I once met some watercolour artists. I showed them the life drawings I did in ink and watercolour. They were aghast! Apparently I broke all the rules! Oh Well. There we are then 😉
Faber Castell Pitt pen and Windsor and Newton half pan watercolours into an A3 Cotman watercolour pad.
Drawing a life model who sits still for ages is one thing, sketching a crowd at a festival is much more of a challenge. People move – they dance! They get up and go off. How inconsiderate. Anyway, got this lot mid-afternoon at the Green Man Festival a couple of years ago [fabulous little folk/rock/psychedelic/arty festival on the Welsh borders if you fancy going]. The weather was uncharacteristically warm and dry and sunny for a British August and everone was chilling out so there wasn’t too much movement going on.
I find it hard to know where to start a crowd drawing but this one was easier than usual because I was at the top of a slope looking down which gave an exaggerated perspective that I really like. I couldn’t be bothered to put in lots of little dots and circles to represent the crowd down the bottom, the sunshine and ambience got to me and I shut my sketchbook and chilled out. That sounds like a good idea – zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
oh yes – Faber Castell Pitt pens size S, F and B into an A5 bound Daler Rowney sketchbook.
Last week I went to the opening of Mary-Ann Kokoska’s fabulous exhibition ‘Drawing: Land and Sky’, featuring her HUGE three-dimensional drawing installations based on the vast landscape and wild weather of Colorado USA, where she lives and teaches. Her drawings are room sized and overwhelm the viewer with their vastness and intensity.
This floor to ceiling drawing at Elysium Gallery in Swansea shows her multi-layered technique, overlapping different types of paper and mylar film [mark-resist] which give extraordinary depth to the drawing and it curves out of the wall into the gallery space. Each mark is carefully considered and she can take several months to make one of these vast drawings.
Unlike me. I rarely do landscapes but now and again, when I’m off travelling, I have been known to make the occasional study. It usually takes me all of three minutes 🙂 ! And they rarely exceed an A6 page. Here are two quick scribbles I made last year during a trip to Ireland. We took a back road and crossed a mountain range on our way to Dingle in County Kerry – it’s called Cahir Conree. Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into a silk-bound A6 sketchbook.
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Mary-Ann’s amazing exhibition continues at Elysium Gallery in Swansea until December 23rd. Wednesday – Saturday, 12.00 – 5.00. Free entry.
I’m such a scribblegeek that it borders on an obsessive compulsive disorder and no-one escapes, not even friends who pop around for a cuppa tea. What could I do when my pal is sitting there with that Egon Schiele pose? Just HAD to get the conte crayons and dash off a sketch into my A2 bound sketchbook. Trouble was, her tea went cold because I wouldn’t let her move. Surprised I’ve got any friends left 🙂
Last night I went to an AMAZING drawing and dance performance at the Volcano Theatre premises in Swansea, by Marega Palser and three other dancers. I’m not normally a huge fan of dance, but this combination of extreme movement, creative soundtrack and spontaneous drawing was fantastic. Marega also had an exhibition of her drawings and monotypes along the walls and several pieces of drawing-based animations. True to form I took my sketchbook and scribbled! There was no seating – the performance moved around and so did the audience which gave me a lot more freedom to draw than in a conventional theatre.
The dancers had those strange dancerish bodies [sorry – don’t mean it nastily] which gives them a very Egon Schiele feel. They were pushing their physiques to the limit and the some of the extreme poses they struck were great to draw. The dancer above is very tall and thin but has strong calves and feet, which seem to anchor her frail torso to the skin of the planet. They used lighting very creatively with minimal props and this piece looked like it was set in a cell, very claustrophobic even though we were in a huge room – an old furniture showroom.
Drawing figures in movement is also challenging, especially as I’m used to working with professional life models who stay completely still. I had to quickly respond to rapid changes and so some of my drawings became composites of different poses and angles, like this one above which is an amalgamation of the dancer in about half a dozen different positions.
The drawings are in Faber Castell Pitt pens into a recycled sari sketchbook, around A5 in size. The show is called ‘Sometimes We Look’ and it’s really exciting and innovative. The Swansea run is finished but it’s moving to Chapter in Cardiff next week and then onto Aberystwth Arts Centre. Try and catch it – I’ve never seen anything like it.
I often use discarded prints as the basis for drawing – I raid the waste paper bin at Swansea Print Workshop for prints that other artists have thrown away as they’re usually on really good paper, a Somerset or Bockinford, and often embossed and coloured which makes an interesting starting point for a drawing, introducing an element of chance into it. I did this drawing earlier in the week. It’s based on a very small sketchbook life drawing I did a few years back and it’s been worked up mainly in oil bars and compressed charcoal onto a highly coloured collagraph print – you can see the embossed patterns particularly under the dark areas. I have no idea who did the original print – it might have been a schoolchild during one of the community outreach sessions.
Every cat I’ve shared my life with has loved our large central heating boiler. It’s a massive floor-standing one with plenty of space for a cat and toaster on the top and one or two cats on chairs and stools in front of it. Here’s a drawing I did a few years ago of my two elderly, now sadly deceased, cats, Bobbit and Bola. Bobbit was a chubby alpha female naughty tortie [calico] cat and she always grabbed the top of the boiler. It used to get really hot and I worried at first that she might burn her paws or something, but I remembered that domestic cats are descended from desert cats and that’s why they LOVE heat so much. She couldn’t get enough of it.
Bola was a huge panther-like not-at-all-alpha male who loved being draped around my husband’s neck and shoulders and pretending to be a purring scarf while husb walked around the house. He was happy to let Bobbit take the top of the boiler [couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of fighting her for it] and he settled for the chair with the soft cushion. When he became too old and infirm to jump onto the chair, we made a little cwtch for him underneath the chair. The poor dear died there, aged nearly 20, in his sleep, snuggled up in a fleecy blanket next to his beloved boiler.
The drawing is in blue biro into an A5 bound sketchbook. The toaster didn’t last long. One of the cats puked into it! We think it was deliberate.
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Last night was the opening of the final exhibition I’ve curated at The Brunswick – I’ve been doing it for three and a half years. For anyone who hasn’t been, it’s a great ‘real ale’ pub in Swansea run by a couple who are keen on art and about 7 years ago they agreed to let local artist, Bruce Risdon, organise exhibitions there. He eventually moved on to do other things and I took over, with the help of my dear husb and his drill.
It’s very different to a ‘normal’ gallery and it attracts not only artlovers but also the ordinary pub customers, who would never go into a conventional gallery, often buy the art there and really seem to appreciate it. We’ve been changing the exhibitions every two months, normally exhibiting three artists at a time. I’ve tried to mix them up a bit, having very commercial artists showing alongside edgier stuff and mixing painters with printmakers with scribblers with photographic artists with textile artists with illustrators. Basically, if it can be screwed to a wall, we’ll show it!
We started the Xmas group show last night and I decided a few months ago that this would be my last. I’ve learned a huge amount from organising the shows and become friends with many artists along the way, but it’s time to move on and focus on getting my own work out there now. A new studio is on the cards before Xmas and I need to concentrate on making lots of art. From January, the shows will be curated by local artist Tim Kelly and his wife Lucy. I believe they’ll be continuing the tradition of home-made cake at all the shows!!!!
The oil painting above is a detail from one of my works in the Xmas show, based on an original life drawing of a model who liked to dye his hair in vibrant colours – that day it was purple. It’s on canvas and about A3 size. I don’t particularly like painting so most of the piece was done using oilbars and rags wrapped round my fingers. It was like being a kid again, finger painting lol :).
It happens to us all – Scribbler’s Block, Writer’s Block, do musicians get blockages? I’m sure they do. What do you do when you’re struggling away in the studio and the creative juices have dried up? You’ve already got three or four pieces of work on the go and everything you try to do to them looks rubbish. I have a nice cup of tea to start with [of course I would. I’m British lol] then I reach for one of my technical books and do some practice.
I’ve had a rough couple of days with no enthusiasm for the pieces I’m working on so I’ve been practicing drawing dynamic hands from a book by Burne Hogarth. They’re quite cheesy and very comic book, but I find them good for practice because they’re very exaggerated so you can see how stuff works. I have another of his books that deals with the dynamic figure too. The top drawing is in conte crayon and the bottom in biro, scribbled into a cheap A4 Belvedere spiral bound sketchbook. They’re only practice so I use cheap paper, but that sometimes frees me up and the practice pieces are often more fun to do and that sometimes helps to release the creative blockage. Hopefully I’ll be unblocked tomorrow.
I’m re-blogging the fabulous Doodlemum blog – her Arnie and my Sparta are a murderous fluffy duo!
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