nice quiet life

Drawings from the last few months or so ago I haven’t got around to posting:

This is Alice, when we were watching some jazz together. I don’t know if I did you justice; you’re much prettier in real life!

This is a page we did together on the same night in the Daffodil.

This is the chapel at Francis Close Hall when it was a bit sunnier in September!

The Bath road on another sunnier day when there was a big traffic jam through town.

A bloke I saw sitting in the Imperial Gardens with three heads – he really did have three heads I was amazed, but too shy to go up and ask him why. More drawings to follow when I’ve done them!

flanagan’s apple

Some drawings done in Flanagan’s Apple pub in Liverpool a few weekends back. We’d gone up for a friend’s birthday and spent part of the night there, after a mandatory Spoon’s session and before going on to some other place I can’t remember the name of. There was a hen party group dancing near where we were sitting and so I drew some of the ladies groovin’ away:

Flanagan’s is just down from the famous Cavern Club on Mathew Street. We didn’t go there but this lady looked like she might have remembered the glory days… she did most of her dancing sitting down but frequently waved her arms and shouted to a lot of people on the dancefloor and, when she noticed me drawing her, leaned over to me and said “You’re just jealous.” I told her I was only human:

I did a couple of other drawings of members of the hen party group, and spliced one with some bits from the Flanagan’s flyer:

This chap sat on our table for about half an hour, staring in to space and not saying anything apart from singing along to some song lyrics:

These are some drawings of my companions done on the train up to Liverpool from Widnes:

two camels

Well, I saw two camels the other day at the Suffolk Souk Fair near my street in Cheltenham, so I got the old (new) sketchbook out. They were quite an inquisitive pair, so it’s a shame they didn’t really get a chance to have a look at the goods on offer at the fair; maybe they might have found some old antique shawl or something to take home.

As it was, they spent most of the day stuck in their enclosure, being petted by people, which is where I drew them. They had impressive humps, great drooping deposits of fat which serve to keep them cool by minimizing fat build up on the rest of their bodies. It was a fairly cool day, so no danger of that. One was a bactrian camel, with two humps, while the other was a dromedary camel.

The man petting the camel is the camel’s owner, ready to put him back in his horse box.

I’ve got lots more drawings to go up when I can get near a scanner; until then !

painting three

I did some more life teaching last week and also did another painting. This one took about three hours on Thursday afternoon, it’s oil on mdf which I primed with gesso. Water soluble oils anyhow, cheap and easy! It’s of our model for two of the days Emma, for whom we arranged a nice colourful bed, flowers and fruit backdrop:

I did a preliminary drawing for this one to try and work out the foreshortening:
Here are some quick life studies done at the beginning of the workshop:

This is an acrylic painting of mine I found in a rack at the school which I did a few months ago, kind of a half-drawing. I find acrylic a difficult medium to paint with as the paint dries so fast and it’s quite hard to paint over what you’ve done without the colours getting very dull. Anyway, this is OK, because there isn’t much paint, it’s of a model called Marcia:

I’m doing a lot more painting now so I might make a new blog, or maybe I’ll just keep putting them up here. 90% of writing is reading, or so it is said, well I think 90% of painting is probably drawing too, but what do I know?

demonstration for gaza

I made it to the Gaza solidarity march in London on Saturday 9th August, but only at the end in Hyde Park, after the majority of protesters had gone home. Since last weekend, a truce seems to have held between the Israelis and Hamas, which is good. I don’t particularly enjoy the charged atmosphere of political protest, and find myself moved more often to doubt than conviction, probably because the language tends so often towards the demagogic. It was also difficult to draw as there was so much visual information, even as the crowds thinned. Even so, I got a little drawn:

A young photography student called Uzma Ravat actually photographed me as I was drawing this. The distance between me with my drawing board and the crowd listening to the speaker says a fair bit; by this stage it was an odd mixture of the lingering hardline and some curious newcomers:

I did some other drawings after that, but with no real vantage point or clear idea I don’t think I achieved anything particularly interesting:

I did draw some of the contributors with the megaphone at Speakers Corner, which had drawn a crowd of about a hundred people. A fair few of them were incoherent, or just prone to stating the very obvious (‘we are all human beings!’) and at least one was drunk, but some of them had some interesting points, even soundbites, which I, of course, neglected to note down:

These women were watching the speakers just to my right.

I think situations like the Arab Israeli conflict reward only those on both sides who want a fight, who revel in it and profit from it. I fear there will always be men in the world like this, and their contemptible backers. I can only be grateful that, as a young Western European man, I am not forced into armed conflict in the name of my country, as I would most likely have been one hundred years ago. Had I been born in Gaza or Israel, it is highly likely that someone would have tried to put a gun in my hands by now.

jason rebello/ jacob collier trios

I went to see the Jason Rebello piano trio play last Friday at Ronnie Scott’s in London. Jason is one of the country’s best jazz pianists, and for a long time has been Sting’s main piano player; I’ve also seen him play with Jeff Beck. I drew for a long time before I could get anything right, it was quite a late show starting at 11. Here is the band with Jeremy Stacey on drums and Yuri Goloubev on double bass:

I couldn’t really get Rebello’s face, I kept making him look too old! Anyway I liked his song ‘Purple Sunflower’ which he wrote for his wife, so I noted it down alongside these bad likenesses of him:

I also drew some audience members in the club. This is actually the same family twice, they looked a little like Sopranos characters:

Next on the bill, starting at a healthy 1.00 am, was teenage piano player Jacob Collier and his band. He’s 20, looks about 16 and plays like an angel; I drew his excellent band several times:

A few more scenes in the club – an interesting couple, the emcee, and Jacob Collier again:

The good seats. Although, perhaps not if that pillar is in your eyeline:

poor charlie

My dog Charlie Brown started whining last night and limped off the sofa, tail between his legs, back arched, walking like he’d taken something he shouldn’t have. Well, I took him to the vet this morning, and he seems to have perked up, probably just strained his back, put him on painkillers. I drew these in the morning waiting for the appointment as we were sitting in the sun outside:

And sitting on the sofa with my brother Jonathan watching the cricket, looking a bit subdued (the dog). I did the classic thing here and didn’t leave enough space for my brother’s head, so he got a bit squashed:

portrait workshop

Last week I helped teach a portrait drawing and painting class at the Cheltenham School of Fine Art, where I will be doing a bit of teaching in the Autumn. I did some quick sketches of the students in the class, and our model Nunu in the center, on the final morning while they worked:

Here are some of the ‘instructional’ drawings I did of our two models on the first day. We looked a bit at Antoine Watteau, one of my favourite draughtsmen:

Everybody jumped into painting on the second day so I tried my hand at oil painting, which I have never done before:

This was my second attempt on the last afternoon, on board and photographed rather badly on a bright window sill. I’ve always been rather terrified of painting but using the oils, although they were only cheap water-soluble ones, I found much more enjoyable than trying to paint with acrylic. Our model was called Emma:

Finally, this is a drawing of me by one of the students in the workshop, a lady called Vanessa who has worked as a children’s illustrator and ceramicist, her drawings were excellent, I was very pleased with this one which she was kind enough to allow me to keep:

herne hill/victoria

Some drawings done in London about three weeks ago, can’t remember exactly, finally got round to scanning some sketchbook pages. Firstly, an interesting looking couple that caught my fancy sitting outside Pullens cafe, next to Herne Hill station:

Some sunbathing at lunchtime in Grosvenor Gardens, near Victoria station:

As I was drawing a fire alarm evidently set off at a nearby building site, and within about five minutes the entire park, not large, was swamped with hundreds of builders waiting for the OK. I tried to draw a group of them as they surrounded a pair of flustered female office workers:

tinariwen

I’ve not posted here for a while, mostly due to having my hands full with finishing my degree, but also because I haven’t been drawing from life as much, despite the good weather. I do have some plans for drawing projects in the near future though, so will add more things soon. Here are a couple of drawings of the Malian band Tinariwen, who I saw play at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in early May:

The band has an interesting history as ethnic Tuareg, a nomadic people from the Sahara desert. In between songs the various band members would take turns saying ‘Welcome to the desert’ to us, until it became a bit of a running joke. They also said ‘You OK? You happy?’, to which the typically polite (seated) Cheltenham audience would murmer ‘yes’ in response. My favourite member was this chap, who was positioned closest to me sitting in the front row to the right of the stage. He played a bit of guitar, did a bit of singing, played a bit of tambourine, but mostly he seemed to be the main exotic dancer for the band. He swayed and smiled at us, waved his hands around in circular motions and sashayed from the hips in his golden yellow robes: