Mythical Creatures

My very kind brother gave me a set of Winsor & Newton gouache paints for my birthday, and I've been busy using them to make paintings of mythical creatures. (I always forget how good it feels to paint with gouache...and whenever I use it, I remember my tutor at Falmouth saying: "it has to be just about the consistency of single cream").

This is a Fenghuang, an East Asian bird with the head of a golden pheasant, the body of a mandarin duck, the tail of a peacock, the legs of a crane and the wings of a swallow. (Descriptions vary...in some it also has the neck of a snake and three legs.)

Heart of Darkness

I've been immersed in Heart of Darkness over the past months, analysing the text and various criticisms, researching African art, learning about Joseph Conrad and his life, filling a sketchbook with drawings and notes...

These are some of the illustrations I made:

This is from a part of the book where the steamboat is described as being like a grimy beetle crawling the floor of a lofty portico. The sense of scale is immense. The Europeans are so small in their little boat and so disconnected from the vast culture and nature around them. Drawn in brush pen, mapping pen, rapidograph, and ink wash sprinkled with salt (while listening to an Alan Watts lecture).

I really wanted to play more with different viewpoints...this illustration is from the part where Marlow wanders into the "grove of death" where the exhausted slaves are dying under the trees. He notices a piece of white worsted tied around the neck of one of the slaves, and wonders what on earth this piece of material from European shores is doing in the Congo, and what it means for it to be around his neck.

Conrad describes the knitter's dress in Chapter 1 as being made from a plain fabric like umbrella material...in my illustration I've taken a few liberties and given it a "rained on" quality. I think the idea is that they are impervious; nothing can stop the progress of their knitting. They are the Fates, possessing power over everyone who passes through their chamber, measuring out their lives in black wool.

Conrad imagined the universe as an infernal knitting machine:

“There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold”. Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.”                              
                                                                              - Joseph Conrad

(speculative cover design based on the character of the Harlequin and a colonial map of Africa)

All good things must come to an end (the bad ones just go on forever) - Daniel Bejar

Well 2013 is nearly over.

It has been an interesting year. I've had some nice commissions from lovely people in New York, which seemed to arrive at points when my confidence in my work was at its lowest ebb. I had an exhibition in Cheltenham - "Bloom" - with three dear friends and fellow Falmouth graduates (and sold a painting of Mata Hari). I created wedding portraits for my cousins. I ran an art therapy group with a friend. WeAdmire began printing my Lou Reed illustration on their t-shirts. I set up Walk Cheerfully Zine with my friend Beth and we received some beautiful illustration work (I really need to do it justice by getting it printed soon). I also started a "portrait on a postcard project" and 15 people took part in commissioning portraits - I've just turned it into a zine (you can find it here)

We lost Hebe in October. It's still impossible to talk about. Do you know what the saddest thing about losing a cat is? They don't leave anything behind. You can't find old letters from them or silly notes that they wrote to you. But that's also the most beautiful thing about our friendships with animals, they are wordless, and somehow more true.

   "The creatures stir across from us, but they cannot come to us, and the You we speak to them sticks to the threshold of language." -  I and Thou, Martin Buber (with thanks to Marty for the quote)

Actually...here he is using a typewriter:

It's just not the same without him sitting next to me while I draw. He was my constant companion. I have made so many drawings of him over the years...and a drawing is always able to transport you right back to the moment you created it. I remember vividly drawing this picture of him - he sat so still for me, and looked me in the eye the whole time - I think he knew what I was up to:

It has been a tough year in so many ways but being able to draw has been so helpful. And seeing friends over this past year has been wonderful. I'm so lucky to have such glorious people in my life. I'm so proud of all my friends and the things they create. I really am.

Anyway, here's to 2014, I hope to see more of the people I treasure, and I hope it is a better year for us all.

Winter Sketchbook

I recently got a Pentel Brush Pen and I've been using it for location drawings. It's much more expressive than the rapidograph or mapping pen, and pretty handy for creating spontaneous drawings while out and about.

My brother Sean

People in a café

A very bad drawing of my brother Lewis, which makes us both giggle

Scarf on an office chair

A pot of tea

Vaslav Nijinsky

Just a couple of drawings I did of Nijinsky for my own amusement, straight from photographs of him.
I've been reading about his life, which the ballet critic Richard Buckle once described as: 

"ten years of growth, ten years of learning, ten years of dancing, thirty years of darkness."

Portrait Commission

part of a set of portraits commissioned by a lovely client in New York

David Lynch & the Dalai Lama

Lou Reed

When I was little, Transformer was our staple record for long car journeys (along with David Bowie's Hunky Dory) - me and my brother's knew it off by heart, back to front, upside down, and never, ever grew tired of it. Our toy monkey's sang along to "Make-up" through many a rain-swept voyage into darkest Wales, delighted to come out of their closets, bom-bom-bom-bom bombombom.

Later, when I was 17, clumsy and shy, somehow sent floundering after the death of my grandmother and my first visit to New York (one freezing February, central park pristine with snow and bare trees), I listened to a cassette of Lou Reed's New York album on repeat, kept afloat amid a sea of the mean-seventeens (possibly not helped by reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted in quick succession).

My portrait of Lou Reed is now available printed on t-shirts at WeAdmire. 

"I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize everything. I just grow a tumor instead."

A postcard sized portrait of Woody Allen, 

sketched in ink with a paintbrush

(drawn for a sketchathon with Little White Lies Magazine)

Process pics

A few months back I completed a painting for a client in New York who commissioned a portrait reflecting the style of classical Hollywood.

I really loved working on it - it taught me to plan out my images beforehand, because I have always been someone who draws straight off in pen and ink without any kind of pencil guide, and I always felt like drawing in pencil first was somehow cheating (thanks, Aubrey Beardsley).

But actually, the longer the process of making something, the more room for discoveries to be made, and it's often where the best ideas regarding colour and composition have chance to step in.

Lately my process is: detailed light pencil sketch (focusing on areas of colour) > then watercolour > then add ink lines (sparingly). 

If I draw in ink before I watercolour the tendency arises to stay too strictly within the lines, and the colours can't interact as much. There is still plenty of room for improvement - I always feel that I could paint much more loosely than I do - but it's all part of the learning process.

 

first sketches

 

pencil and watercolour

watercolour, gouache + pen and ink

final piece

close-up

James Joyce & Charlie Parker

James Joyce

Charlie Parker

more Portraits on Postcards

Hugh Laurie

Jeff Mangum

Paul McCartney

Tracey Emin