We have a big boiler in the kitchen and for the past seventeen years it was ruled by Bobbit, our recently deceased tortoiseshell [calico] queen. It’s been five weeks now since she died and in the past week Ming the Merciless, our next oldest cat, has grabbed the space and made it her own. For the first week or two after Bobbit’s death, she and Sparta took it in turns to sprawl on the boiler top, but after a few scuffles, Ming asserted her dominance and the coveted boiler is hers. It’s covered in cork tiles so it’s exceptionally warm and cosy but she has to share it with the bread maker and the kettle. No problemo. The kettle is warm as well and she’s happy to cwtch up next to it and even curl around it. The kettle is her new Best Friend Forever. I think this is one relationship that’s going to last and last.
Unless we decide to change to a small wall-mounted boiler.
No! NO MING! I didn’t mean it! AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
We have a glut of cooking apples this year and they’re a type that doesn’t store very well so I’m trying out as many apple recipes as I can find time to. Today I made Tinker’s Cakes, which are a variation on Welsh Cakes, a traditional Celtic dish, using apples and cinnamon instead of currants and nutmeg. The cakes are cooked on an iron ‘maen’ or ‘planc’ in Welsh, a griddle or bakestone in English. This is a very ancient way of cooking over a fire. Celtic cooking was done either in an iron cauldron, giving rise to one-pot dishes like Irish Stew, Lobscouse from Liverpool and Cawl, a Welsh lamb and vegetable soup, or a griddle. You can still buy cakes and breads cooked in this way from Swansea market and Scottish oatcakes, pikelets, crepes and pancakes are also part of this tradition.
We went for a run along the beach earlier so we were starving when we got back and I thought we deserved some nice Tinker’s Cakes hot off the maen, with some lovely Welsh farmhouse butter melting into them. We nommed the lot! I’ll have to do another run tomorrow to work off the calories!
I did a drawing of the cakes in my sketchbook while they were cooking. It’s in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and F with shading by FCP again, only this time their set of ‘Shades of Grey’ brush pens.
We have a glut of cooking apples this year and they’re a type that doesn’t store very well so I’m trying out as many apple recipes as I can find time to. Today I made Tinker’s Cakes, which are a variation on Welsh Cakes, a traditional Celtic dish, using apples and cinnamon instead of currants and nutmeg. The cakes are cooked on an iron ‘maen’ or ‘planc’ in Welsh, a griddle or bakestone in English. This is a very ancient way of cooking over a fire. Celtic cooking was done either in an iron cauldron, giving rise to one-pot dishes like Irish Stew, Lobscouse from Liverpool and Cawl, a Welsh lamb and vegetable soup, or a griddle. You can still buy cakes and breads cooked in this way from Swansea market and Scottish oatcakes, pikelets, crepes and pancakes are also part of this tradition.
We went for a run along the beach earlier so we were starving when we got back and I thought we deserved some nice Tinker’s Cakes hot off the maen, with some lovely Welsh farmhouse butter melting into them. We nommed the lot! I’ll have to do another run tomorrow to work off the calories!
I did a drawing of the cakes in my sketchbook while they were cooking. It’s in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and F with shading by FCP again, only this time their set of ‘Shades of Grey’ brush pens.
We have a big boiler in the kitchen and for the past seventeen years it was ruled by Bobbit, our recently deceased tortoiseshell [calico] queen. It’s been five weeks now since she died and in the past week Ming the Merciless, our next oldest cat, has grabbed the space and made it her own. For the first week or two after Bobbit’s death, she and Sparta took it in turns to sprawl on the boiler top, but after a few scuffles, Ming asserted her dominance and the coveted boiler is hers. It’s covered in cork tiles so it’s exceptionally warm and cosy but she has to share it with the bread maker and the kettle. No problemo. The kettle is warm as well and she’s happy to cwtch up next to it and even curl around it. The kettle is her new Best Friend Forever. I think this is one relationship that’s going to last and last.
Unless we decide to change to a small wall-mounted boiler.
No! NO MING! I didn’t mean it! AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
I volunteer regularly to babysit exhibitions at Elysium Gallery and it’s a chance to catch up on admin on the laptop like cataloguing photos and writing artist statements. This week it’s Bus Stop Cinema, featuring 13 films from international artists, an eclectic mix of art, drama, animation and parody. It’s fun babysitting in the dark and mostly I’m on my own with people popping in and out but no-one yet has had time to watch the whole cycle, so they watch one or two, have a bit of a chat and then off to carry on with their Thursday afternoon activities.
First in was an older local artist during ‘River of Mud’ by Jacob Dwyer and he showed me a small original oil painting he’d bought in a second-hand shop for four quid. The painting was a conventional but pretty landscape in a lovely old-fashioned, well-made stretcher.
Ink drawing: a corner at the old Elysium Gallery.
Another artist came in during Melvyn William’s first Downfall parody, ‘Jaffa Cakes’. We discussed the call for the forthcoming Venice Biennale fringe exhibition of work in vending machines and talked about the different ways of presenting artwork in a sphere with a ten centimetre diameter – folding, crumpling, digital imagery on a memory stick, tiny art……. which took us through ‘Interior Day’ by Elina Medley.
An older woman popped in during Jayne Wilson’s ‘All That Mighty Heart’ and told me about her skateboarding lessons and the disapproval of her neighbours that a woman of her age had taken up the skateboard. She’s learnt five manoeuvres; getting on, getting off, moving in a straight line, going up, going down. She left during ‘Dress, Cover, Interval, Distance’ by Lindsay Foster to go and finish re-pointing her garden wall before it rained again. A photographer of a certain age asked about opening times next week and we chatted about the Simulacrum exhibition that’s coming up and I gave him flyers for it and the Artawe website for local artists. That took us through David Marchant’s ‘Love Boat’.
Three people, also of a certain age, watched the animation ‘Re-Toiled’ by Sean Vicary and got right into it – it’s fantastical and a bit disturbing. The two men thought the second Hitler parody, ‘Self-service Tills’ , was hilarious but the woman found it quite difficult to get beyond the evil that Hitler stood for. No young people this afternoon, maybe because the students have gone home. All the visitors have been 40+. Like me. Nobody but me saw David Theobald’s ‘Greensleaves’ which is a pity because it’s really funny in a weird way.
The drawing is an ink sketch in my sketchbook of a corner of the last incarnation of the Elysium Gallery when it was situated in a large semi-derelict ex-brothel in Mansel Street. I used Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens.
Taking a break for a few days in Brighton, we went to see The Guard, hilariously funny film, at The Duke of York’s Picturehouse. It’s an independent cinema built in 1910 in a rather over-the-top Victorian style; one of those buildings that looks like a wedding cake, all white and stuccoed and covered with curly bits. The most distinctive thing about The Duke’s though is an enormous pair of shapely lady’s legs clad in black stilettos and black and white stripy stockings sticking out of the roof. It’s the sort of sight that makes you think someone’s spiked your drink with something nefarious.
I don’t know when they arrived, or why, but they turn a conventional municipal building into something rather groovy. There’s also a lovely mature passion fruit plant scrambling over the stonework. I stood more or less directly underneath the legs, so there’s some acute foreshortening going on. I’m not that keen on drawing architecture and those Victorians were way too fond of decoration for my liking and it made my job much harder – all that frippery took ages to sketch. The drawing is done in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens in sizes S, F and B into my folded sketchbook, which is why there is a colour cast over some of the drawing.
Earlier, we walked past the Royal Pavilion built for George the 4th, which is way over the top like a cross between St. Basil’s in Moscow and a giant exotic mosque, a fantastical building, but it’s a pity that Brighton and Hove Borough Council has decided to paint the entire thing in magnolia. Of all the boring colours on the planet, magnolia has to be the MOST boring.
We’re having a few days away on the English South coast in a very typical small seaside town with some friends and this very sunny morning we wandered down to a field by the seafront to a festival of vintage and custom motorbikes and cars, with leather-clad bikers, heavy rock bands and ………. the Women’s Institute cake stall. We discovered the 21st century version of the British Summer Fete!
There were loads of beautiful classic bikes – I fell in love with a gorgeous Velocette – and even a couple of Vespa scooters fully kitted out in 1960’s Mod style as well as dozens of Hot Rods and beautifully restored vintage cars. A young couple with a lovely little Hillman Minx were using it to pull a fantastic home-made caravanette, lovingly fashioned from plywood with the most amazing storage solutions and looking like a large grey woodlouse. The event was very cool and laid back but even so, perhaps because of jitters over the recent riots, there was a Police CCTV van on site with three bored officers lolling about in it with absolutely nothing to do.
The drawing is in ink using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens size S and F onto cartridge paper in a complex folded sketchbook, which I bought in May and which looks fab but is quite awkward to draw into when you’re out and about. I like drawing outside, I think that artists should be more visible and people seem to respond very well, without the hostility that photographers can face in public places. I liked this little hot rod with it’s bonnet up – it was like a cross between the Anthill Mob and The Yellow Submarine.
I’m not a natural born painter – I like scribbling and printmaking but I’ve recently been going over to the dark side and experimenting with paint, with varying success. Watercolours and Oils are a joy to work with and I’ve had one attempt at using Gouache, which I quite liked. However, Acrylics just leave me cold. I can’t get used to the plastic nature of them; the speed of drying; the intensity of the colours; and simply the way they feel on a brush or on my fingers. Acrylic seems to me like a very clumsy medium for painting – I’ve used it for screenprinting and it works beautifully.
I managed to do one life study in Acrylic which I’m reasonable happy with. We did some clothed studies of our model Theresa at our life drawing group and I managed to get this one done. I usually have lots of fine detail in my work; preferring to draw directly with very fine ink pens and incorporating fine drawing detail into my monotypes, so handling something as clumsy and opaque as Acrylic paint was a challenge. Anyway, here it is. It’s OK but I won’t be using Acrylic again in a hurry.
Cats are not easy to draw but at least they spend long hours completely immobile – fast asleep. I take advantage and get some sketching done. It’s doubly hard with Sparta because she also has very distinctive markings so drawings have to be accurate or they don’t look like her. This is a page in my sketchbook [Bockingford paper] using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens. The middle one looks quite like her.
I don’t often do portraits, preferring nudes and cats, but I’ve been trying harder to get a likeness over the past year because it’s good discipline and forces me to be not only very observant but also very accurate, which feeds into my professional development.
This is John, a life model I often work with but on this occasion I decided to draw a portrait instead of the figure. I used soft chalky pastels onto brown parcel wrapping paper. It’s a very large piece, about A1, and that gave me the opportunity to be very free with my mark-making. I tried to observe the Impressionist approach to colour theory and didn’t use any black; instead I juxtaposed complementary colours in the shadows. Despite the scribbly hatching, it was a very disciplined and planned piece. Oh, and it looks like him too. Result!
scribblah 