A UFO FOR LISA

Let me introduce you to my painting of Rodney, who was lucky enough to meet Andy Warhol and get the Marilyn Monroe picture treatment (with the help of Photoshop).  

Rodney, or rather a photograph of him, was the model for an assignment on Lisa Wright's e-course.

Just after I had started the course I was suddenly diagnosed with cancer of the colon, followed rapidly by an op, and this did tend to interrupt my flow of work, just when I was enjoying myself and being 'stretched'.

(Lisa is just about to run her e-course again - details on her blog at http://all-the-wright-stuff.blogspot.co.uk).

When I used to do a lot of quilt-making and textile work we always called something that never seemed to get around to being completed a UFO - an unfinished object.  So this was the problem with Rodders, he was a UFO.

The actual assignment was about looking and looking and looking, ever more closely, and observing just a small area of the photograph of Rodney.  I chose a section of his beak, which had a network of cream-coloured lines forming an abstract design.

This is what emerged.  The more I looked, the more I saw, and I drew something I would never have drawn from any other inspiration.  Picking it up again the other day I added a few more lines and started to thicken some outlines.

It made me think of an outline map, with continents and islands.

At this point I had a bit of sense and photocopied it onto good quality cartridge paper, so that I could keep the original and then work on it further.

Doing this was very therapeutic and meditative.  I simply coloured in with black and red pens fairly randomly, but somehow the randomness made sense to me.  I'm pleased with it.  It's not a map now, it's an abstract that I'm happy with.

By this time I had got rather fond of Rodney, and although his full beauty was not part of the assignment I decided to paint him, or at least his head.  One of the things I have been trying to do for years is loosen myself up - I'm definitely a colour within the lines person.  So I forced myself to paint him very roughly and freely, using my Inktense pencils heavily and getting away from the smooth finish I usually like.

In other words, I was doing what Lisa always urged - take things further, be a bit braver. 

So here he is.  I underpainted the beak with creamy-grey Inktense and drew fine lines with masking fluid to indicate some of the lines on the beak.  Learning outcome:  I found that scrubbing heavily with Inktense pencil on top of dried masking fluid is not a good idea, the masking rubs off.  Never mind, this was an experiment.

I'm pleased that I went the extra hundred yards and learnt from the experience.  Rodney's propped up on my easel and I'm getting to like him.  Who's a pretty boy, then?

So this post was for you, Lisa, to show that I am determined to catch up on the work I missed.  The course did me so much good, and I miss it - Jez.

EGON AMADEO SCHIELE MODIGLIANI

I am so pleased with myself!  Yesterday morning I decided I had to stop doodling for the moment and try to get back to something a big more demanding.  So Assignment 5.2 of Lisa Wright's e-course beckoned me (and forgave me for temporarily missing out a few tasks in between).  This the first 'work' I've done since the operation, and I was surprised at how much my hand was shaking, but I persevered.

This assignment really made me think - which of course is what Lisa intended - and it took a lot more thinking about than I expected.


Firstly, it really needs two very contrasting styles - like the Vermeer/Picasso Lisa showed as her example, so I decided on Modigliani and Schiele.


Modigliani is one of my favourite artists, his lines and shapes and colours all so 'wrong' and yet so 'right'.

Egon Schiele is such a different 'kettle of fish'.  I love his lines and his use of colour - again so seemingly 'wrong'.  This painting of Walli, his model, is lovely.  The number of times I've tried to copy her face and capture the sad expression of her eyes and lips and never managed it.  (I think she's taking her pulse, actually).  No wonder she was sad, when after doing everything for him he upped and married someone else.


Now, as you know, Schiele was a bit of a weirdo, and definitely not the kind of man you would invite home for coffee or accept his invitation to pose for him.  Not that he was the only artist with peculiar artistic interests - try Rodin, for example, and I have a vague feeling Picasso too.

So this was the Modigliani painting of Juan Gris that I chose, partly because his head was already as a slight angle.  And this was the Schiele painting.

I chose this because it was not quite as bumpy or knobbly as many of his drawings.  I thought that if I went too much in the direction of Schiele there might be nothing of Juan Gris left.

To start off I did a quick sketch of Juan to provide me with a basis.

Not too clear because the pencil lines were quite faint.  So here's Juan by Egon Amadeo Schiele Modigliani.  I was fairly limited with colour because I am still using just the Inktense pencils.

I can't say that I'm particularly pleased with it, and would have liked a little more of Schiele in it, but Juan would have got lost.  In spite of that I'm happy that I made myself do it: I enjoyed the thinking, the process and the discipline of it.  So it has achieved what Lisa intended.


Just to finish I thought I would include one of my own sketches from my sketchbook, done towards the end of last year, of a gallery attendant in one of the Liverpool museums.  A lovely chap with thick spikes of hair sticking up, I don't know how but not with gel.  He said everyone wanted to photograph him, and I'm not surprised!

Feeling much better now and improving every day, and glad to be getting back to the real world.  Dev made scones this morning, just had one with coffee and it was gorgeous.  Eldest grandson (27) just rang and said he and his brother and sister are all home from down south and are about to come round.  Life is certainly not boring!

THE EYES HAVE IT

This is just to prove that I did do something on the 'eyes' project for Lisa's E-Course, even if it was not much in the way of drawing/painting.

I arrived in the hospital the day before the op in the late morning.  No bed available, but there was a hard chair in the corridor for me to sit on while they tipped someone else out of a bed and readied it to put me in.


So, apart from a break for a 'cuppa' and yet another blood test, I sat and waited on the chair.  Unfortunately it was the afternoon for the fire alarm to be tested - and tested it was, all afternoon!


So, it was me, a hard chair, my sketchbook, a few Inktense pencils and a water-brush ........ something to take my mind off things while I waited.  

It wasn't very convenient or conducive for drawing and painting, so I decided I would just write and write about eyes - almost stream of consciousness writing, with the odd scribbled sketch.  I thought of the way we like to see people's eyes when we talk to them, and how tough men and gangsters - and even the FBI in movies - always seem to wear dark glasses.

I got quite interested in what I was doing and shut the world out - which was fortunate because I sat there for 5 hours solid just writing and drawing!  I just thought about what eyes mean to us.  For instance, if you start to draw someone quite a distance away in a cafe, even if they have their back to you, do you find as I do that they turn round and look straight at you?

Are you influenced in making a decision about someone by the colour of their eyes?

Then I thought more about how unsettling it is when we can't see someone's eyes - and what if the eyes are replaced in an image by something completely alien ..... or not even there at all.

My scribbled sketches got worse and worse as the hours went on, as you can see and eventually I just came to a full stop.  At last I was given a bed in a nice small ward with just two other ladies, and so glad to lie down.

Later in the evening I picked up my Kindle to read a little.  Having written and drawn about masks, it seemed so co-incidental that the very next page was about a body hanging in a shed with a mask on.  Cheerful reading!


After the op the next day I had no 'go' for anything, and am just now feeling that I might be able to start sketching.  I try to make myself do something else each day - and this blog post is today's challenge. Very tired now - Goodnight.