Blog Archives

31 January: Pasty pixels

31/1/2021

A collage of elements is always somewhere to start blue-sky thinking. Things somehow insinuate themselves next to something else in a way I would never have consciously imagined, and a bit of serendipity never goes amiss in artworking. I spend hours in this happy playground, and the exercise steers me away from preconceived notions and drawing by rote. The image above is composed from some of the bits and pieces which I showed jumbled together in last week’s entry. I inverted the image to get some reversed colours to use, the image below displays it’s pastelly glory. (It’s all getting rather painterly, I may even have to get back to using oils again at some point).

I call this collage, but is it really? From French coller to stick, in its turn from colle glue. It was composed in Procreate (the drawing app with so much more!) after ‘cutting up’ scans of previous drawings and inventing blooms, so the only sticky stuff involved is digital glue. Pasty pixels rock.

24 January: The architect’s garden

24/1/2021

Here were two old wood trellises hung against the walls shut away quietly from the streets outside. He kept putting all manner of plants safely in both beds, from the prettily scented to whatever had crept into the earth and stayed there until spring, upon which time pod receptacles filled with flourishes were in great contrast to the structured walls.
Sketchy beginnings from the story I imagined, a little chaotic now but they will become something. From the initial vision I quickly gathered together thoughts, motifs and ideas before I lost the thread, combining templates from my Dad’s old architectural business, events in the natural world, plants and brickwork. A couple of very quick sketches above and a jumble of elements below.

18 January: Bathroom window weather forecast

18/1/2021

The bathroom window is old, old as the house. Its pattern is ubiquitous, common to many buildings in the land, but presents something new every day. Gaze at the puffly cushions in each pane, find ice cream cones, fists, flowers, constantly changing as light passes through them. Today cartoon raindrops cascade from glass clouds.

10 January: Looking the other way

10/1/2021

Probably on the phone, sometimes watching TV, your mind isn’t on the biro you use to write a date or a number on a scrap of paper or the kitchen notepad. On hold with that music in a loop, after many minutes you look at what you have done. It wasn’t boredom so much as a vacancy in time when your hand embellished those dates, numbers, and meter readings with springing arabesques, whorls, arrows and roses while you weren’t looking. Or hands. Once, I drew a hand making a rude gesture while speaking with exquisite politeness to some poor guy in a BT call centre.
Some interesting things come out when you’re looking the other way. Keep them - they may get into your work or lead to totally new things. I cut out my favourite doodles and paste them into a notebook. It moves you out of being stuck because what you’re really thinking comes out when you’re looking the other way.

31 January: Pasty pixels

24 January: The architect’s garden

18 January: Bathroom window weather forecast

10 January: Looking the other way

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