It’s yet another #StandingStoneSunday and here’s a drawing I made of the fabulous King’s Quoit monument in Manorbier, Pembrokeshire. It’s been overlooking the sea here for about 5,000 years. It’s a spectacular location for a truly magnificent dolmen and also a lovely place for a drive and a day out.
It’s #Caturday Saturday once again and here’s a drawing from ages ago when I was still using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens. I don’t really know why I stopped, I generally use ballpoint pen now in my sketchbooks. I was chilling one evening with Sparta Puss stretched out on my lap, wearing some snazzy leggings and walking boots (me, not the cat). I liked the composition before me, so I had a scribble.
I’ve almost finished this painting of two siblings on Swansea Beach in the dark last summer. We went to see the bioluminescence in the bay and sat around a driftwood fire for a while, watching the stars. It was lovely. I took some photos and the painting is from one of those – many of the features are due to photographic effects, they’re not there in the eye. There’s just a tiny bit of tweaking left to do, I’m hoping it will be finished over the weekend.
I’m using Liquitex Heavy Body acrylic paints, mostly transparent and translucent, onto a recycled canvas.
I’ve been browsing through my files, looking at past work as I do from time to time. It’s good to get a bit of distance and take a second look at things, especially those I wasn’t too fond of first time round. I cut some small vinyl blocks, using random marks, about 4 years ago and overprinted them in Process Yellow, Magenta and Cyan. I thinned the inks a lot and was hoping for quite subtle colours, but they decided to shout loudly. I didn’t like these at the time, but now I love them – they zing!
I started cutting small lino blocks of text back during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. I intended to record 100 words and phrases that summed up my experience of the pandemic and lockdown, and work them into a three dimensional piece of art, but I found the process so depressing. It was too much for me while we were still going through the pandemic and since then I’ve found it hard to look back on my feelings at the time.
But I’m finally able to look at and work with them and I went down to Swansea Print Workshop this afternoon to print some. I’m working mainly onto fabric but I tried them out on paper first – proof printing them as new unprinted blocks are best “seasoned” first.
Just a couple of people standing around at the gallery the other evening. I scribbled them with a ballpoint pen into my A5 leather-bound sketchbook.
It’s #StandingStoneSunday on t’Internet today and here’s a view of the magnificent monument Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire. I drew it in ink and soft pastels onto a rough Khadi handmade paper. You can read more about my field trip here.
This short film from Cadw Wales shows how Pentre Ifan probably looked like when it was first built, surprisingly covered in, the stones we see now may have been just the skeleton of an even larger monument.
I did this when I was travelling across South Wales with pre-historian Dewi Bowen and filmmaker Melvyn Williams, making art while Dewi researched his soon-to-be-published new book, featuring the tale of Y Twrch Trwyth (The Boar Hunt) from the Mabinogion.
It’s #Caturday / Saturday again and here’s the little fluffy tyrant, Sparta Puss, photographed, scanned, uploaded into Adobe Photoshop and put through the Threshold adjustment to turn her into a stark black and white image. There’s a reason I was doing this – more to come on that …..
Husb and I went to the opening of an exhibition of glorious collaborative prints by Welsh artist Sarah Hopkins and Pakistani artist Muhammad Atif Khan at Studio Griffith in the Dynefor campus at University of Wales Trinity Saint Davids, SA1 3EU. And that’s a pretty big opening sentence!
The show is called Diptych and runs until Saturday 4th March during college opening hours. There’s also an interesting film of the way they collaborated to produce this exciting and luscious group of artworks.
Of course, I had to have a scribble! Would be rude not to!
I work part-time for a national charity, teaching art to adults. I love it, it brings me such joy. One of the techniques I use occasionally in my painting class is copying great paintings, encouraging my students to understand how the great artists worked and how they achieved their effects. This latest one (it’s my demonstration copy) is by the French Impressionist Claude Monet.
I started painting these “fakes” during the first Covid19 lockdown, following the painter Ed Sumner on Facebook who kept up a weekly painting tutorial, The Cheese and Wine Painting Club, for almost two years to raise people’s spirits as well as give us something really interesting and fun to do.
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