Unison Pastels

St Peter's, Falstone, 1 July 2015
(0.8 marker and Pentel Brush Pen in 21 x 26 cm sketchbook)

The North of England Art Club organised a good day out yesterday to the Unison Pastels Factory at Thorneyburn.  I've been twice before, but I still find it rather amazing that a world-wide business is run from a such a tiny place in the middle of absolutely nowhere. 

It's always interesting to see how the pastels are made, but I resisted the temptation to add to my untouched supply of pastels from those previous trips. I was keen to press on to Falstone where we were to have lunch and do some sketching.

A tiny village in Northumberland, Falstone boasts two churches, but only one pub. The pub was closed until the evening, but St Peter's, the Anglican church, was open, so I wandered around there for a while. It was refreshing to be in the cool air, after what had become a scorching hot day outside.

I'd just about given up finding something to draw and was on the point of ambling off to Rose Cottage where Ian and Judy were promising tea and biscuits at 2.30, when these gravestones set against the big cypress caught my eye. I managed to finish it just as the ink in my Brush Pen ran out and the need for tea and biscuits became overwhelming.

Treasure Trove

I spent the afternoon clearing out some drawers in the studio, ready for a future move. What a treasure trove of oil bars, pastels, oil pastels, watercolour tubes and sets, and a huge selection of coloured pencils! All bought over the years and more or less neglected as I pursued my dedication to oils.

I think I see a new period of experimentation coming up, once I'm sorted.

Driftwood

Driftwood (Charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper)

In an idle moment in the studio yesterday I came across a bit of scrap paper and decided to see what I might make of this image of driftwood I'd seen on Holy Island. The paper was a bit lacking in tooth, so the pastel didn't take well, but I think I see something here that may work its way into a painting.

Third Holy Island Picture

Holy Island III (work in progress)

A bit more cloud structure in the sky in this one. It'll give me the opportunity to play with quite a varied palette of pastel colours.

Old Drawings #63

Car Park (Charcoal, pastel on cartridge paper, 60 x 60 cms)

I don't think I've posted this before and it does more or less fit chronologically into the series of Old Drawings, having been drawn in 2000/2001.

The underground car park shown is still there in Newcastle, but much of the superstructure was demolished or remodelled when the new City Library was built last year.

Old Drawings #58

Collapsed Ceiling 2 (charcoal and pastel, A1 cartridge paper)

This drawing is so like the previous one that it seems daft to wait a while before posting it. Even now I'm surprised by how similar the two are.

I don't often follow up a charcoal drawing with one in pastel of the same subject, but this time I was trying to work out whether I wanted to make painting of it. I never did make up my mind and the painting didn't get made.

Old Drawings #35

Archways (Charcoal, compressed charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper)

These arches lie at the Newcastle end of the Tyne Bridge and carry the main London to Edinburgh rail line. I think when I was making the drawing (probably in 1996), a hint of Cubism crept into the building on the right.

Shoe on a Rug

(2B mechanical pencil, pastel, A5 sketchbook)

Too many things to catch up on at home today, so I decided to forgo my second visit of the week to the Art Club. However, just to keep things rolling, I did this drawing of my old trainer on a striped rug. "Draw a shoe" is Challenge No.1 on the Everyday Matters list.

It occurs to me that I must have been wearing these trainers for close to 30 years and they're still the most comfortable shoes I possess.

Contained

Tree in rock, Blawearie (Charcoal and pastel, cartridge paper)

This tree had struggled up through a crack in the rock in the garden at Blawearie, a place I've written about before. It seems to exemplify the qualities of the new Illustration Friday subject, Contained, while suggesting there is always a way out.

Old Drawings #25

High Level Bridge (Charcoal, pastel on cartridge paper)

I'm guessing 1995 again. I remember exaggerating the height of the bridge a little to make it fit the square - I'd just discovered the square format and was determined to make everything square.

The High Level was designed by Robert Stephenson and is the first major example of a wrought iron bow-string girder bridge in the world. It's probably my favourite of all the bridges over the Tyne (there are 12 in all) and is certainly the one I've painted most - I love the way its rectilinear profile fits the picture plane.

It's been closed to traffic since 2005 because, of course, in addition to the rail traffic on the upper deck, it was built to accommodate Victorian horse-drawn transport and years of heavy motorised transport had taken their toll. As a Grade I listed structure, there were strictures on how it might be repaired. The road bed, for instance, had to be completely replaced, along with a number of the girders which had corroded, and this had to be done with sympathetic materials. After a £42m refit it opened again this year, with traffic restricted to buses and taxis, going one way only (Newcastle to Gateshead).

Old Drawings #23

Yucca (21 x 16.5 ins., charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper)

Following on from that agave, I thought this might be an appropriate time to post this drawing, done in 1996. The yucca is sitting in the window of my parents' flat on Allerdene Estate in Gateshead. Through the window can be seen a bit of the estate and part of the Silver Hills.

Snow

Window View - Snow (Charcoal and pastel, 19.5 x 16.5 ins)

I didn't go to the Club today and this is why. When I got up there was a white-out. It gradually thawed as the day went on, but I suspect the Club studio would have been deserted. And pretty damn cold. This drawing will have to do for today.

Old Drawings #20

Blawearie Garden (Charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper, 20 x 33 ins)

I don't recall when the drawing was made, I'm afraid, and I hadn't intended to post another Old Drawing so soon, but this one seemed apposite. My friend The Architect is off work for a couple of weeks, so he suggested that he and I and Mrs Sums should walk across Bewick Moor to Blawearie today. As I've said before, it's one of my most favourite places and I was looking forward not only to the walk, but to maybe getting a little sketching done. The Architect is an artist too, so I reckon he'd have been amenable to a short delay in the walk to make a drawing or two.

It was not to be. The weather has been quite pleasant so far this week, but for one day only it's due to visit us with gale force winds and lashing rain. Not the sort of weather you really want on Bewick Moor, where the only shelter is at Blawearie.

Old Drawings #19

Ford Castle Garden 1994 (4B pencil, A3)

For a number of years I went to painting weekends at Ford Castle in Northumberland, organised by the Friends of the Hatton. There were usually two of them a year, in Spring and Autumn, and they were wonderful weekends, providing camaraderie, great food and the chance for quiet painting and drawing in the private grounds.

The Castle belonged to the Duke of Northumberland's family, but was leased to Northumberland County Council Education Authority. We were able to use it in out of term times. Unfortunately, it eventually fell under a new regime and it became finacially impractical for us to use it any more.

I did a lot of work in sketchbooks on those weekends, and several pochade paintings, but this one was on a single sheet of paper. I drew it from one of the dormitory windows (we had the place to ourselves, so I had a dormitory to myself!) and although I think I started a painting of the same view, nothing came of it.

This is often the case - the making of the drawing is sufficient. I don't find I want to do more with it. Do any of you feel the same way sometimes?

Exploring Mallorca: Bollards again

Concrete Bollards 2 (Pencil, pastel, and Pentel Brushpen, A5 sketchbook)

Before setting off for the Art Club this morning, I felt the need to revisit the photograph of broken bollards. This was the result.


I actually got to the Club quite early today (a result of forgetting to re-set my alarm after having to make an early start yesterday to get to the dentist) and as a result was able to spend almost five hours working on the new view from the Tyne Bridge. It may not look like five hours work, but this is a small canvas with a great deal of complex detail and for most of the time I was using a brush no more than 5mm wide. I must be mad.




Buildings with Tyne Bridge (work in progress)

This is where I left it today. Apart form some minor corrections, the right hand side is pretty much complete. I've been delaying work on the Bridge itself, because it's such a bugger to get right. All those spars and dramatically receding perspective. I don't want to find myself fiddling with detail, so next week I'll have to approach it quite broadly.

Broken Benches

Broken Benches (Oil on board, 13 x 13 ins.) (Private Collection)

I've been combing my boxes of photographs recently to find and record pictures of paintings which have sold. This one was sold in a solo show I had at the Gallagher & Turner Gallery in 2000 in Newcastle. Ostensibly, the show was an exhibition of images from a holiday in Cyprus, but I threw this one in because it fitted the overall look of the show. It's actually based on a sketch I did in Nafplio in Greece in 1994:





Broken Benches, Nafplio (Watercolour and pastel, A5 sketchbook)

The painting was originally the same format as the sketch, but I cut it down to a square because I felt it focused more on the benches that way. For me, it's still an example of how unpromising material can produce an interesting painting.

Old Drawings #12 & #13

Snooker Table (Charcoal on cartridge paper, 16 x 8 ins)

I moved into my current house in 1991 because it had a large basement room, nearly 26 feet in length. By then I'd been with the Open College of the Arts (OCA) for two years and was painting seriously (no drawings seem to have survived from that period), so I was looking for good studio space.

When I moved into the house, the basement had a full sized snooker table in it, which the previous owners had inherited from the people they bought the house from and which they didn't want. I wasn't interested in snooker and billiards, but for a while I kept the table for visiting friends, and tried painting round it.

One of the projects in Year 3 of the OCA course, was to "Make a Painting in the Style of ...". I chose Georges Braque a) because I like him, and b) possibly because he had made paintings of billiard tables. After drawing some pastel copies of a few of his paintings (I remember noting how wobbly his lines were), I set up a still life on the snooker table and made the drawing above.

The next step was to make a colour sketch, so, ever the one for cutting corners, I photocopied the drawing and worked over it with pastel:



Snooker table (Pastel over photocopied drawing, 16 x 8 ins)

Finally, the painting, which still hangs on my living room wall:



Still Life with Snooker Table and Mandolin (Oil on board, 28 x 14 ins.)

Drawing for Today

Concrete & Wire (Pastel, A1 cartridge)

Something I found by the sea.

The Oak Citadel

Oak Citadel (Charcoal, charcoal and coloured Conte on A3 cartridge)

It's been my intention for some time to try to work on drawings outside which are bigger than sketchbook size. Oddly enough, although I've done it in the less agreeable surroundings of Newcastle, I've never really attempted it in the countryside.

This time I went prepared. I had with me a Mapac bag containing an A3 pad of Winsor & Newton Medium Surface cartridge paper and all manner of drawing stuff - charcoal, compressed charcoal, pencils, pastels and coloured Conte. And a new can of fixative. The fixative is really important to my working method. I spray as often as is necessary, rubbing down elements of the current drawing and spraying again, until there develops a crystalline tooth to the drawing.

Despite my preparedness, I still didn't achieve what I set out to do. Mainly because I hadn't prepared myself for something outside my control - the wind. The thing about little pieces of charcoal, Conte sticks and the packs they come in, is that they're very light. So a great deal of my time was taken up with rushing about retrieving materials and generally cursing the elements.

I know it's a poor workman who blames his tools, but I also found that my choice of medium surface cartridge was a mistake - I really don't like the rather mechanical tooth it's been prepared with. Maybe the other side would have been better for my purposes, but smooth would have been best of all.

Anyway, after a considerable time cursing and grunting, a black cloud came and threatened me and I was forced to give up. So the drawing as it stands lacks a certain definition in the trees. The trunks don't seem to have sufficient body and even the rocks are a little anaemic. I do like the way the shadows of the branches are cast over the rock face, however: something I would find difficult to invent because even standing in front of them, I couldn't figure out which branch was casting which shadow.

I may return to it in the studio when the time is right.