Here are some more sketches done on tube trains, ideal for people-watching. This young man above was chatting to his friend and didn’t notice me – one of the few people talking on the London Tube! What struck me was his childlike face. His features were scrunched up into a much smaller area, unlike an average adult head. He was very animated and it’s a challenge to draw someone who’s smiling, laughing and talking so much. Reasonable likeness though.
The stylish man below was engrossed in his paper. He wore a large and expensive looking watch and a typical looking old-school tie. Drawing on the Tube is difficult because it’s so shaky and the line wobbles all over the place, but I like the effect.
Ink drawing: The Watchman.
They’re drawn in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen size ‘S’ into an ‘Artbox’ recycled leather-bound A6 sketchbook.
I don’t often paint as I have a printmaker’s brain which I think is wired differently to the painter’s brain. I prefer to draw and I get frustrated by dragging a bit of paint across a surface with a brush. This piece started as a small sketchbook lifedrawing which I then worked up into a large drawing in conte crayon, oil bars and compressed charcoal onto Bockingford paper. I used that as a template for a three-colour spearation monotype and then decided to push out of my comfort zone and try out some oil painting. It’s one of a series of nudes featured in the Winter show at The Brunswick, ‘Ex-Massive’, with eight other artists.It was interesting doing them, but I couldn’t wait to get back to drawing and block-cutting 🙂
I’m a gingery Celt living in a predominately gingery Celtic part of the country so it’s an absolute joy to have a new model from Africa working with our life drawing group. Swansea has had a fair bit of immigration in the past, as it was a thriving port and is a thousand years old, but most dark-skinned immigrants, like my own grandfather, came here some generations ago and married local gingery Celts, so the gene pool tends to be rather pale and freckly and more recent immigrants are mostly Asian. It’s the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to draw African skin from life and, yeah I know it’s stating the obvious, but it’s very different so a new approach was called for.
I have a set of conte crayons which includes a range of rich browns, that I rarely use. Absolutely perfect for our model! I prepared some pages in a ‘Seawhites of Brighton’ A4 Fabriano bound sketchbook by Prittsticking some handmade paper randomly into it. I like to work across different colours and textures. The model posed for a full hour and at first I focussed on getting the line of the face and head correct, very different to the Caucasian and Asian models I’ve previously worked with so took a lot of concentration. Then onto the colour and texture of her skin and hair, which gave me an opportunity to indulge in some free mark-making. I enjoyed it, our group enjoyed it, our model enjoyed it so here’s to a long and happy partnership with our new muse.
A couple of years ago, my dear friend and neighbout died. She was in her ’90’s and was a veteran of World War Two, leaving her quiet village in West Wales to enlist in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the W.R.E.Ns. After a posting to the Isle of Man, she was stationed in Swansea where, as a despatch rider, she learned how to strip and reassemble a motorbike on her kitchen table and ride her bike through the potholed city enduring night after night of bombing throughout the Blitz. An injury became seriously infected and she nearly died, but returned to duty as soon as she was on her feet.
British women of that generation threw their collective weight into the war effort, joining the Forces, becoming farmers, riveters, engineers, factory workers. Leaving their previous domestic lives behind them, they not only helped to defeat the Third Reich, they forged a new world for their daughters and granddaughters. They were feminists before feminism and sometimes I wonder if we realise how much we owe them.
I developed this block print after my friend died, as an homage to her and her generation. It was developed from a photograph of her as a young W.R.E.N and cut into polycarbonate foamboard. I printed a small edition onto Zercoll 145gsm paper using black litho/relief ink. I used a red hand-made Indian paper as chine colle for the poppy .
I don’t advocate war, but sometimes people have to step up and act out of duty for a wider good and that’s what her generation did. It’s now over seventy years since the War began and most of the veterans are dead. I miss them, their stoicism, their duty and their committment to making the future a better place.
Mixed media: Anastasia and Sparta and the MultiColoured Blanket.
I was working with an artist friend, we were exchanging modelling hours and I built up a large collection of life drawings of her and started wondering what to do with them, whether they could form the basis of new pieces of work. I also had some large sheets of very good paper that I had coloured with acrylic medium and metallic powders and I’d done some screenprints on top; the prints were from sketches in various sketchbooks. Unfortunately the screenprints hadn’t come out as I’d wanted – it’s a much harder process that many people realise – it’s a lot to do with the wrist action and I don’t seem to have it – yet.
Anyhoo, I had a drawing I’d done while Anastasia was sitting on a large floor cushion which was covered with a very jazzy blanket. Sparta, who was then a kitten of about 12 weeks, came in and started playing with a scrunched up paper ball and I managed to capture the two of them together in a drawing, which we both really liked. I decided to redraw it onto the screenprinted paper and as I was working on it, I took an old black-and-white blockprint that hadn’t worked out right and I coloured it with oilwashes and tore it up and collaged it onto the drawing to make the blanket. I drew in compressed charcoal and black and white conte crayon, overlaid with white and neutral oilbars. I wanted to make her body insubstantial and transient: it’s to do with my death obsession I guess. But I also like the domesticity of the scene, a woman watching a kitten play while she chills out is a very everyday and ordinary thing to do.
The paper is Somerset Velvet 250gsm; Sericol acrylic medium and gold powder; Rowney System 3 acrylic inks; compressed charcoal, conte crayons, Windsor and Newton oil bars; Daler Rowney oil paints; Pritt Stick.
I’ve been sitting with my dear aunt in her nursing home and spending the time drawing her. She mostly doesn’t recognise anyone and stares into space or dozes quietly, but now and again she’ll look directly at me, smile and give me a broad wink before slipping back into quiet isolation. It’s a hard decision to blog this drawing because I worried that it might be intrusive and maybe voyeuristic, but I aso feel strongly that we shouldn’t hide our elders away. They’ve given us everything and this generation, my aunt is in her ’80’s, fought a World War for us and then built a new society with free education, healthcare, the redbrick universities, good housing …. they didn’t want us to suffer the awful poverty they endured during their own youth and they wanted their children and grandchildren to have the opportunities they never had. And they succeeded. Big time!
We’re a society unhealthily obsessed with youth and celebrity. Well in my opinion, young skin is rather bland and uninteresting, whereas our elders glow with the beauty of a lifetime of living etched into their faces and bodies. I remember my aunt as a strong, gutsy woman who lived every day like it was her last. She inspired me and loved me. She jived to The Andrew’s Sisters at my wedding when she was well into her 70’s and boy, could she jive! And now she’s tiny and frail and quietly living through her last few days, she is still lovely and I won’t pander to our unfortunate cultural stereotypes which dictate that we only see young plasticised people and that pictures of older people must have the wrinkles Photoshopped off them! Here she is at the end of a life lived fully and she is beautiful.
Ink drawing: Rickety stairs on the Karakoram Highway.
Travelling across Pakistan in a minibus 4 years ago along the Karakoram Highway, we stopped in Kohistan for lunch and a cup of tea. The ‘cafe’ was an ancient wooden building with wobbly rickety stairs on the outside leading to the flat roof. It was unbearably hot inside the dark little shack so we all traipsed up to the roof and lounged around on whicker sunbeds, snacking and drinking tea and gazing at the extraordinary mountains before us. For a comparison, Snowdon at 3,000 feet is the highest in England and Wales. These mountains were around 30,000 feet! The stairs, indeed the whole building, was very very rickety – no EU regs and Elfin Safety out here! The drawing is in Faber Castell Pitt pens into an A6 Cotman watercolour sketchbook.
Digitally altered photograph: The Apricot Tree.
Our destination was The Hunza Valley, way up the Karakoram Highway. We went in Springtime and the valley was smothered in the pale pink flowers of hundreds of thousands of apricot trees, so thick that even the view of the enormous mountains was occasionally lost behind clouds of blossom. I took this photo then had a bit of a play with Adobe Photoshop ‘cutout’ filter.
Me in Gilgit with a large mountain.
Here I am in front of our hotel in Gilgit, the capital of the Northern Territories of Pakistan, with some of the Karakoram Mountain Range in the background.
A load of artists got together in the centre of the city last Saturday to do two hours of disruptive art events, a mostly humourous approach to involving the public in some off-beat art and completely independent of any funding bodies and their agendas.Although the organisers had cleared the event with police and local authority, the ‘City Rangers’ a group of uniformed non-police, obviously felt very threatened by all these anti-social, dangerous artists and did their very best to get some of us off the street. I worry about the range of people employed as uniformed street security. Police officers were walking around and joining in with the spirit of the thing, but these guys seemed to enjoy strutting around trying to be intimidating and impose their own brand of censorship on the whole thing.
This very large ‘Ranger’ didn’t like the women putting the giant corset across ‘his’ street. He gave them hassle. They were half his size and mostly a good generation or so older than him. They carried on. He really tried to intimidate them and move them on – they were having none of it and loads of people got involved, all ages, all walks of life. People were invited to write their thoughts about women and the role of women onto strips of material and then pin it to the corset. By the end of the session, it was jampacked with cotton writings fluttering like bunting. Some very insightful and moving stuff, some not but there you are. The great thing about recording through drawing instead of photography or film is that you have to stay put for quite a while and you get really absorbed in what’s going on and people interact in a different way than thye generally would with a photographer.
I love to draw on trains because people are so often lost in theeir own world and stay relatively still and don’t notice you drawing them. It also attracts attention from other travellers and I believe that artists should be seen doing art in public. They used to so why isn’t it fashionable any more? I did these drawings last week when I visited London. The man above had one of those very long faces with nobbly bits either side of his mouth. I should know what they are because I study anatomy avidly, but I can’t remember. D’Oh!
Ink drawing: deep in thought.
Here’s husb, lost in his own world, gazing up at the ceiling of the train. I love drawing faces from this angle. It isn’t very flattering to draw right up someone’s nose, but it’s a great view.
Ink drawing: The Owlman.
This older man was reading throughout the journey and had a wonderfully crumpled face that was really interesting to draw. He also had a cool tie made up of little framed drawings of an owl surrounded by text, set against a stripey shirt. It’s not easy drawing on the Tube because of the movement, but I like the wobblier line it gives me and I also like a challenge.
We saw the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern and Grayson Perry at the British Museum. Both excellent but Perry’s was, for me, the more interesting. I love his quirkiness and outrageous sense of humour along with his absolute commitment to the ‘craft’ of art. The drawings are done in Faber Castell Pitt pens into an A6 ‘Artbox’ recycled leather-bound sketchbook.
Ink drawing: Tent City, St. Paul's Cathedral, London, UK.
I did some sketchbook drawings of the anti-capitalism protest outside St. Paul’s Cathedral during our visit to London earlier this week. I was surprised that the Cathedral staff had previously wanted to evict the protestors as there weren’t all that many there, they seemed a pretty peaceful bunch and they weren’t blocking anyone from walking around the church. I suspect that the Health and Safety Act was being used as an excuse ….. seriously, how many people have suffered injury or death from hippies in tents?
Not everyone is going to agree with their sentiments and that’s fine in a free society, but I’m worried that the presence of wardens, special constables, private security firms and bouncers on our streets is eroding our freedom not only to protest but also to be a bit different. I know artists who have had their cameras snatched by private security and special constables using the spurious excuse of ‘anti-terrorism’. In my opinion, artists must resist attempts to curb our freedom and what happens to the protestors at St. Paul’s is absolutely relevant to the freedom of artists to observe, record and reflect.
Ink drawing: 'Democracy Now' at Tent City, St. Paul's.
The drawings are in Faber Castell Pitt pens, sizes S and M into an ‘Artbox’ recycled leather bound A6 sketchbook.
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