EXCITING WAY TO SPEND A SATURDAY MORNING!

Last Saturday was the first day of the Tate Liverpool 'Drawing the Line' course, and I'm looking forward to the second session tomorrow.

This first session was really exciting and thought-provoking.  We started with a quick tour of the new exhibition and other exhibitions in the gallery with guidance from Stephen Ashton, our Course Leader.  Back in the workroom Stephen talked about what we were going to do, and the rationale behind it, focussing exclusively on 'line'.

Then it was out to the gallery for half an hour, armed with a new A3 sketchbook and pencil - no pens allowed in the galleries - where we were to focus on a Jan Arp sculpture and render it only with line. 

Now this may look just like a page of scribble to you, but to me it was a fascinating process.  Instead of focussing only on one image per page, I drew it once quite quickly, moved my chair, drew, moved and kept moving round it in this way until I had drawn it several times and was back where I started.

This process and the way it helped me to learn about and understand the piece during the process really pleased me, and I felt I was investigating its energy.

We were free then to move around and choose our own subjects.  This 'Standing Mobile' is one I always like.

Not the correct reason for choosing it.  As soon as I had finished I realised I had selected it because it was easy to draw ... so it was rather a waste of time.

This is a section of a John Chamberlain 'assemblage' combining bits of old cars.  I really didn't want to draw it because the whole 'crushed car' shape is so complicated, but I had stern words with myself and set to with just a section in the minutes before we had arranged to meet back in the workroom for a discussion of what we had done.

Very concentrated effort, and quite tiring, but happy with the result.  Time up, and we went back to the workroom again for more discussion and viewing of what we had all done.  

At this point we were encouraged to use brush and ink to continue our investigation of line for another half-hour, but I decided to draw just one more piece from the exhibition.

This drawing by Philip Guston grabbed my attention, because it is such a simple, almost naive drawing, and yet there is such mystery and menace in the composition.  I was, and still am, intrigued by the mysterious figures and the grouping.

I do apologise for the quality of the photos above - I blame the terrible dark skies we've had for days and the difficulty of photographing pencil drawings, even with flash.

Back in the workroom to use brush and indian ink, in spite of the fact that I was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse!

All the pen and ink versions were painted from memory.  The image above is an approximation of the Jean Arp sculpture in the 'scribble' drawing.

Still intrigued by these figures - so speedily painted with the ink that I didn't even realise the central figure is balanced precariously on a chair with no leg - and lack of advance planning left no room for the last figure.

Stephen had pointed out that this Guston drawing was about the KKK - so I keep wondering what the child (if it is a child) is doing in the group, and painted this selection.

After a bit more discussion there were just about 8 minutes left of the morning.  Altogether we had produced everything in about an hour, but I decided to grab the moment and go out into the Foyer to draw one of my all-time favourite sculptures.

This is just a section of Epstein's 'Jacob and the Angel' sculpture, so much solidity and power.

By this time I was really quite tired and chose my viewpoint by managing to find room on a bench opposite this side of the sculpture.

I decided to finish the morning by doing a blind drawing - keeping my eyes on the sculpture from start to finish.  My concentration was broken by a voice with a Spanish accent saying 'Are you drawing that without looking?' 

I explained about blind drawing and its benefits to the young man and his girlfriend next to me who hadn't even come to the gallery because of an interest in art, but because it was raining and they had to wait quite a while before their train was due to leave!  But I was really pleased with the drawing I'd managed in a few minutes.

At home this week, like a good student, I tackled a few more drawings - here are two that pleased me.

 Quite pleased with this study of a terra cotta sculpture we have, because I did get some variation in the thickness of my lines this time.  The one below is a technique I've often read about but never used.

Stephen had pointed out one of Henry Moore's 'WW2 Underground Shelter' paintings, which were achieved by drawing the figure with a wax candle and then painting all over the page with black ink.  I used a white wax crayon, and in 'real life' on the paper the wax seems to shimmer through the ink quite mysteriously.

Such a happy, exciting morning - can't wait to get stuck in tomorrow.

EXPERIMENTAL SKETCHING - JUST MEANS ENJOYING MYSELF!

I was looking through my "Faces and Figures" sketchbook two or three days ago. (Yes, some of my sketchbooks are devoted to a single theme.  Sad and rather obsessive, I know.)  I came across the digitally drawn image below - done using a Bamboo pen and pad.

It's probably only people in the UK (and possibly only in the North of England) who might recognise the personality the drawing is intended to show.  (I promise that after talking about him I will return to the subject of art and sketching.)

Yes, it's Ken Dodd, otherwise known as Doddy, the Nut from Knotty Ash, a quick-fire stand-up comedian and singer.  I once went to one of his performances at the Southport Theatre, quite a long time ago, against my better judgement.  

But in fact he was fantastic.  I don't think I have ever laughed so much in my life, and true to his reputation he went on until midnight, just joke after joke after joke - and he never tells  a smutty joke or repeats himself.

At 84 he was still performing .... and stayed on the stage just telling jokes until 25 minutes past midnight.  This is what Wikipedia says:

Dodd is renowned for the length of his performances, and during the 1960s he earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's longest ever joke-telling session: 1,500 jokes in three and a half hours (7.14 jokes per minute), undertaken at a Liverpool theatre, where audiences were observed to enter the show in shifts. 

Well, this post was supposed to be about art, not about a stand-up comedian, so back to the subject of drawings.

When I saw the digital Doddy it reminded me that I was taken with the idea of representing hair in a different way, but never followed it up.  Then a few pages further on I came across this sketch copied from a Monet self-portrait sketch. 

It brought to mind that I had been intrigued by the idea of how much or how little information is necessary to represent a face.  Another thing that got put on the back burner.

So I determined to play about with the two ideas, and perhaps combine them.

Whoops - not too good, though I do quite like the top image with straight hair.

Everywhere I look now I see people with Big Hair, in life and on television.  Watching the Scholti Centenary Concert on BBC a couple of nights ago the soprano came on with orange hair just like that.  Gorgeous!

Everything was linking up to get me working on this exercise.  I remembered that some of Schiele's drawings feature models with big hair, and the sketch above was very loosely based on one of his paintings.

Boing!!  Not too good, but still we always learn something from our failures.  If we could do it well without trying then there would be no point in pushing ourselves to experiment.

Even at the Liverpool Tate Gallery yesterday the big hair was present.  After our morning's Gallery tour and drawing course at the Tate we were given complimentary tickets for a talk by Anthony McCall, and I quickly sketched a woman in front of me while waiting for the talk to begin.

This first Saturday morning of the four-Saturday course I mentioned in my last post was fantastic, just what I had hoped for, and I hope to write about that in a future post.

So, after all the pencil and pen sketches, I thought I'd finish with a bit of colour and a different technique using ordinary coloured pencils. 

Keep well, keep happy, keep drawing and painting.

MAGRITTE - FOLLOWING THE STYLE

About eighteen months ago Dev and I were lucky enough to go on two separate four-day courses at the Tate Liverpool, running alongside the fantastic Magritte exhibition being held at the time.

I was reminded of this because we have just booked to attend another course starting next week - 'Drawing the Line'.  This  is related to the current exhibition 'Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change'.

So, really looking forward to this because drawing is my favourite art practice.   

Back to the Magritte course, which was based on techniques and approaches he used in his paintings.

(This is a quarter of my completed cut-out)

OK, so this doesn't look anything like one of Magritte's paintings.  The course leader, Roz, focussed this challenge on his use of cut-outs in some of his work, and introduced us to the world of cut-outs at a level beyond the paper doilies we all used to cut as children.

She handed each of us a large A1-sized piece of paper and a craft knife and said 'Go!'.  Quite daunting and certainly not an easy or speedy task.  

The next image shows my completed 'creature cut-out'.

We then glued the cut image on to a backing card - colour of our choice and I chose black - with the addition of red eyes,  and red tongues that were glued only near the upper teeth.

Whew, quite a job.  But I was (and am) really pleased with the result.

We than had to apply this technique with an A2 sized acrylic painting which had to include other elements of Magritte's work.  I chose his little puffy white clouds, male figures seen from the back, and his 'out of context' bird images.
     

 Another short-time-scale task, but once again I was really pleased with the result - something I would never have painted without the inspiration of the course.

As the saying goes, waste not - want not, and so I saved the pieces cut out from the card figure and at home stuck them onto a sheet of paper.  

The shapes look completely different like this, many of them seem to be animal shapes.

Then took it further to make a 4-up image on Photoshop, which I think is quite effective.

Both 4-day sessions were fantastic and quite different from each other.

So I'm looking forward to the challenges of next week's first session of 'Drawing the Line'. 

A TIME FOR HEROES

It's rapidly approaching 11th November, the time when we remember all those who fought, were injured and died in so many wars.

This year I've been thinking especially about 'heroes', a much devalued word.  If someone who scores a goal, or wins a race, for example, is a hero, then what word can we use for the courageous men and women who fought in all these battles and were unbelievably HEROIC?

As well as remembering those who died, I wanted to dedicate this post to all the brave men and women who performed heroic deeds, but was no-one was there who could record and report on their bravery as worthy of a medal.

This double page spread in my journal is my tribute to my father, one of the unrecognised heroes of World War 2.

My father was a regular in the Royal Navy, and served on several different ships, the last being HMS Prince of Wales, a brand new ship that was commissioned in January 1941, completed in March, and sunk on 10 December 1941, with the loss of 327 men.

The irony is that, like the 'Titanic' and the German battleship 'Bismark', the Prince of Wales was said to be unsinkable, and it was even nicknamed 'HMS Unsinkable'!

The Prince of Wales, along with the Repulse, was sunk by Japanese air attack in the South China Seas.  Churchill had sent the two ships out to the far east to fight the superior Japanese navy without any support by air or any other means.  There is a great deal on the internet about this terrible, and it seems, almost forgotten event, if you should be interested.

My dad survived the sinking, was rescued and picked up and landed back to Singapore - which not long after was captured by the Japanese.

This post is not to tell you of all his adventures or the brave things he did, because he was only one among so many in all the wars we are remembering - just this one thing.  

He was one of the last navy personnel to escape from Singapore at the very last moment, saving a group of civilian women and children, but that ship too was bombed from the air.

They were among a group of islands and all managed to swim ashore.  After a week there they woke up one morning to find Japanese soldiers with guns pointed at them. 

My mother received a telegram to say that her husband was missing.  She was convinced he was not dead, and although she had so little money went out to buy a red coat and scandalised the neighbours by wearing it.

Quite a while later she heard that he was a prisoner in Changi Jail, a Japanese Prisoner of War camp, where he remained in the most terrible conditions until after VJ day, 15th August 1945.  But it was some time before he arrived home.

The photo of my father was taken when he was 29 or 30, I think, and he was 36 when the Prince of Wales went down.

After the war several men who had been in Changi with my father visited our home and told us of the things my father had done, and how good he had been to them in the prison camp.

For all of them, coming home was not a return to the life they, or their families, had led before the war.

So this year perhaps you could spend a little time remembering those who survived their war-time experiences, as well as those who gave their lives.

Writing this has been very emotional for me, so thank you for reading this.

I found the painting of the Prince of Wales on the internet

but lost the name of the artist, and then couldn't find the site again.

So apologies to the artist, and I hope he will forgive me for using it.

AUTUMN CAME AND WENT - WHO NOTICED?

Autumn always makes me think of the lovely poem by John Keats -"Ode to Autumn".  I learnt this at school 62 years ago.  How lucky we were then to be taught the magic of poetry and 'made' to learn it.  

The poem begins "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" and it's full of  beautiful words and images throughout the poem. 

But instead of mists and mellow fruitfulness autumn came and went and we didn't even notice the transition into the start of winter.

While I was still looking forward to autumn and still inspired by Keats I painted this as my own "Ode to Autumn".

It's painted with Inktense water-soluble pencils.  I painted the large tree separately on card, cut it out with a sharp knife and collaged it onto the page.

Here's hoping for a mild, pleasant, sunny winter for all of us.

AN APPLE FOR HALLOWE'EN

As it's All Hallows Eve today, here's my apple for Hallowe'en.   It is as taken without filters or special lenses, and I promise you, there is NO Photoshopping on this photo, except for putting a green border around it and re-sizing to save for the web.

Now  I know this is my age showing because every old codger you know makes the same kind of comment, but Hallowe'en is not what it used to be.   More about that in a moment or two.

I told you I had not Photoshopped the photo above, but once I'm on the program, which I love, I can't resist trying out various manipulations of the original.  So I experimented with a few colour changes.

But back to Hallowe'en.  When I've been out in the car recently I've been amazed at the grisly decorations on houses - skulls, skeletons, bats, spiders, etc - and the quantity of Hallowe'en 'stuff' on sale in the shops.  I'd be scared witless now to be out in the dark at Hallowe'en, let alone how scared I'd have been as a child.

It makes me think of 'the olden days' when I was a child.  No easily-carved pumpkins then.  We kids would get turnips from the farm down our lane to make our Hallowe'en lanterns.  

Then it took us all day to cut off a lid, carve out a hollow in the middle and shapes for eyes, nose and mouth - not easy and very tough - try it as an alternative to a pumpkin!  

Finally we would pierce a couple of holes so we could add string to make carrying the lantern easier.

And we were allowed to use a sharp knife ....... and nobody accidentally cut themselves or a friend!

We would put a stump of candle inside the hollow, and in the early evening go about trying to frighten each other, without any real success, but it was fun.  

Then we would be called home for the big event.  With our hands behind our backs we tried to bite apples dangling on strings tied to a broom handle.

We ducked for apples in a big metal bowl of water, again with hands behind our backs.  Then there were toffee apples (liked the toffee, not the combination with apple), and treacle toffee.

Then perhaps a simple game or two.  That was it, but we had fun and still have happy memories.

The Hallowe'en period has been pretty horrifying this year.  Watching the extensive news coverage of Hurricane Sandy on TV, it was so sad to see the powerful and frightening effects of the wind and water on peoples homes, businesses and environment.

I found it very touching to see the outdoor Hallowe'en decorations being torn from their places and blown about, when the children had been preparing and looking forward to the evening for so long.

If you live in the affected areas of the eastern USA, I hope you and your families are safe and well, and that you have not experienced too much damage to your properties.   My thoughts are with you all, and I hope the children manage to get some fun this evening.

WHO CHICKENED OUT FOR 12 YEARS?

Before I get to 'Who chickened out for 12 years' I just wanted to share this doodle.  I had to telephone the electricity company this morning to check on the current best tariff for us, and this was my 'Your call is  important to us but all our agents are busy ....' doodle while I waited.

Just looking at it now I realise I doodled the title of this post in advance.

So, now to get down to the actual post.  It's a fairly long one, so be prepared if you decide to stay with me - but there are plenty of pictures to help along the way.  

One artform I am fascinated with is tattooing, particularly the ones people have designed themselves.  Dev has become resigned to me starting up conversations with anyone I'm standing or sitting close to who has an interesting tattoo.

This feather turning into birds belonged to Freya, a young lady I met at the Henri Matisse exhibition in March and it was designed by her boyfriend.  I love this.

I was sitting in the doctor's waiting room a week or two ago opposite a young man with a tattoo, various rings and studs - and his little daughter, and I was fascinated with what I could see of his tattoo.  So I asked to see it more closely, and then asked permission to photograph it.

He told me he had drawn and painted the design himself, but when I asked if he had done an art degree he said 'Oh no, my Nan showed me how to draw'.  Oh, if only I'd had a Nan like that.

Twelve years ago, after many years of saying I wanted a tattoo, Dev gave in and withdrew his objections, and said 'Go on then, get one for your birthday'.

When my younger daughter Zoë heard about it she decided that we would both go together because she had wanted a tattoo for a long time.

I drew up the design I wanted, but although the tattoo artist I chose was very good, he didn't do 'own designs'.  So I quickly had to choose a stock image, and liked this bird of peace with a olive branch in its beak.

It is tattoo-ed (? is that the spelling?) on my left arm near the shoulder.  If Dev and I have a little tiff I roll up my sleeve and say 'Go on, kiss it, peace between us'.  Always makes us laugh.

BUT GUESS WHO CHICKENED OUT of the agreement to go together!  Well it wasn't me.

At my mum's funeral lunch with all our family around, the talk somehow got round to tattoos, so I stood up and showed mine to a horrified audience - appalled mainly because I was 65.  My niece, then in her twenties, suddenly stood up, hoisted up her shirt and turned round to show a gorgeous tattoo in the small of her back.  Her mother screamed in horror 'You've got a TATTOOOOO!!!!!!!' and everyone fell about laughing.

Mum would have had such a good time if she could have been there.

So, back to chickening out.  A few weeks ago Zoë told me she had decided to get her tattoo at last - the only reason apparently that she had waited was because she hadn't decided what design to have.  Some decisions take a very long time to make.  (She chickened out!)

She designed it herself - it's very simple but the concept behind it is a little complicated.  The shot above shows the tattoo as an E for Ellie, her daughter.

And this way it is an old-fashioned Z for Zoë.  And as well as being a Z, this way also represents a 3 for the three of them including Rob, her husband.

And from this angle it is an 'open heart for all the love to come'.  I really like it and the sentiment behind it.

Her reason for getting it now was because she decided to do 50 things for 50, having reached the half-century this year.  So far the things she has done have included being a zoo-keeper for a day (and shovelling elephant dung), going to New York, getting a present from Tiffany's, going to New Zealand, taking a course in Stand-Up and doing a stand-up comedy routine in front of an audience a few times, taking singing lessons, and moving from a house to an apartment.

And to finish, just a story about my dad's tattoo.  He was a regular in the Royal Navy.  Before he met and married my mum he must have had another girlfriend, because he had a sort of ribbon tattoo.  It would hardly have been a good start to the marriage to have 'Esther' tattooed in large letters on his fore-arm, so he had it altered so that it read 'Mother' and it ended up looking like neither name. 

And I've never for a moment regretted having my tattoo.