I blogged about two other self-portraits in an earlier post
This one is only 10cm high, made in my Seawhite A6 landscape sketchbook using watercolour with a pentel brush pen and a Uni Posca marker for the white. Additional black line made with a 0.2 Pilot technical pen. It's hard to not look serious when one is drawing!
Since last Summer I have been keeping an A4 sketchbook for ideas. These are two early pages from the book, where I was developing ideas that had been started the previous February and eventually led to my painting "From Me to You"
Click images for a larger view.
This is a painting that again, like Evenlode, combines both landscape and figures in a constructed space of my imagination. Click the image for more information. It was made for a friend who is a sculptor, and suggests ideas about travel and journeys. I really enjoyed painting it and unlike Evenlode didn't have a very clear idea on its composition as I started, so it evolved as it developed. It uses a visual language derived from the drawings the figures are based upon, and perhaps because it's a work on paper and is relatively small, it's as much 'drawing' as 'painting'; it feels like a tentative proposition rather than a full blown statement. There is a lot going on in the piece, so I'd like to take elements from this composition and develop them into larger works.
This quickly produced screen print developed from a recent small sketchbook drawing made in the life class.
I worked on this for sometime. It's quite small really - acrylic on watercolour paper - about 13x10ins.
I made some initial working drawings in my A6 sketchbook, because the composition was complicated and not really planned but felt towards intuitively, combining memories and images from the place where stayed. The painting is a gift to a friend.
When I was about 14, I went to a large exhibition of Turner's work, including sketchbooks and sketches, at what was then the Tate Gallery and now Tate Britain. I spent the return journey scribbling on a piece of paper as the coach chased the sun down the M4. Today I did something similar returning on a coach from the Turner and the Masters Exhibition.
Top drawing is an imaginative interpretation of the Oxfordshire landscape as seen from the coach window. the sketches below were made from the work in the exhibition.
(click on the images for further info and larger versions)
