RAIN STEAM SPEED

Typical April showers today, hail, torrents, sunshine and spring chills.

Still it's been productive for me as I've had a whole day to pace myself over my new drawing, which I've temporarily called 'Contrary Motion'. The title's vaguely recalled from a piano tutorial piece - I tried teaching myself keyboard a couple of times and both times ran out of steam or time. Maybe 3rd time lucky some day, who knows?

Anyway here's some detail of my work in progress...


My shoulder and neck, which have been giving me real pain since last October, have been better of late. I don't know if it's the effect of visiting my GP and the GP offering to refer me to hospital for pain management (just the though that someone cares a little often helps with pain, and vica versa, so I find) of if it's the Glucosamine I've been taking (I can't swallow the tabs so I crush the up and hide them amongst my food. My tastebuds find them out though. Oh, they taste horrible!) or whether it's just the milder weather. I'm also doing simple exercises when I remember and or feel the need. I try to take breaks from my drawing, and today my motivation has been a) to hoover and b) to edge a little closer towards clearing the ivy and brambles which have overrun our shed. Hopefully eventually I'll find some way of re-covering the roof. The wind tore the felting off a few years ago and it's a very very sad sight now. Saggy in the middle like a gone wrong cake.

I find that if I parcel what I want to do up into bite sized chunks my energy goes further and I'm not in pain so much.

Anyway, I bit off quite a bit of my drawing today, ably assisted by Radio 4Extra: More Titanic, a history of childhood and Slipstream. Here's how far it's got me.

Turning over a new (and another new) leaf

I'm using my new Kandahar Ink for this drawing. I haven't been able to get any of this ink for years now, and I was chuffed when I found some on-line. But it doesn't seem as black as I remember it.




Maybe it's just me.

Sleepy and busy bees

It's been a lovely spring like day today and G & I drove to Lower Brockampton, a beautiful NT property in Herefordshire. It was really quiet, I took lots of photographs and my shoulder, which has been causing me problems since last autumn, felt a little easier at last.

It's so difficult to get away from the din of traffic, even on NT properties. But there were moments today where the traffic dimmed to a distant drone. Even busy bees could get some sleep, like this one I noticed curled up fast asleep in a daffodil.


Yellow really was the colour of the day.


I'm progressing on May Gate at last. I hope to finish it this week.

Drawing in - the nights

In a way I'm relieved that the nights are begining to draw in, even though they do so with remarkable speed. 7.30 sunset tonight, far too early.

And yet, this summer especially the garden has held me ransom. The hours I've spent seeing to our flowers, the tomato plants (they're heavy with tomatoes now, I don't know what to do with them. I don't even like tomatoes!), reading, sitting in the sunshine, snatching it when I can. And time, being so precious this year, as it was last year, nudges me further into obsession. This year more than any year I've felt almost driven to soak up as much of what passes for fresh air round here, earlier in the summer I sat out as long as I could until our solar lights came on, lighting up the garden path like a runway (Santa stop here!)

Tonight, a bumble bee, heavy with pollen or perhaps just tired out at the end of summer, has fallen asleep on the dropping sunflower near the veranda. I know how it feels. Sated on summer.

So now, the nights are drawing in, and I am freed to sit under the daylight lamp and work at my drawings. My neglected craft.


I think I began this drawing as much to keep chugging away at something as with any real intention at art. And it's been extremely slow progress, extremely frustrating. At least now I'm covering paper, but I don't know if I'm finding a pattern yet. I don't know if I will.

Last night I began a new drawing. A refreshingly simple subject, unemcumbered by detail. Or at least, keep the detail to a small area and surround it with painterly light and shade, pen and ink. Plus the pen glides more comfortably over the yellow Ingres paper than it does over the white watercolour paper. And at this moment I crave comfort.


I got a chance to give a first listen to one of my Christmas presents this evening. The National's Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. Gorgeous.

Bright Water

I have developed a very strange twitch in my right eye, I've had it since last Thursday. Probably I'm just a bit tired at the moment, but it's uncomfortable.

So today, apart from continuing with the home repairs that have gobbled up the last few weeks of my life (it feels like forever) I have been dashing into the garden between showers to sit in the warm and windy outdoors reading a biography of Gavin Maxwell I borrowed from the library, which is totally fascinating.

It's a sign that I've managed to find a little bit of space this week, that ideas have started to bubble up again. But they are frenzied kind of ideas, so many of them, so various, that I become paralized by choice. So while I'm happy that my creativity hasn't died totally, I am uncomfortable as I usually am when the dearth becomes a kind of creative death as I am plunged into a frustrated impasse.

I've managed to do about half an hour's work on my drawing. This is the first time I've touched it since my last blog entry on the subject. I'm struggling with enthusiasm for it, but I must finish it over the next few weeks, I can't give in to the impulse to let another thing go.

Googling Gavin Maxwell I found this lovely blog. Wish I could take it outside with me to read, or to work, where I will be tommorow, for my brief commute. It makes me yearn to be in Scotland again. Really does.

PROGRESS AND PRE-RAPHAELITES...

...and the Royal Wedding of course. I'm not really a monarchist but I watched every minute of it yesterday with Mum, and I think it was pretty special. Anything that cheers a gloomy nation up can't be half bad.




I've finished 'untitled' in all but name. I can't think what to call it at all.

Continued progress on Secret Dancer...



...and something new...



I've actually progressed quite a bit more on Secret Dancer but despite the Bank Holidays (which I was desperate for) I still can't find the time to do all the things I want to do...including relax, which I really NEED to do.

I did however get to the Pre-Raphaelite Drawing exhibition at Gas Hall. I loved this excellent exhibition, despite the slightly confusing layout and presentation being not quite as slick as it could have been. It was fantastic seeing the famous names alongside the not so famous ones. It was nice to see John Brett's work again (The Barber Institute's exhibition Objects of Affection was wonderful last year), and quirky moments like Dante Gabriel's drawing of Christina Rossetti throwing a temper tantrum. Christina Rossetti is one of my poetry hero's. A new name for me is Simeon Solomon, I wish I'd seen the retrospective held at the Gas hall in 2006. There was a fantastic pen and ink drawing by him which I really loved and got totally lost in, one of those moments when I wished I could climb up the wall and disappear into the picture.

11.4.11

What a nice symmetrical date for today.

I've just got back through sunshine and showers from delivering my picture to a courier (Picture Post) to enter in another Open. Don't know how lucky I'll be this time.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, more like July than April. I spent most of it walking through the woods at Lower Brockhampton with G, taking photographs, marvelling at how everything has suddenly burst into life. The woods were a carpet of starry white wood anenomes, but there were also a few early bluebells too

I woke very early yesterday morning, determined to get a little work done. I masked off my current work in progress and flicked a little black acrylic paint on the unmasked areas.

Later this evening and tommorow I'll work some more into the darkly shaded areas, keeping the mask on for a while, because I want these areas to be more intense than the rest of the piece.


I began a new piece based on a photograph I took a couple of years ago. I've dithered for ages over begining this piece making experimental sketches since last summer really. The shape of the tree is so suggestive I've decided to call this picture Secret Dancer. I began with a clean wash of pink and blue, and began drawing into this with my usual dip pen and ink. However, I wanted to give it a quick shot of shade, to define the areas of darkness in the tangled undergrowth (the skirt of the dancer). So again, I made a mask by tracing the drawing through greaseproof paper and shading in the areas I wanted to be dark. Then I cut these areas out...

...then sprayed red acrylic ink and diluted black acrylic paint onto the piece...

...removed the greaseproof paper (when it was dry) and now I have a more solidly defined area of light and shade to work into. I wanted to do this as I was feeling a bit lost and frustrated seeing and knowing the rhythms I wanted to build in the picture but struggling to construct anything. Now, hopefully, I can begin to build those rythms of shade and shape a little more confidently.

It struck me as I was cutting out the areas I wanted shaded in my mask, that the dancing tree is shaped a little like the UK. And when looked at from side on, the splattered greaseproof paper looked a little like a beach pitted with rockpools.

Islands of paper floating on a cutting mat.

Mellow Yell oh

I've progressed more quickly than usual on my new drawing, which I haven't got a title for yet.

I've used acrylic ink and coloured pencil to add colour. The horizontal orange lines aren't part of any squaring up process, I added them after I'd made the initial drawing as I thought the diagonal thrust of the composition needed a little horizontal smoothing, or soothing.


I'm hoping to finish it this week.

Entertainment while I work has so far been provided by Count Arthur Strong, who was excellent last night at Stourbridge Town Hall. Clever, quirky, and very very funny.


Yellow is the new showdrop white.

Sunshiny day

The weather is fooling us spring is here. But now the sun is setting, the birds are still singing, but it's getting chilly again. Nice while it lasted through.

I've been to collect my Blue Tree from Oakengates today, not such a long journey but as it was 2 trains, and the one to Shrewsbury runs only one an hour, it was a sizeable chunk out of my day. At my local station I was bemused to see a notice declaring 2 service cancellations due to 'no crew' being available. Cutbacks everywhere.

I've managed to creep forward a little more on my new piece, which I'm calling Listen.


I'm aware of this becoming a claustrophobic drawing, partly because of the green, which can be a smothering and claustrophobic colour (except when it's in nature, of course), as well as because of the detail. I've become very involved in the distant tree (as I so often do, backgrounds draw me into them, perhaps because I am one of nature's wallflowers). I do have a plan though, more of which later.

Splodges and seeds

Mom and me have taken to feeding the birds that come to our garden. I bought a couple of dispensers from our local pound shop and some cheap bird food, suet based and seed, some of which the birds seem to love and some of which they don't.

It's funny to watch the littlest birds work so industriously worrying the seeds out of their mesh dispenser, and the fat, cumbersome, apparently lazy wood pigeons flutter down to grub around in the long grass for the seeds and suet pellets they drop. The pigeons are clever, letting the little birds do all the work so that they can reap the benefits. Not so different to some humans.

I'm so glad the UK government have shelved their plans to sell off Forestry Commission land. I'd like to think it's because they were moved by the mass of public protest, but the cynic in me says they probably just realised that all the trouble they'd have to go to selling the land wasn't worth the meagre funds they'd raise.


Work is progressing excruciatingly slowly on my green picture. I've done quite a lot of splodging too, much harder to disguise on a green base. I've tried to treat it as David Cox might have done, by elaborating on the splodges and trying to work them to my advantage, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes a splodge is destined to remain just a splodge.

This week, I've been continuing to enjoy Mozart and his letters. Also Never Let Me Go, a beautiful and unsentimental film who's message surpasses the plot. We're all donors and we all complete. That's what I'm taking from it.

LISTEN

The birds have just stopped singing. A car engine starts up, its drone monotonous and bold.

More progress on my green drawing, which I've decided to call 'Listen'. Actually the title came pretty much with the begining of this piece.


I've pretty much wrecked the photographs I'm working from but the cost of Tri-colour cartridges for my inkjet printer are so pricey I'm loathe to print again. So I'm squinting round the ink blots and attempting to exercise my imagination, memory, and whatever else mysterious processes are at work to finish this piece.

Which I hope to do soon. The less time I have, the less patience too.

I wish I could work on more than one piece at simultaneously but time, space and temperament won't let me, at least at present.


I've been reading Mozart's letters. Anyone who loves Mozart should read this book. He's my obsession at the moment. His music is one of the few glimmers of light in my life right now. It inspires, moves, comforts and energises me. The very best of medicine.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOZART!

I've been loving the music of Mozart since Radio 3 began the year with their Mozartfest. I'm listening to the Magic Flute and reading the libretto, though Mozart's highly dramatic and emotionally rollercoastering music conveys so much without words.

I'm hoping something musical might infuse my new drawing, as well as the vivid green ink I've stained the watercolour paper with.


I prepared the paper last year, I can't remember why I decided to stain it green, but I'm glad I did now. It was waiting for these lines to grow on it.


This mighty oak tree brings home all the more to me how crass, selfish and utterly immoral the current Government idea to sell off our (note that word 'our' - what the Government plan to do is basically theft) forests. They say it's necessary to plug this deficit, but I don't know. The only certain deficit I can see is the moral one.

If you disagree with what the Government plans to do with Forestry Commission land, please sign one or both of these petitions.

Forestry Commission's petition.

38 Degrees Petition

Drawing to a close.

This has been really strange year for me, since starting a new job back in March I've been slowly paying off debts and struggling to remain creative. I think Blue Tree is the only thing I've done this year that I really feel pleased with, since starting working full time that is. I've certainly not achieved anything near the quality of PW PW 2001, which was the last thing I completed before starting working full-time.

I'm trying to finish off a few pieces at the moment. First, my most recent piece in progress, which I'm calling Long Winter for the time being.

Then 1947 Ford, which I'm not entirely pleased with. It started off well, but there are more things that I don't like about it than those I do. I've tried to diffuse the pink coloured pencil by adding a little yellow and splattering it with more white gouache. I do like the textural effects of gouache layered over pen and ink and gesso. The coloured pencil goes with this combination better than I had expected.

And here's something I dug out last week, it's a drawing of snowdrops which I abandoned earlier this year. I like the juxtaposition of ink and gouache and the softening effect of the Ingres paper it's worked on. Maybe I'll try and finish this too, but I don't know if I'll do it before New Year's Eve.

Lost camera, Open All Media...

Work in progress. I've had to scan my drawing (or a part of it) because I've lost my camera!

And on the reverse of my current work in progress is this abandoned one.

Last week I had a drawing accepted for the RBSA's Open All Media exhibition. It's the last drawing I made right at the begining of this year, before I began working full time, and it's the last good thing I've done. I exhibited it earlier this year at Worcester, it's called PW PW 2001.

1947 Ford

I'm having all kinds of problems with my computer lately, so I'm tending to avoid it. Lest I go around breaking windows with flying PCs.

I've got to try and finish this today...


Out of frustration I've layered some red and white coloured pencil on top of the pen and the gesso I'd painted the paper with. The gesso is mixed witih gouache and acrylic paint, and it's not such a comfortable surface to work on with the dip pen as I'd hoped.

I popped into the only art shop I can walk to during my lunchbreak from work on Tuesday - High Town Art Shop in Chapel Ash. I bought a couple of nibs and my own stock is quickly diminishing. The lady in the shop told me that they were still manufactured by a company local to where I live, they're based in Oldbury. Birmingham used to famously produce steel pen nibs years ago, the Museum and art gallery have a huge display of pen nibs from one of the old firms there and I believe there is (or used to be) a pen museum. But it's good to know that these nibs are still being produced. Don't know what I'd do without them.

Black and white to colour

More progress on my new drawing, which I think I'm going to call 1947 Ford.

I'm playing around with a colour version too, this is the start of it.


My working title is 'long golden'.

I've been trying out ideas for colour work in my sketchbooks, I've an idea of calling this one Golden Stretch, or something like that. The foreground tree has the presence of a figure for me, which is something that happens quite a lot with my tree drawings.


Both of the colour works are pure colour pencil, using Coloursoft and the wonderful Luminance.

Waxing eloquent

The drawing board I'm using for my blue tree is actually the top of an old coffee table that collapsed a few weeks ago. It's very heavy, and the rounded corners aren't practical (it wouldn't sit still for me when I photographed it, hence the wobble in focus) but as I'm short of boards for new pieces I'm not complaining.


I would really like to begin several pieces and work on them side by side, but I've not got the space to do this. In fact, for such a huge place this world seems to offer less and less space in which to manouvre, I've lost so many pen nibs lately by sweeping them onto the carpet. They bounce and come up with crooked Concord noses. Which is annoying as these fine pen nibs are really difficult to come by.

On Saturday G and I went to Westonbirt, a wonderful place this time of year. Autumn is an annual 'event' and you're rarely alone with the trees, except if, like us, you linger 'til the very end (well as near to it as light allows). There was a lovely moment beneath a canopy of softly yellowing leaves listening to the pine needles and seeds dropping into the mulch around our feet. We were being watched of course, by an absent minded squirrel. Wonder if he'll remember where he's hidden his treasure?

I came back with treasure of my own, including this curious seed case, which was bright red when I found it on the ground. I think it came from a magnolia tree, which was aflame with these peculiar things, held upright like candles which gradually split apart to allow hard orange berries to peer through, like so many alien eyes.

True blue electric blue

I don't know why but my blue tree seems quite edible to me. Maybe it's because the white speckles make me think of icing sugar...


...yes, if I could eat this picture it would taste very sweet and have a crisp, slightly greasy surface, dusted with icing sugar like an expensive French pastry.

I've been playing around with ideas for more colour work...



My use of colour here is purely instinctive, maybe a little emotional. But there's nothing intellectual about it at all.