Tuesday 8 December 2015

Model in Margate


From the last day of a five week model course in Margate, led by Roy Eastland, an A2  study in charcoal pencil of our model who is also seen in the photo. A kind friend said "well done for capturing the model clothed and unclothed and in a third medium". I am looking forward to continuing in January in this inspiring space. Meanwhile am blogging this latest drawing just to convince Blogger not to archive my blog after such a long time without entries.. a bientot

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Figure in movement




Movement and strength - figure study - very big - maybe 90 x 50cms - and charcoal on very heavy grammage of paper.... 2007?

a bientot 

Jane

Monday 23 May 2011

Fresh and Wild



Just drawing .. artist and model with reflection and flowers.. charcoal, painted ground, coloured chalk. Very big.  Very Quick. 2007.

a bientot
Jane

Friday 13 May 2011

Mise en Page



I must say quite like this one .. which I fished out while weeding the unruly garden of my old life drawings.. so thought to blog it.. but I cannot remember who it is or when I did it or where... never mind.

a bientot

Jane

Thursday 12 May 2011

Strong guy..


A shy model, clearly, but no matter.. what he obviously made us think about was mass and muscle... and given rather a short pose, ten minutes (?) I nevertheless got interested in the complexities of those huge hands and their shadows..  a big drawing, at least A2, done in chalk pastel in 2005 in Nicosia.

a bientot 
Jane

Friday 6 May 2011

Memento mori?


A diversion into a drawing from my Academy days in Brussels in which I recognise two hallmarks of that particular studio .. one is our Prof's sadistic liking for setting subjects in or in front of filthy pieces of plastic sheeting - (here delicately interpreted, I must say) and the other is the note of dissonance provided by the skeleton.. just in case we were tempted to turn it into something too pretty..  (model with skeleton, 1998, A2 charcoal pencil on paper)

a bientot

Jane

Thursday 5 May 2011

Speed dating ..


A rare chance to do very short poses with two models - double trouble to capture visual information .. don't think .. just draw ..

a bientot 
Jane

Petra 2


The same nicely curvy model as yesterday's posting,  with Alberto seen at work reflected in the mirror behind her... all that space to fill and I still chopped her foot off... (Chalk pastel on blue paper, A2, 2008)

a bientot 
Jane

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Petra


A chalk drawing made of a pleasingly ample model with reflections in the mirror behind her showing me or one of my colleagues at work... most of my work was on the artist and model theme at the time.
( Chalk pastel on coloured paper, A2, 2008)

a bientot
Jane

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Spring sketches no 8


Sometimes with short poses we choose what to notate and what to leave out ...


... and sometimes we try to include everything including the kitchen sink when there really isn't time.. (two short poses, chalk on sugar paper, A3,  2009)


a bientot
Jane

Friday 25 March 2011

Spring Sketches no 7



Pink lady .. a variety of apple.. and a minute with the model..

a bientot
Jane

Thursday 24 March 2011

Spring Sketches no 7



These two short poses (A3 charcoal pencil on sugar paper 2009) were probably made in the same series and are certainly with the same model - a very characterful one, whose likeness was one of the easiest to capture. Although likeness is not the object of the exercise, (which is to observe the whole figure), it is always nice when it happens.

a bientot
Jane

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Spring sketches no 6



A blue one. One of my favourite supports for very short poses is the sugar paper you buy in colourful blocks from toy shops for children's drawings. It has a nice rough resistance and "hooks" chalk and pastels particularly well. However it is much too absorbent for ink. Here are a few chalky white lines on a blue background. The model has a rather masculine look to her shoulders and seems solid without having a womanly voluptuousness... but I cannot really remember the session .. by the time you have spent about 700 hours in the life room you can't remember everything,  though it is surprising how much is retained.

a bientot
Jane

Monday 21 March 2011

Spring Sketches No 4


A couple of scribbly ones.. not so much taking a line for a walk but more like taking it on a pub crawl and getting it drunk.. but I was on the orange juice myself..  advice: don't drink and draw!

à bientôt
Jane

Sunday 20 March 2011

Spring Sketches No 3. Ink/line/endomorph



These were all from the same series of short poses - draw, turn the page, draw, turn the page .. and above all ...... LOOK! My prof in Brussels said if you have 30 seconds look for 29 and then draw. They are never perfect so it is a good thing you can move swiftly on to the next one.. but don't suffocate the line.. the line must breathe .. that's a tough one..

Ha ha .. a cheeky felt nude is peeping out from the bottom corner.. a stowaway on the Good Ship Blogspot!

à bientôt
Jane

Saturday 19 March 2011

Splashing about


My friend Sara doesn't know that her friends are putting a project together for her 50th birthday. I have been messing around with felt today making my contributions.. it is a lot of fun..

à bientôt

Jane

Spring Sketches No 2. Ink/line/endomorph


A5 size sketchbook. Calligraphy pen and a minute with the model. A satisfyingly ample one to wrap the line around. The challenge is always to create three dimensionality without recourse to shading. Especially when she is leaning over and away from my point of view. Another one tomorrow.

à bientôt
Jane

Friday 18 March 2011

Spring Sketches Series No 1

I made this sketch a while ago ... (couple, ink and wash, A5 , 2005) My friend Sheri sent me a beautiful drawing recently and the subject reminded me so much of this one of my own.... then I thought of blogging some of these sketches while I am on the point of getting a studio and getting back down to work again. It will help get me in the mood after too long a break.

This is an "après Rodin" moment of love. If you want to see Sheri's drawing and her wide range of lovely works made with everything from paintbrush to knitting needle visit Everyday Louise by Sheri La...

a bientot

Jane

Friday 25 February 2011

Little acorns

Trying to get started again .. here's a small nude fashioned in a new medium for me. I have always been a needlewoman and have long been wondering how to build a technique around that and this is a new line of experimentation. I love Tracey Emin's blankets but I didn't want to imitate them .. maybe I can find a way to do something different with this roving wool and a needle combined with other elements. Words, in particular. And needlepoint with soluble canvas, perhaps.. here we go..

I am frustrated with having no studio but this can be done at home without poisoning the family...

a bientot









Friday 14 January 2011

Happy New Year

Happy New Year

This year's resolution is to open my studio again and get back down to work.. watch this space.

This year's stocking went to my brother, who is younger than me, but old enough to have seen the first episode of Doctor Who with those utterly terrifying Daleks. This is one of those original Daleks who now, retired from a long career of frightening children (and quite a few parents) is enjoying a harmless game in the snow and using those guns to shoot nothing more lethal than a couple of snowballs.

His teddy bear is on there too - and his daughter Hannah's guinea pig.. and on the inside? Rather a lot of wine gums.

a bientot

Friday 15 January 2010

Happy New Year


This year's Christmas Stocking missed its deadline... Josephine, my stepmother, never got to hang it up on Christmas Eve and will have to wait for next year. Instead of having a slick organised Christmas I spent it in a blizzard of little bits of wool partly because in order to work in the quotation - the only reference Shakespeare ever made to Christmas - I had to make the stocking bigger than usual. Appropriate though, for a lady resident of Stratford on Avon.
Here is the whole passage - Marcellus to Horatio at the end of Hamlet, Act one - Scene one.

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is that time.

Thursday 5 February 2009

Packing roses


Sometimes you are in the middle of things and you have to leave.... this is a piece about packing up the studio mid-series.  I always felt these rose paintings were composite elements of a larger work.. so here I find I was at least partially right.  It may not be the end of the story. I may not know for some time. 
a bientot
Jane 

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Self portrait in cage with open door and butterfly..

You can use a frame for a print of a self portrait but why not a cage? If you sometimes feel that you are in one it can be appropriate. But of course the door is open so it is all about choice. This is a detail from an installation I made as part of a show during January at the Goethe Insitute in Rotterdam. It was all about the effects of living from country to country on the work that I make. I will post the rest of the installation tomorrow. 
a bientot
Jane  

Wednesday 7 January 2009

A new print at a new stage

Three delightful models!... I made a soft ground etching  - then used aquatint  - which inadvertently put paid to some of the original drawing which hadn't completely etched. Grr. Then I went over with a soft ground again and added a few lines - especially to define the dog.  Yes, its a dog. Then I totally  forgot to cover the back of the plate so that meant the plate heated up  in the acid and I etched a hilarious,unintentional, aleatoric abstract compostion on it for good measure - might print it off one day just to annoy myself.. meanwhile .. well.  This process definitely isn't spontaneous but I am slowly catching on - only experience and our mistakes can teach us of course and I am a great one for wanting to run before I can walk..
a bientot
Jane 

Friday 26 December 2008

Happy Christmas Everybody

Not my usual style but I do this every Christmas. I sit down before an array of coloured wools and "paint" with them until a Christmas stocking has made itself for this year's recipient. I make it up as I go along. We were so happy to have my Mother, Betty,  with us on Christmas Day this year but I took this to the wire with the stocking finished at 2.30 in the morning and just hanging in time for Santa's boots to be almost visible descending the chimney. Most enjoyable.
a  tres vite
Jane 

Saturday 13 December 2008

Sleeping infant

My small daughter, sketched while she was asleep in 1997, aged about three months.  She was not a beautiful baby and had a blotchy face but was none the less an absorbing subject whether I was drawing her or not.
a bientot
Jane 

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Scribbles and blots

Here's a drawing I made last time I went to SKVA in Rotterdam - very free and I got the ink to keep its flow by occasionally dipping my pen in the water (n.b. I love ink;I hate pens!) and started it off by shaking a few blots onto the page,  one of which became his right nipple, albeit a a millimetre or so too low. 
a tres vite
jane 

Monday 8 December 2008

Last one...

The last and smudgiest of these monoprints. I think this was a very fast one. It is always interesting afterwards  to find what I chose and notated from the scene in front of me. In this one the model becomes integrated with the foliage and objects behind her,  and,  as she leans towards me I just have time to note the back of her hand and the corrugated knuckles  before the line falls away with the curve of her lower leg... and time's up.
a tres vite
Jane

Sunday 7 December 2008

monoprints in minutes (4)


Nearly the last of this series .........(monoprints, 30 x 30, 2008)  tomorrow one last smudgy little one and then, since I am preparing an exhibition next month in the Goethe Institute in Rottterdam, who knows what strange miscellany all my sifting through  and choosing will produce..
a bientot
Jane 

Saturday 6 December 2008

Monoprints in minutes (3)


Two more from the monoprint series I am serialising. I love the accidental smudgy effects that are a by-product of this medium. Remember the actual drawing is on the back -  a clean, 5b pencil drawing in a reverse image... I always prefer the print. Last examples tomorrow...
a bientot
Jane
a

Friday 5 December 2008

Monoprints in minutes (2)


Just a couple of purely linear accounts of one-minute model poses... made a few weeks ago.  Don't I make it look easy? Just try it... and these are far from perfect.
a bientot
Jane

Thursday 4 December 2008

Monoprints in minutes


Sometimes, with models I know well, I really capture a likeness. It's not a portrait and getting a likeness is not the objective but it is quite satisfying when it happens. With this model on this occasion I was feeling her in a linear way. I was having some fun with the foliage in the background - I often feel the need for a context - even a narrative - though not always - as you will see tomorrow.
a bientot
Jane

Friday 3 October 2008

Nude studies in indigo



Another recent fast sketch.. when you have only a few minutes it is all about choosing..  note this.. omit that.. mostly omit, of course..  
a bientot
Jane

Tuesday 30 September 2008

Studies in Indigo


Even when there's only five or ten minutes to play with I rarely just notate the figure although sometimes if the muscles are good I get lost in the anatomy.  Composing with the figure in the space is where the interest lies for me and especially where there are other people working in the room to give it a slight narrative edge.  Monoprint again... approx A4.
a bientot
Jane 

Saturday 13 September 2008

Birthday Roses

When my friend Ruth left The Hague I threw a small party to say good bye and these roses were given to me by the guests.  When people give me roses i usually paint them and then, since they were a gift, I give the painting away.  (Birthday roses 50 x 40 cms oil on canvas 2008) I never try to get an exact observational drawing. I just choose the things that I want to paint from the flowers in front of me. I think there is a lot of personality in the leaves.. like a small nest of baby cobras.. the flowers have that lovely heavy floppiness that garden roses have when they open .. anyhow as an artist of the human figure I always run to this subject like a guilty lover to his mistress..  very enjoyable.
a bientot
Jane

Friday 25 July 2008

Have a good Summer

I am off to France for the Summer to my second home in the Auvergne - a place where the internet connection is so slow that it is not worth the frustration.  So the blog resumes in September with the Autumn fruits of the Summer's productivity. A welcome return to routine. I leave you with a little sketch (nude, reflection, artist, oil on paper A3 2007) and good wishes for the Summer.
a bientot
Jane

Monday 9 June 2008

Work in progress

A painting I am making in the studio at Rijswijk. To be continued... I am going off to my house in France for a week - a wonderful prospect.
a bientot
Jane

Friday 6 June 2008

Life of Brian....





Brian Irvine came to Limassol with his utterly crazy jazz band and gave us a night of high energy, seriously off-beat wild sounds.. this not very typical work (For Brian Irvine, 60 x 50 paper collage, inks, on canvas 2005) was made for him out of sketches I was making at high speed all the way through the concert.. it includes pencil scribbles of some of the exclamations he made along the way such as "have some Ice cream!", "Endure!" (He meant Enjoy!) and "empty space" - that is the bottom right hand corner, of course..... here is the whole image and two details... normal services will be resumed as soon as possible :)

a bientot

Jane