Rickety Stairs and Giant Mountains.

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.

Heavy Man, Little Women and Huge Corset.

Ink drawing: City ranger and corset!

 

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.

Three Men’s Heads on a Tube Train

Ink drawing: Longfaceman.

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.

 

Tent City, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

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.

 

 

Cat On A Rucksack On A Blanket On A Footstool

Ink drawing: Cat on a rucksack.

This drawing had to be done! Little one-eyed Ming the Merciless, our fluffy Tortoiseshell [Calico] cat, doing her ‘Princess and the Pea’ stuff again earlier today, dossing on top of a large packed rucksack that had been left on top of a large, well-stuffed leather pouffee that was covered with a thick fleecy blanket. Any one of those would have been comfortable enough for most creatures, but not a cat – oh no! She would probably have liked it better if I’d have draped a newspaper over it all as well. When I ever-so-gingerly moved her to unpack the rucksack, she did one of those stiff-legged storming-off-in-a-huff stomps out of the room, like as if I’d put Smartie tubes on her legs lol.

 

Drawing in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and M into an Artbox recycled leather bound sketchbook.

Etching with Hogarth!

Drypoint from a paper plate.

 

I like to draw from life and always carry a small sketchbook. I’m enormously inspired by the work of William Hogarth, who catalogued daily life in the 1700s with his meticulous metal engravings. This is a drypoint from a paper plate based on a sketch I did in a tiny Cotman sketchbook. It’s the brothel at the end of our street which is sandwiched between two restaurants. There are often red faces when restaurant patrons go through the wrong door and come rushing back out again pretty fast. The ladies from the brothel often hang out of their upstairs window, watching life go by and chatting to passers-by below. A very Hogarthian subject.

Life Drawing: May and September [parental guidance]

Pastel drawing: May and September.

One week at life drawing group, an administrative error meant that we had our older male model AND our younger female model for the whole session. I’m used to working with just one model at a time so it was quite a challenge to draw the two together, getting them in proportion in relation to each other. On the other hand, it was great to draw the contrasts between old and young, male and female, wrinkled and smooth. The drawing is in soft chalky pastels onto A1 brown wrapping paper using a severely restricted pallette of two colours plus white, which forced me to concentrate on line and form instead of modelling the bodies with naturalistic colour.

The title ‘May and September’ comes from a phrase I used to hear from my Nana’s generation describing a married couple where the husband was considerably older than the wife. Nice way of putting it, I thought.

Skeletons I Have Known [2] SKULL ATTACK!

Chalk, pen and charcoal drawing: Skull Attack #1.

Keeping to the seasonal Halloween theme, I’ve been doing a series of pieces based on the human skull that includes sketches, pastel drawings, cyanotypes and blockprints. These two small drawings were done in chalk, compressed charcoal and Faber Castell Pitt pens into a brown paper sketchbook.

I’m going to call the series Skull Attack, which is a potent local South Wales beer made by a brewer called Brains. The SA beer, which stands for Special Ale, has been nicknamed ‘Brains Skull Attack’ because it’s very strong and that’s what it feels like if you’ve had too much of it.

 

Happy Halloween

 

🙂

Chalk, pen and charcoal drawing: Skull Attack #2.

Skeletons I Have Known [1].

Pastel anatomical drawing: Hand and knee.

 

People who’ve read my blog before will know that I share my studio with a skeleton, a lady called Felicity. But I’ve drawn other skeletons too. This one, nicknamed Fred Skelly, was the subject of many drawings during a life drawing course at Gorseinon College. He was once a man – smaller pelvis, shorter neck – and we often removed his head to get a better look. I did a series of fairly large drawings of bits of him in soft chalky pastels in ochre and olive with a bit of graphite block into a cream, bound Somerset A3 sketchbook. I like drawing from skeletons. It isn’t just about practicing anatomy to get a better understanding of how the human body works to inform my life drawings. I also think the human skeleton is a thing of beauty in it’s own right. I’ve made prints and mixed media work incorporating bits of skeleton and I like having them on my walls. Spooks some people out though!

Pastel drawing: Skeletal knees and feet.

All Day at the Print Studio.

Full colour monotype.

 

Very busy day today at the printmaking studio in Swansea. Made two full-colour monotypes, plus two ‘ghosts’. Have been on my feet for 7.5 hours and I’m shattered, but reasonably happy with the results. I based the monotypes on drawings made from life with a professional model. The prints are made in oil-based pigment in the three process colours, mixed with medium plate oil in a 60:40 ratio and printed onto BFK Rives 250gsm paper from a perspex matrix.

Got to go to a Halloween party now. I think I’m going to sleep in the corner :).