Rhythms In The Garden ….

Every year, a chum holds a garden party on her birthday. Her organic garden is fantastic, hewn from a steep and uncompromising hillside, every inch of ground packed with exquisite flora. No flashy architectural hard landscaping, no astroturf, just the outcome of years of hard work and a great love of plants.

I don’t find it easy to draw plants, greenery, landscape, so I just let myself be guided by the play of water on the heavyweight Khadi paper, the randomness of the marks made with Derwent Inktense blocks and the rhythms of the musicians playing into the dusky evening.

The Welsh May Cat: Y Gath Mis Mai…

Pastel drawing: The Welsh May Cat.

Sparta Puss, our 14 year old Naughty Tortie, is a bit of 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 have to deal with terrorised rats, mice, voles and birds trapped in the house.

My late father-in-law, 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 Puss’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.

Husb In Blue…

Cyanotype portrait

I don’t always work from drawings although 90% of my work, or more, is based on sketches. Sometimes I have a bit of a play with photographic imagery and translate it into various forms of printmaking, this is cyanotype. Cyan is the colour blue and also the first four letters of cyanide and it’s this combined with ferric compounds that form the chemical basis for this, one of the earliest forms of photography. I took the photo of Husb at night in a rooftop restaurant in Lahore, Pakistan some years ago and gave him the cyanotype treatment.

Time For A Move …..

After 30 years of city-centre living, Husb and I are selling up and moving from our large inner-city Victorian terraced house to somewhere in The ‘Burbs. We’re looking for a “garden with a house attached”, more land, less house. We love our tiny urban garden and have made the most of it, but as we get older, we don’t need to be based in the centre of the city any more and we want to put our creativity into developing a beautiful and productive garden.

When Husb and I bought the house in the early 90s, there was a lot of hardboard everywhere, it was a fashion back in the 1970s and the house was still full of it. We didn’t know what was behind it until we ripped it off and found lovely original features, including 2 Victorian cast-iron bedroom fireplaces. We also have a rather plain 1950s fireplace in an anaemic pink that Husb decorated with patterned stickers as a Covid project.

All the doors were also covered in hardboard and when we took it off we found lovely glazed and panelled Victorian pine doors underneath. Some were recycled for kitchen cabinets. The rather lovely black ceramic Victorian door knob came from an architectural salvage place in Trecastell. We love rooting round in curious places for period pieces for our home. But now we’ll do it in our new house, wherever that may be.

This is a little glimpse of our Victorian Terrace and lovely garden – if you know anyone looking for a central location in Swansea near the beach, please pass it on. Here’s the brochure from our estate agents, Astleys.

A Head At A Gig … The Unruly One

A quick portrait sketch with a graphite block into my Khadi handmade paper sketchbook. I like the thick graphite with this textured paper, anything finer would struggle to be seen. This guy had lots of quite unruly hair and the thick end of the graphite block was ideal for scribbling a likeness.

Sketchbook Archives: 1

Bobbit in a drain

I started this blog in July 2011, almost 13 years now. I wanted an outlet for my sketchbooks as these are aspects of an artist’s practice that are rarely seen by other people. I had no idea I’d still be doing it all these years later, posting more-or-less every evening. The first two above are of Husb on our travels, we did a lot more travelling before Covid19. The first was when he fell asleep in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the second on a tram in Berlin. The final is of our late Tortie, Bobbit. She loved to sleep in a drain in the back garden on sunny days! Cats!!!!

A Head At A Gig…The Hat One

Husb and I went to a gig the other night ….. more of that in another post. Of course I had to have a quick scribble or two. This is my old mate Peter Crow, who plays with an awesome Gothic Folk Rock band (I hope I got that right) called Wild-Eyed, Wicked and Oblivious. Check them out, all their material is original.

It’s a challenge sketching people who are performing, they move around a lot and sing! But it’s good practice.

Fun With Skulls!

I run regular adult education sessions and this week I was demonstrating collage using a line drawing of a skull and a copy of National Geographic. The eyes are by Picasso, the nose by the Hubble Space Telescope and the rest are from an exhibition of dead stuffed birds. When it’s finished I’ll coat it with several layers of PVA glue to make it stiff and waterproof and it can be used as a mask.

Travels With My Sketchbook …

I always carry a sketchbook when I travel, I prefer to look at sketches rather than photos, they seem to take me back to that time and place more effectively than a snapshot that took a few seconds to capture. Although the scribbles are quick, they’re slower and take more attention and effort than photos, well, my photos anyway. Here are a few from New York City in 2008.

Faces From The Past…

I’ve been taking a stroll through the images I’ve posted on this blog over the years – I’ve been doing it since 2011. It’s been good for me to revisit the work, I tend to ignore sketches once I’ve done them, which is a pity because there’s often some good stuff there. Here are four from June 2012.