Monday, January 22, 2007

The Napoli


Something large has washed up on the beach near here this week spilling pollution and boxes of presents for the people of nearby Branscombe and anybody who can get a tractor to the shore. Although this should make my beachcombing for driftwood a little more interesting for a while I can't help wondering why this ship was not taken to Plymouth instead of the intended destination of Portland. Unable to get as far as Portland it was decided to run it aground at Branscombe right in the middle of a World Heritage site. Bit of a stupid decision as far as I can see.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The Book of Drawings.

I have been working on a book of my old drawings on and off now for about a year or so and hopefully I should be reaching the end of it soon. Most of the drawings date from the early nineties. When I left college I was pretty much burnt out and I could hardly draw at all even though in my younger days drawing had been one of my strong points.At college the emphasis had been on theoretical work and everything had to be justified in terms of meaning, I found this to be a great inhibiter of creative expression. Thinking about what something meant before actually producing anything seemed pointless to me. In retrospect it is easy to see what the intention behind a piece of work is and I find it much easier to produce something if I am not worrying about justifiying everything to some imaginary audience while I am working. These drawings were an attempt to teach myself to draw again by just drawing in the same method as I had used when I was younger and I just drew for fun and to see what happened. I used to be very keen on science fiction and I liked to create alternate worlds of my own and populate them with my own characters and landscapes.Sometimes I would produce long comic strips of these places.These new drawings revisited these places and others that were new to me. They were mostly drawn late at night in a cold room with my old cat for warmth and company and all were drawn for my own benefit and not to show really as they are very different from my usual paintings. Anyway I have got the drawings out of storage and dusted them off and slimmed them down to about 170 images and structured them into a book. I will post some of them here at some point but for now here is a possible cover.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

January



I thought it would be nice to put someone else's work up for a change. This illustration is by Vernon Hill courtesy of the blog http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ which is always worth a look.There are lots of Vernon Hills other pictures in the collection of Southampton Art Gallery though none of them look like his illustrations to The Arcadian Calender.