Spider Alley, the place only the bravest children dare enter. Brave the sticky webs and wrapped bundles of mummified bugs, spun and wrapped, ready to stick in your hair. Run, run, run! … Read More
I’m not a big fan of paint, I’d rather draw or make prints, but I like to use watercolours to add colour and pattern to some of the life drawings I do in pen and ink. I prefer watercolour to coloured ink because it has a lightness and transparency to it and in practical terms it will wash out if you spill it; definitely a consideration when you’re as clumsy as I am. I go through phases of working in black and white, usually just with Faber Castell Pitt pens, and then get a hankering to use colour for a while.
Some artists prefer to concentrate on the figure when they’re drawing from life but I want to put the figure into context; I think it helps with getting proportions and foreshortening right. The Life Drawing studio at Swansea Print Workshop has large mirrors which are useful for getting a different perspective of the model and it’s great to get two views in the same drawing.
I’ve done the initial drawing here in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens and then added the watercolour with a stiff straight edge sable brush to give a choppy sort of effect. I haven’t used watercolour in the traditional way, overlaying delicate transparent glazes, because I want strident colours and definite brushstrokes. I’ve used Windsor and Newton half-pan artist quality watercolours. In the near future, I’ll be using this drawing as the basis for monochrome direct monotypes and full-colour reduction monotypes.
This is Felicity and she’s borrowed from another artist; she’s living in my studio at the moment and looks out into the street over the bus stop, scaring passengers who look up.
Why do I draw from a skeleton? It’s partly technical, to understand the beautiful mechanics of the human body which helps me with my life drawing. As an artist who works mostly with the human body, particularly with nudes, studying anatomy helps improve my artistic practice as I can better understand what’s going on under the skin, proportion, movement, foreshortening….. I’m lucky that I can share my studio with a skeleton as I can do a bit of anatomy whenever I want.
But there’s more to it than that. Having Felicity here constantly reminds me that we are ethereal creatures, here for such a short time and that all too soon we’ll end up just like her. It also reminds me that we are very alone. Our bodies are barriers to the universe, keeping ourselves inside and everything else outside. We can never really know what anyone, or anything, is thinking, feeling, experiencing or even if they see, smell, hear the same things as oneself. In a world teeming with billions of people, and even more billions of other life forms, each of us is essentially locked in to our own tiny fragile body. It’s a source of wonder to me that we manage to form societies and civilisations; that we put aside our separation and isolation to interact with each other and the world around us.
I don’t find children easy to draw. They’re like animals and birds, they’re not still unless they’re asleep so sketches have to be very quick and you’re lucky if you get an accurate likeness. Here’s a page of sketches I did of Owain when we took him to the local milkshake bar. He was chuffed to find that he could have a milkshake made with a Curly Wurly. I know it’s not healthy but aunties are allowed to spoil nephews and nieces. I did some quick scribbles in between slurps of milkshake [of course, I had a fruit smoothie].
The bottom sketch looks reasonably like him. It’s easier to draw older people because features are stronger and more defined and there are more points of reference like wrinkles and saggy bits. A child’s head also has completely different proportions, with the face being ‘scrunched’ up into a smaller part of the head – it stretches as the child grows older. Noses are littler and cuter and eyes look much larger. Bit like aliens really.
Faber Castell Pitt pens into a Fabriano sketchbook.
I’ve never had much time for Jeff Koons’ work, I had thought it superficial and cynical until one of my visits to New York City when I finally made it down to the World Trade Centre. It was difficult to see the construction at Ground Zero because of all the fencing and the crowds of people milling round, but then I walked up onto a bridge above the area and I was shocked at the hugeness of the site and the depth of the hole in the ground. What I’d seen on television didn’t prepare me for this, for the extent of the destruction.
I walked around the area and there was a small plaza with Jeff Koons’ massive red polished steel sculpture, Balloon Flower [Red], reflecting everything about it. I’d only seen Koons’ work before in magazines or TV documentaries, never in context and in this case, context is everything. The sculpture is beautiful, uplifting and fun and is a wonderful antidote to the sadness that you feel when you see Ground Zero and remember what happened. If we allow ourselves to remain sad and not experience laughter and joy then the tiny minority of fanatics in our species will have won.
This ink drawing was done in Faber Castell Pitt pens into a Tate ‘landscape’ sketchbook. The World Trade Centre construction site is in the background.
I don’t often draw landscapes, I prefer people or occasionally cityscapes as my subject but as we live in such a beautiful part of the world we often stop for a long walk while we’re out driving and find new places to explore and draw. We found Carew on one of our impromptu drives to West Wales. It’s in Pembrokeshire and the ruined Medieval castle and tidal mill are on the site of an ancient Iron Age fort. An eleventh century intricately carved Celtic Cross stands outside the castle entrance.
The tidal mill is opposite the castle ruins, across a substantial mill pond and one has been on this site since the 1500’s, although the current one dates from the early 19th century. It’s a very quiet and atmospheric place. The day we visited had some very dramatic weather conditions with huge clouds and eerie early evening Autumnal sunlight which made it all seem very spooky.
Part of the Celtic Cross.
The drawing is done in Faber Castell Pitt pens into a Cotman Watercolour sketchbook and the photograph has been digitally altered in Adobe Photoshop. I had to lean over the top of a rickety bridge to scribble and it was challenging drawing moving water with pens. The water flowed quickly as it’s tidal and so the subject was constantly changing.
I’ll scribble anywhere and platforms on the tube are great because you can often get crowd scenes and people tend to stay reasonably still. When I went to New York City I sketched on the subway – loads of homeless people sleep down there and you could find them tucked away at all hours and sometimes former homeless subway people collected on the trains for charity. I saw these two young men one day sleeping at 34th Penn station, their bodies adopting the same position.
Ink drawing: Large woman from the NJT.
Trains are good because there are captive subjects and if you’re lucky you can sit down too. I stayed in New Jersey and travelled in to NYC on the New Jersey Transit [NJT], which had these odd seats that you could turn round so they were either seating a twosome or a foursome. I tried speed sketching when we pulled into stations and caught this woman standing on the platform. I don’t often get the chance to draw someone of this size and it was interesting to see how her lower body hung down over her legs. It may seem voyeuristic but I guess that’s something we artists have to come to terms with. I found the difference between the haves and have-nots very pronounced on my USA visits and I think you can see that in these two drawings.
I drew this alien as I was walking home from the supermarket. They appeared suddenly all over Swansea and this one is at the bottom of Wind Street by the old subway which is now filled in. It eyeballed me as I turned the corner so I stopped and eyeballed it back and did this ink sketch. Some people say that the Council put them there for people to stub out cigarettes and dispose of chewing gum. But that’s just a cover. They’re aliens really and they’re just waiting…………
Ink drawing: homeless disabled man in Grand Central Station.
I’ve been to New York City a few times and it’s a great place for drawing people. One of my favourite places is Grand Central Station. There’s a large Dining Concourse with a beautifully painted ceiling and little stalls around the edge selling all sorts of food – Middle Eastern, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Indian, American…… and you buy what you want and sit in the middle to eat. It seems to be a great leveller; you’re as likely to sit next to a smartly turned-out executive in an expensive cashmere coat as a homeless person. I loved drawing there as people were really interested and friendly and came to chat.
I went back quite often and there seemed to be a lot of people who stayed there all day, possibly homeless and I drew some of them. They sometimes fell asleep and security officers would wake them up but rarely moved them on. I saw this man several times. He was very clean and tidy but was usually sleeping in his wheelchair and had one leg amputated and wore a very basic prosthetic; the other leg was heavily bandaged and he wore an orthopaedic shoe. I wondered what his story was but I was too shy to ask him. This drawing was done on Easter Sunday and although I’m not religious, I found it even more poignant to see someone in such a sad situation on that day.
I was very shocked at the amount and condition of street people I saw in NYC. I know we have problems here but it seemed to be on a much larger scale and of course, there’s no National Health Service in the USA. We should be grateful for what we have. The drawing is done with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into a small Cotman watercolour sketchbook.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to visit friends based at the Princeton University Institute of Advanced Studies in the USA. I was expecting New Jersey to be a cross between a Bruce Springsteen song and The Sopranos but I had a surprise because it was beautiful. The university campus is an odd mix of all sorts of architectural periods; rich benefactors endow buildings and seem to prefer historic styles, even to having mature trees transplanted in front of their buildings so they look very old and well-established instead of newbuild faux Victorian or whatever. I’m a keen gardener so I know how hard it is to keep a large transplanted tree alive and to stop it from falling over. That’s REAL money.
Our friends had a wonderful Bauhaus style apartment in a development of similar units set in parkland. The layout was a piece of brilliant modern open-plan design, spacious and airy with a vacuum cleaner that sucked dust into the cavity wall. Cool. We’re so used to modern architecture that it’s easy to forget that how revolutionary this stuff was when it was first built and this complex is one of the best examples I have seen.
While I was there my friends drove me up to visit the Printmaking Centre of New Jersey, about 45 minutes through beautiful Autumn countryside that reminded me of Powys back home except the houses were mostly made from wood. Eventually a tall rickety wooden building came into view that resembled Bates’ Motel from the film Psycho. It was the printmaking centre and it looked very sinister. I told my friends but as they’re Danish and Pakistani, they didn’t get the cultural reference and thought it was quaint. It spooked me out at first but inside is lovely with loads of printmaking facilities and a gallery.
I did this ink drawing in my sketchbook of Melvyn, my husband, looking out of the Bauhaus apartment through the large picture window onto the parkland in Princeton. You can see electrical cables clearly; I was surprised to see so many wherever we went; most cabling in Britain is buried. It was also the first place that I saw black squirrels, but they’ve now arrived in the UK.
Spider Alley, the place only the bravest children dare enter. Brave the sticky webs and wrapped bundles of mummified bugs, spun and wrapped, ready to stick in your hair. Run, run, run! … Read More
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