The sun came streaming through my studio window yesterday and cast this shadow of Felicity the skeleton onto the door. There’s a work in progress on the easel, a scaled up drawing from a life study in one of my sketchbooks. It’s in charcoal and pastels onto Somerset paper that has been previously coloured with a mixture of acrylic paint, acrylic medium and metallic powder. The model is a young soldier and I’m making a series of work based on him. Eventually I’ll also use this pose for a full-colour monotype. To the left of the easel are two more life drawings that will also be worked up into monotypes at some time.
One of the hardest things in creating a work of art is knowing when to stop. It’s too easy to keep on going and overwork something which then loses its spontaneity and liveliness. I find it useful to do formal drawing exercises to try and overcome this; things like speed sketching, drawing with a twig and ink [really frustrating], drawing with your ‘other’ hand.
This drawing was done in seconds using a square section chalky pastel into a hardbound A4 sketchbook. I used the pastel on it’s side rather than the sharp point so that I wouldn’t be able to get any fine detail, which freed me up to concentrate on getting a flowing motion across the paper and blocking in the main areas and proportions. It’s very free and simple but I think it is also very clearly a female figure. Whenever I find myself struggling with a major piece of artwork and fretting about whether it needs more detail, I do a few simple exercises like this one and it sorts of reboots me and helps me look at my work with fresh eyes.
Today I saw the chiropodist about the verrucae in my right foot and was transfixed for half an hour by his scientific lecture on the phenomenon of veruccae and viral infections. Turned out he did his dissertation on verrucae, luckily for me. I’ve had two on my right foot for some weeks now and my beast of an immune system has been fighting off the viral infection that causes them and giving me quite a bit of gyp along the way. It’s one of the many variants of the human papilloma virus. Apparently viruses are not strictly speaking living organisms as they only have four out of the seven criteria that denote life and the strain that causes verrucae are very clever at hiding themselves from adult immune systems so my own system has done well to seek them out and attempt to destroy them.
Ink and graphite drawing.
The first one died last week. I gave it a tug and out came a – thing – the size of a Jelly Tot. It was awesome. The second one is still in there but it’s on its last legs and should be dead soon. I feel like I’ve been invaded by an alien entity. It’s quite horrible. And it’s stopped me from running; for the first couple of weeks I could barely walk because it was so painful. Anyway, my poor old foot is on the mend so I thought I’d cheer it up by drawing its portrait this morning against the backdrop of my be-socked left foot. It’s all cwtched up with padding and plaster to ease the pain when I walk. It was fun observing how the round spots on the sock are distorted and drawing them accurately.
The drawing is in Faber Castell Pitt pens, sizes S, F, M and B with additional shading in FCP greytone pens and 6B graphite block into a Daler Rowney A6 sketchbook.
This is a very geeky blog today. I was chatting to some printmakers on LinkedIn earlier about the ‘suicide’ method of block printing [we love talking technique], where you produce a multi-coloured print using the same block, by progressively cutting away each colour. You end up totally destroying the block, so there’s little room for error and there’s no chance of ever doing a reprinted edition. I started this reduction lino block of family pet Rocky, a bearded dragon, by putting a digital photo through the Artistic: Cutout filter on Adobe Photoshop and printing out an image to the size of the block I was using. I also reversed the image and after transferring it, cut out the fragments of white and printed a pale orangey-yellow. Next I removed the orangey-yellow areas and overprinted in a Rhodamine Red mixed with white to give a rich pink. I use Intaglio Printmakers Oil Relief inks. I printed wet on wet to get a slightly ‘fizzy’ surface texture and to encourage some slight colour mixing. Then I removed the pink areaas and printed a rich brown, then grey and finally black. Lots of work! I ended up with an edition of 18 perfect prints, each about 15cms x 10cms. He’s a real cuteypie.
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!
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