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.
”]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.
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.
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