Doing the Laundry

I went back to life drawing at the nearby Figures&Form group for the first time in months yesterday, and was taken aback to see that a washing line was strung up behind one of the models. Somebody, or the universe, seems to be trying to tell me something... (I was quite pleased with my painting here but unfortunately did it on cartridge paper which buckled and didn't take kindly to too much layering).

The washing line outside my studio and its drapery and shadows have been grabbing my attention for some time now and I've been wondering if it could possibly become the subject for a painting or series of paintings. In a podcast I was listening to on Tuesday, from The Savvy Painter with Christopher Gallego, he talked about how certain unorthodox motifs around his home and studio grabbed and nagged at him to paint them, and that one should go with those urges... I've been thinking I must be crazy to want to paint the washing, but John Singer Sargent did it, and actually it has many associations for me as my children have grown over years and my husband and my lives are changing. Maybe I should have been painting it all this time. These are some sketches - a notan scribble in my studio sketchbook, a watercolour in which the laundry came out quite well but I badly messed up the shadow... and another where it's the other way around. Shall I do an oil painting, or am I crazy?

Greek Day at Rotary Arts Festival

 I cannot believe it's almost July! I have so much I should be doing but finding it hard to knuckle down and do any of it, including updating my blog (doggedly keeping it going though, as proof that I actually DO do something every now and then).

These sketches from a few weeks ago at the annual Rotary Arts Festival... I see this time last year I was thinking of having an Urban Sketchers display or stand there next time, which never happened.
We had fun though on the Greek-themed day, sketching the kids from the Saheti School playing bouzoukis, singing and dancing, as well as catching other scenes from around the shopping centre - over coffee in the bookshop, a life drawing session from the Figures & Form group, and a lone pianist who I hope realised his beautiful playing was appreciated even if he didn't draw the crowds. I stuck to simple contour line drawing after a brief attempt to take my watercolours out in a shifting, shuffling situation!

Life, oh Life

I've been back to life drawing sessions again - just a model and a group of fellow strugglers, no tuition. I stopped going some years back as I'd collected such a pile of drawings that I didn't know what to do with. It is one of my favourite things to do, when you get into such total concentration on contours, shadows and the subtlest of tones and hues that you lose all sense of time or whatever else is going on... but I did get to a stage when the whole exercise seemed a bit pointless, so since I've returned to it I've been trying to find new ways to interest myself - which for me usually comes by way of happy semi-accidents. Semi because I do use the watercolour very wet, and allow it to do its thing with just a little guidance from me. This one came closest to making me feel a bit excited to go further with this approach, with other more controlled or less successful attempts below. I tend to get some great bits, like an arm or a left leg, together with some awful ones, a bad torso or face, I need to get all the great bits together in one painting!

The model for most of these has been bringing her Jack Russell with her, which has provided another lovely dynamic to the poses (and two models for the price of one). A bit sad though as the little dog is old and not well, and so content to lie quietly wherever she's placed - the closeness between the two is obvious. 

The charcoals are quick poses, I think the first was half an hour and the others five minutes. The watercolours mostly half an hour - the one at the bottom an hour.

 

These are all quite big - perhaps I wouldn't have such trouble storing them if they were smaller, but strangely given all the small scale sketching I do, I feel compelled to do large figure studies - even A2 paper isn't quite big enough!

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Hello! Back to my nice quiet blog after almost drowning in crowded, noisy Facebook. It's such a long time since I posted, I don't know where to start, so I'll just start... been doing quite a bit of figure drawing and painting lately, with the Figures & Form group I mentioned before and in a workshop - more of which soon - which was very hard work! These two watercolours on Arches cold press were sold hot off the easel as a birthday present for the model, so apologies for the bad photos. I would have liked to get more varied angles but the class was full and I couldn't squeeze into another position.

Figures & Form

Ecoline watercolour and Neocolor II on Fabriano 70x50cm

Graphite and marker on cartridge 59x42cm

Ecoline and Neocolor II on Fabriano 70x50cm

I spent the last Wednesday mornings of May at lovely figure drawing sessions held by the Figures & Form group in Parkhurst, in return for a 10 minute talk on urban sketching on my last day. It was lovely to slow down and spend whole hours looking, drawing and painting. These were from a session with the theme of Flappers - the top and bottom ones long poses and the middle ones two 5 minute poses. Such fun, but what does one do with all these studies..!?
The talk went well in spite of nerves, I'm a drawer not a talker!..but I had stacks of sketchbooks on display, and inspirational sketching books like The Art of Urban Sketching and One Drawing a Day and Danny Gregory's books. The group received it enthusiastically - ten minutes wasn't actually enough to say all I had to say about urban sketching. I'm hoping  a few more will join Joburg Sketchers, as well as start their own sketchbooks and journals. I forgot to take a photo, as I always do :-/ but I have to say the display looked quite impressive, I never feel like I sketch enough, but when they're all spread out - whew - 100's!!

Drawing course Day Two

 

Actually I can't remember exactly what we did on each separate day - I think we did some warming up quick exercises on the second day too, but the main object was to take some of the previous days 'sensual' drawings and work new drawings over them, not obliterating them, but trying to have some new feeling or meaning emerge from superimposing images - I'm not at all doing justice to Hermine's urging us out of the usual or the safe, she had us each enthralled in our own individual and different journeys of discovery. This time she had made a doll out of clothes, blankets, buttons and string, as a prop to the model, which in some of my drawings manifested as a rather sinister and ghostly voyeur.

 For our final drawings we were to use all the materials we'd brought as we liked, which were many and varied - and combine everything we'd learnt to create a composition. Not the most attractive result here, though Hermine kindly called it 'stone-like', I used an old chewed foam roller to draw out the figure, which made her look a bit like some of us post-course students (one artist was so coated in charcoal and ink you could hardly make out her features - wish I'd taken a photo!) and added powdered graphite and glue, charcoal and ink, and stuck on some textured paper - didn't get to the candle wax, sandpaper and crayons!

Drawing course Day One

I mentioned a drawing workshop I went on in October a couple of posts ago - I have only now got to photographing the results, and am glad to recall it before it disappears into the dim dusty recesses of my mind. It was an intense two day course devised by a fabulous artist and teacher, Hermine Spies Coleman, called 'Drawing with all of your senses'. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but we had to bring a wide variety of drawing materials, scented things, music, and food (lunch!) We had a young newbie model not comfortable with disrobing completely, to work from, though formal life drawing wasn't the object so it didn't really matter.

 The first exercises were using a soft powdery medium like charcoal dust or powdered graphite, dipping our fingers into it and 'feeling the drawing' directly onto the paper. We then added glue or water to make a creamy mixture and continued the sensual experience of building the images with our hands - I was frustrated with how difficult it was to get the glue and graphite to do what I wanted it to, but persevered rather irritably rubbing from side to side to get the pigment to stick the paper, and was surprised and pleased to step back and find an interesting, evocative image (right) had resulted, as if she's in or made of water.

I have to admit to getting very bored with much of my life drawing last time I was doing it regularly, and this course forced me to leave my comfort zone and discover new ways of mark making and unexpected solutions to problems - and excitement. They may posssibly not appeal to many viewers who like their life drawing conventional, but I was happy to launch into fresh directions, and as I relive the workshop, am excited again to get back to the drawing board, the sooner the better.

We did a series of short exercises - drawing with our eyes on the

model only, not looking down at the paper, looking at short poses and then closing our eyes to draw them quickly and succinctly, drawing to music, trying to put the music into the marks and then drawing the model dancing to the music - a huge amount of concentration and being in the moment. The afternoon session saw us all exhausted, and returning to our old tried and tired drawing styles...

Life continued...

These were all done at the local recreation centre, where there is a model every week, but no tuition. I did a lot of trying out of techniques...above left, graphite with watercolour, right, conte with Caran D'Ache neocolor II Aquarelle crayons. You can see here models come in all shapes and sizes! Water-soluble pencil and conte crayon on the right...

More conte and Aquarelle crayons, and charcoal ...

I was getting braver to leave the charcoal/conte drawing and just use straight watercolour. I was hoping to get to a Georgia O'Keeffe style of clean, pure watercolour, but I couldn't let myself get that simple!
But I am quite pleased with the last one - that's the one that I may frame, though it's very pale.
That concludes my life drawing so far - hope it won't be too long before I do some more.

Life classes past

I was planning to post some little sketches I did on Sunday, and talk about my cat, BUT... the zeitgeist currently is pushing me in the direction of life drawing, life classes and groups. I read Africantapestry's post on it a week or so ago, and thought I'd love to get back to that, then my sister did a post on it yesterday, and this morning I found Katherine Tyrrell's usual thorough, well-researched and well-linked post on the subject.

So I spent the morning, unrolling dusty, cobwebby and fishmoth-chewed drawings from life sessions past - I've had them hanging around, some records of almost rapturous autumn mornings spent with an inspiring teacher, some stiff ungainly forays back into the genre after long absences, some I wanted to frame and hang, but was too protective of them from the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' brigade. All of them with the long-asked question hanging over them..."What on earth to do with them all?"

So this is what I'm doing - I've photographed them, rather badly probably, cleaned up the chew-holes and critter-droppings in Photopaint, and am posting some today, some tomorrow or the next (there are rather a lot), and then they'll all be here (forever?), and the gogga-food can mostly move on off to the recycle depot, I guess. Maybe I will frame one.

These are from classes and workshops with a wonderful teacher, Hermine Spies Coleman, who has since sadly for us, moved to Giverney in

Kwa-Zulu Natal. She was the most encouraging tutor, seeing promise and excitement in the greenest and most nervous life-newbie's efforts, and urging us all to seek the personal, the unique, our own interpretation of every model and every pose. She wasn't too hung up on proportion and measurements - as you can no doubt tell from these - but movement, thrust, animal-like qualities (pic 2 I was thinking of a cheetah I think), machine-like qualities (a spine becoming a drill in this one below), bone, muscle and sinew stretching and straining, she'd push us to break out of our comfort zones and we'd go home exhausted but elated.

The studio was sun-drenched, so strong shadows sometimes fell on the model - but that was turned to advantage when we were encouraged to see the abstract emerging on our pages.
This last one has bitter-sweet memories... while I was engrossed in capturing the twisted movement, my car was being pinched from outside the gate!