talented printmaker
5. Lemon’s Tree – fun and quirky drawings and cartoons about life and stuff
15. J Hladik Voss – absolutely bonkers Barbie tableaux and other stuff
It was very hard choosing just 15 out of the 90 blogs I follow but I tried to pick those that publish regularly and have the most varied content. Please forgive me if I didn’t include yours.
Here are the rules:
If you are nominated, you’ve been awarded the Versatile Blogger award.
Thank the person who gave you this award. That’s common courtesy.
Include a link to their blog. That’s also common courtesy — if you can figure out how to do it.
Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly. ( I would add, pick blogs or bloggers that are excellent!)
Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award.
Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.
versatile blogger award
Nominated bloggers don’t have to participate. I nominated each of these because I feel their blogs deserve to be recognized, read and followed.
Seven things about me:
1. I’m a mad cat lady
2. I love living by the sea – I love it’s smell
3. I’m a rock chick – old school, prog, metal, grunge – love it all [except 1980’s poodle rock]
4. I love making cakes but I don’t like eating them
5. I like watching world-class rugby
6. I’m a tea addict
7. I find weather fascinating [just realised how very British the last three are lol]
A little relative had her 5th birthday today so we had a family day out at Folly Farm in West Wales, which was grand, although freezing cold. Of course it was, it’s a British Bank Holiday – too much to expect fine weather. At least it didn’t rain. We are lucky to still have four generations in our family and we made up a group aged from 15 months to 80 years and it was lovely. There was a very high wooden walkway going right up into the air and we were level with the giraffes. They are such strange creatures – I’ve never seen them close to before. Their hips face forward and they have these ridiculously skinny legs with nobbly knees. And very lumpy heads. I had my fingerles mittens on but my fingers still froze! We also saw meercats, mongooses and a foosa. Brilliant day out.
The drawing I posted yesterday of one of our male models from life drawing group got quite a lot of comments, so by popular request here are some more drawings of him. He’s a young soldier who has seen action in Afghanistan and when he’s home he likes to relax by doing a spot of life modelling. Being young and fit he’s able to get into some very awkward poses and also hold poses for a long time. He even posed in a handstand once!
Ink drawing: in the life studio.
I’m thinking of turning this drawing into a silkscreen print, I think it’s quite funny and a nice snapshot of a life drawing session :).
Just a quick blog tonight as I’ve only just got back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop and I want to go to bed! Here’s out fabulous model who is also a soldier in the Territorial Army [army reserves]. He’s just become a ‘poster-boy’ for the TA’s and we walked around the corner the other day and saw his face plastered over a telephone box on a large recruitment poster. Quite a surprise. Being a fit soldier, he holds some extraordinary poses and I did some drawings I’m really pleased with tonight that I will work up into large completed drawings and full-colour monotypes.
I got carried away with this one and it’s come out quite 1930’s, a bit Art Deco, maybe even a bit Tamara de Lempicka. It was fun – I did it for my warm-up before I got stuck into some serious stuff, before we squished him up into some horribly contorted poses. Poor guy suffers for our art :). It’s drawn with a 9B graphite block into an A3 Bockingford sketchbook.
Ming The Merciless is a rescued cat. She was liberated from someone who neglected her so badly that she nearly died of starvation and untreated infections. She was about 10 months old when we rescued her and we had a terrible four days and nights where she was touch and go at the vets, but she pulled through and she’s now 10 years old and an absolute joy to live with. I detest people who are cruel to animals. If they can be so appalling to animals, they can also be equally appalling to their fellow humans. I would like to make animal abusers suffer the same fate as their helpless little victims.
She’s a tiny little thing, a pretty tortoiseshell [calico] semi-longhair kitty with one eye, she lost the other because of one of the infections she had due to neglect. Her fur is mostly a pale pinky-beige with brown markings and white socks and bib. But she’s really scruffy. No matter how much I brush her [and that’s taking my life into my hands!] she scruffs up again in seconds. Her favourite place is on top of the boiler in the kitchen, with a view into the garden. Here she is earlier this evening, looking at me drawing her and resting her head on one of the central heating pipes. It was almost too hot for me to touch but it didn’t bother her at all.
So here’s the problem – drawing such a hairy little scruffy furball of a cat. I used a very fine pen, size 0.5mm into an A6 sketch book and scribbled. Then scribbled some more. And a bit more scribbling. It’s not a bad likeness at all.
Had a rotten cold today so I worked from home and caught up with loads of admin stuff – so boring but needed to be done. I didn’t feel like drawing so I had a play around with Adobe Photoshop. I don’t know why, but I don’t really think of it as art. The innate snobbery of a ‘fine’ artist maybe? Yet it still involves using tools, techniques and making artistic judgements so I shouldn’t think that way. I had a few digital photos of Husb to faff around with and I tried out some of the functions I’m less familiar with. I like this one and although I wasn’t aiming to do anything with the images, I think I’ll try this out as a cyanotype print next time I’m at Swansea Print Workshop.
Work in progress: life drawing in charcoal, ink and oil bar.
I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that I thought Husb’s eyebrows might take over the universe. He was straight up the barber shop this morning for a haircut and a spot of eyebrow grooming. His eyebrows are now beautifully trimmed and don’t rest on top of his specs anymore. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence though :).
In the studio I’ve been working on this drawing. I’ve used this same image quite a few times now. It started out as a small sketchbook life-drawing and I scaled it up and made a full-colour monotype from it and also did it as a smallish oil painting. Now I’m drawing it onto Fabriano Accademica paper, in oilbars on top of a background of inks sprayed on with one of those funny little mouth-spraying gadgets, overlaid with scribbled charcoal. I like reworking the same image in different media because it changes so much from the original depending on what materials I use. I previously stretched the paper and sized it with several layers of rabbit-skin glue. I love the surface it gives to work on, but it makes my studio smell like a butcher’s shop.
Had a hard day on the allotment today, both of us doing loads of digging into heavy clay-ey soil. Then when we got home I had to move a huge trug full of horse slurry that had been fermenting all winter and spread it round the rhubarb, loganberries, blueberries and fig. Honestly, it was bubbling away like The Bog Of Eternal Stench from the film Labyrinth. I love the way that Nature recycles a load of manure into rhubarb crumble! Yum :).
Just rattled off a quickie sketch of Husb chilling out on Facebook. We’re both slumped into chairs, too tired for anything else. I think his eyebrows are going to take over the universe.
scribblah 