Inviting dark

I've been taking a break from trees and have made a couple of quick self portraits. The first in charcoal and conte crayon on hardboard which I primed last summer and had been using to stretch paper on. When I cut the stretched paper off it this evening, I decided that I liked the surface, which I'd primed and stained slightly white. I stained it some more with white gouache tinted pink with a little acrylic ink, then began working on my drawing while the board was still damp.

I drew myself sitting in the growing dark in the glowing white light from the television behind me.


When I'd done as much as I can tonight on this I began a really quick drawing on Ingres paper in fibre pens (various sized nibs), dark was falling fast by then and I found my place on the paper as much by instinct as sight. I had to give up after 15 minutes or so.


I really wasn't feeling half as severe or as fretful as I look in these drawings by the way.

I'm enjoying a book about Courbet at the moment. I really like his self-portraits, in which he looks the epitome of the 19th century Bohemian. I love Courbet's use of shadow, the dark and the black in his paintings enfolds the subject and draws in the viewer, it's an intimate and dramatic darkness that seems both provocative and inviting. I saw Buriel at Ornans in 2003 in Paris. What an astounding picture. No reproduction can convey the drama or the sheer size of the piece.

Black and White

So cold this morning that the condensation had frozen on the inside of my bedroom windows. It's been a long time since that happened!


So beautiful, and yet...brrrr....the old thermometer in our verandah has more white in it than red...it's been hanging there as long as I've lived in this house, so it's more than 40 years old...






The photo' above isn't of a bleak and desolate moorland landscape but a piece of fossil encrusted mud I picked up at Kilve Beach about 15 years ago. It's propped up against my bedroom window.


I've been working from life today, only managed 3 drawings, including this portrait of a weary looking Mom watching Loose Women. She said it doesn't look like her.


Earlier this morning I perched on a ladder upstairs on our landing to draw Mom's cardigan draped over a heap of laundered curtains and towells. I like the shapes, but my bum got rather numb sitting there for so long. It's been a very long time indeed since I worked in charcoal properly. When I was younger I liked the painterly qualities of this medium, I especially liked to use Conte crayon, because you could go very dark and moody with it. I never did like the messiness of it though, or the fact that it was so easy to smudge and ruin your hard work. Pen and ink is such a clean medium, if you can manage to avoid too many splats and blobs. But I still like the painterly moodiness of charcoal.

I've ideas for still life subjects I'd like to pursue with a mixture of drawing mediums, I'd like to work on a large scale too. But although I can see the collection of objects I want to draw in my mind's eye, do you think I can find them for real? I'll have to keep searching I suppose.