I don’t usually paint, preferring pen and ink, charcoal and chalk. Now and again I bring out the watercolours in life drawing sessions and have a bash. The received wisdom is that watercolour is a gentle, refined medium where you build up layers of pale delicate glazes. Some of the artists in the group do beautifully modulated watercolour studies with exquisitely executed skin tones using gently graduated brushstrokes.
Not me. I wield a brush like Thor’s double-headed axe, chopping at the poor defenceless little blocks of watercolour paint in their tiny little pans and then stabbing the unfortunate brush at the cringing paper. It’s a bit of a gorefest, like the forces of Asgard unleashed on the Frost Giants of Jotunheim via a small sable paint brush.
This is a pen and ink drawing into an A3 180gsm watercolour sketchpad, attacked with lashings of Windsor and Newton Artist’s watercolour.
We live in a society that does not, in my opinion, value our elders. They are marginalised from mass media; stereotyped when they do appear; and shuffled off into ‘care’ homes when they become too inconvenient. Our civilisation has an unhealthy obsession with youth to the extent that barely middle aged people have their faces fixed into a vile rictus grin with botox or surgery, fooling themselves that they look young. They don’t. Young people don’t have stretched skin. We don’t venerate, celebrate or respect age, wisdom, experience, that ability to take the long view.
As artists we should be subverting society’s conventions by giving visibility to the invisible; respect to the disrespected. I have always worked with the human figure, mostly, though not exclusively, through the nude and it’s demoralising going to group shows that feature figurative art and finding that almost all the models are young, conventionally beautiful, female and painted/drawn/printed in coy ‘tasteful’ poses which is an euphemism for soft core porn. What about elder women and elder men? Don’t they deserve to be portrayed and exhibited too? As a baby-boomer I’m acutely aware that if we don’t make a stand, then pretty soon we’ll start disappearing from public view as well.
Relief print: Elder Woman of Hunza.
This portrait is a block print I did based on a photograph I took of an elder in the Hunza region of Pakistan in the North East territories, near the Chinese border during my trip in 2007. She is wearing the traditional Hunza hat which is heavily embroidered. Women in this region are well-educated and economically active, with a reasonable standard of living and good health. Yes, her face has wrinkles but she also shines with joy and I’ve had terrific feedback whenever I’ve shown her and she’s being collected too!
I cut and incised the image into an offcut of signwriter’s foamboard and printed in oil-based relief ink onto Zercoll 145gsm paper in a limited edition of 10.
It’s been a great year for apples and apart from the glut on our own tiny trees, people have been generous and given us loads, mostly cooking apples. I’ve been trying to find different uses and recipes for them and yesterday Melvyn juiced half a carrier bag full and made us some sensational fresh apple and cucumber juice. It was gorgeous and just the thing for this brilliant Indian Summer we’re having.
One of the problems with a small domestic juicer is that there’s a lot of pulp. I know I could put it in the compost bin, but I hate the waste. I’ve developed a lovely carrot cake recipe with pulp, so today I experimented and made this spicy apple sultana cake. It’s quite puddingy as I used nearly a pound of apple pulp but it’s really nice served warm with cream. I drizzled some of our home-made elderflower syrup over the top as it came out of the oven to glaze it.
Ink drawing: Bisham, Pakistan.
The drawing is one I did in a tiny travel sketchbook on my trip around Pakistan back in 2007. I travelled with 8 Brits, 16 Danes and varying amounts of Pakistanis in a minibus throughout the plains and mountains and one night we stayed in a government hostel in Bisham. The next day we woke up to this amazing scene – mountains bigger than any I have ever seen and a beautiful valley studded with flowering trees. The only thing available for breakfast was eggs – in abundance – and we travelled onwards to Gilgit on the Karakoram Highway quite eggbound.
Full colour monotype. Nude image - parental guidance suggested.
I spent the whole day at Swansea Print Workshop, making a new large full colour monotype. Here it is. It started life as a sketchbook drawing done during the weekly life drawing group at the Workshop. I redrew it, scaled up onto a much larger sheet of paper in conté, charcoal and white pastel. I traced the large drawing onto tracing parchment and used the reverse as my template for the monotype. It’s a very labour-intensive process and I’m too tired to think now so I’ll just post the full-colour piece and blog an explanation of the process tomorrow 🙂
Today I babysat for my six-year old nephew and as we’re having a glorious Indian summer I took him out, around the local museums and galleries and then to an ice cream parlour for a rest and something to cool down with. He loves mint choc chip so he had a huge cornet, almost as big as his head. When we went back to the house he wanted to play on the computer or the Wii, but call me old-fashioned, I sent him out the garden to play in the rare sunshine and told him to make his own entertainment. Within minutes he was fascinated by the huge spider webs criss crossing the garden like sparkly net curtains – they’re everywhere – it’s been a great year for spiders. Luckily he isn’t at all afraid of them. Then he noticed that our large and spectacular Sedum flowers were covered with bees, taking advantage of the late summer sunshine and the cornucopia of pollen provided by them. He sat down with a sketchbook and some pencils and drew this lovely little picture of a bee visiting a Sedum. Chip off the old block eh?
I sometimes go for a cup of tea to the café in Waterstones bookshop which is in a beautiful old cinema. The café is on the first floor and I sit in the large bow window overlooking the street below which has some lovely Indian Bean trees and benches and I sketch people. It’s good fun because they don’t usually look up and so they’re completely natural.
This elderly man was cwtching a little boy, maybe his grandson? They were playing together and having loads of fun, tickling each other. They were hard to draw because they were moving about so much but I tried to capture the essence of them, rather than try and get a good likeness. It’s unusual these days to see a man and small child playing together and so wrapped up in each other. Delightful.
Ink sketch: Old man with tight trousers.
This old chap sat straight as a ramrod, possibly an old soldier. He stayed for some time, watching people pass by, so I was able to get a reasonable amount of detail in my drawing. He had the tightest trousers I’d seen in a long time!
I’m a frenetic scribbler, always sketching and I have thousands of drawings done over the years. It’s fun to go through old sketchbooks and see what I can do with the images. The drawing style I use most is the ‘continuous line’ method, where I keep the pen on the paper without taking a break and restarting in another part of the drawing and also hardly looking at the paper at all.
I find that this technique is great as the basis of a direct line monotype. I sometimes draw freehand with my sketchbook on hand for reference, but usually make a tracing of the original drawing from the sketchbook and tape this to the back of a piece of Fabriano 120gms before placing it onto a plate inked up very thinly with Intaglio Printmaker litho/relief ink. I use a sharpened 2H pencil and draw carefully but speedily to keep the spontaneity of line in the original drawing. Here’s one I did earlier.
We visited the USA a couple of times and spent some time exploring New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We went on a daytrip to Lancaster County, to the Amish area around the main market town of Intercourse [I kid you not]. It was amazing to see the hugeness of the countryside; flat land going on for what looked like hundreds of miles, punctuated by large wooden farmhouses and Dutch barns; no electricity pylons, motorways or any of the ugly accessories of modern life. The sky was as huge as the land and made for fabulous photographs and we saw lots of wooden covered bridges, like in the film ‘The Bridges of Madison County’, and Amish residents clopping across them in ancient traps.
In the centre of Intercourse was what passes for a mall in Amish territory, which was a small cluster of wooden shops and a little covered market selling home produced goods. The needlework was exquisite and we bought a small piece of patchwork which now hangs on our living room wall. In the centre of the market area was a jam-making ‘factory’, more of a large kitchen really, making gorgeous preserves in a very traditional way. We bought about 2 dozen jars to bring back as souvenirs, not sure if we were allowed to import them but we did anyway.
Back in New Jersey we just had to visit a Walmart. It was huge; the biggest supermarket I’ve ever been in. Despite that, we couldn’t find anything we wanted to buy. It was a bit of a let down and a bit scruffy. I sat and waited while Melvyn spent ages trying on sunglasses and did this drawing of him. There were bins right in front of me and they were pretty full. I was surprised because there were a lot of bins dotted around and that wasn’t something I’d seen at home, in Sainsburys or Tescos. Drawn with Faber Castell Pitt pens in an A6 Cotman sketchbook.
I don’t normally do portraits because I think they’re really HARD. I find it much easier to draw the human body, rather than the face, but now and again I have a go. It’s easier when you’ve been drawing the model for a while because you get used to them. The face is not only extremely complex; there’s no room for even the slightest mistake because it means the difference between a likeness and looking like someone else. I’d had some practice with this particular model; I’d drawn her many times before so I had already developed a sort of ‘shorthand’ for her features. The drawings are pastel and chalk onto sugar paper and the poses were between 5 and 10 minutes. I’m pleased with the results; the speed drawing freed me up from worrying too much about being accurate and they ended up being quite good likenesses.
Sparta, our two-year old tortoiseshell [calico] cat is simultaneously a tiny, sweet, adorable, cuddly little kitty and a rampaging murderous scourge of anything smaller than her that moves. Worse than that, she brings her prey into the house. People tell us she’s bringing us ‘presents’ but you know, I’d rather go without her little gifts. The worst thing of all is that they’re often alive when she throws them at our feet and we’ve often had to deal with terrorised rats, mice, voles and birds trapped in the house.
This morning we found a fairly large rat hiding in our hallway; it had probably been there all night. We devised a strategy to try and get it out the front door as it didn’t seem to be injured and it’s horrible to have to kill an animal. It was hysterical with fear and it’s not a good idea to get too close to a panicked rat, but eventually it rushed out the door. And all the while Sparta lolled about on top of the boiler in the kitchen, looking bored!
My father-in-law, who is a fluent Welsh speaker, told me about the Welsh ‘Cath Mis Mai’ translated as ‘The Month of May Cat’. According to Welsh tradition, you should avoid giving a home to a kitten born after the month of May as they will invariably bring their prey home. Sparta’s birth month? September!
Here she is in a pastel drawing I did on BFK Rives 250 gms paper that I had previously coloured with acrylic pigment mixed with acrylic medium and metallic powder.
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