Joiner Photographs

 

In the course of an online workshop, I found myself doing a bit of joinery today. David Hockney has a lot to answer for.

Karen Stamper and the Concertina Sketchbook

It takes a lot to get me out of bed, dressed and breakfasted and onto a train by 8.43 am these days, but that's what happened last Saturday. I was on my way to York with fellow Sketch Crawler Richard to take part in a workshop led by Karen Stamper.

I've been looking at Karen's work for quite a while and wondering how she achieved the effects in her concertina sketchbooks, so when the opportunity to find out came up, I jumped at the chance.

And it was well worth the effort! I won't give away Karen's secrets - she has lots more workshops to give, I'm sure - but will say that she started us off slowly to get us over the natural trepidation most of us felt. Dribbling ink and squirting it with water while it runs down five or six pages of  the concertina must be a proven ice-breaker. After that it was just one bit of fun after another, involving PVA, gesso, frottage, markers, collage and some hard thinking.

I ended up with six pages of an abstracted townscape full of references to Crete. One of the fascinations of the concertina sketchbook is that as it's folded, new compositions come into view.

It was clear everyone enjoyed themselves and seeing the sketchbooks laid out together showed how individual the end results were. 

Pat and I have a long holiday in Chania planned for later this year and I can certainly see me using some of these techniques while I'm there. And I'll be watching out for the chance to take another of Karen's workshops!

#KarenStamperArt

Knife Painting Workshop

Knife Workshop WIP

(acrylic on watercolour paper)

This is the result of an interesting workshop this afternoon, led by my old friend Tony Montague. Using one of Tony's own photographs of a garden whose name I've forgotten, this was done with heavy body acrylics and a couple of painting knives. No brush, other than to lay in some base colours on the 140 lb watercolour paper, and me very much out of my comfort zone.

It took me until the coffee break, when I stepped away, to recognise the better aspects of this painting, and I was very grateful for Tony's later offer of a pot of fluorescent orange that helped make it sing a bit.

This was my first use of heavy body acrylics and I was surprised to find that parts of the painting were still wet when it was time to take it home. All my recent experience of acrylic painting has been with standard, flow formula and fluid acrylic, all of which dry frighteningly fast.

I quite like this painting, but it needs cropping and I'm already thinking about how it might be improved with a brush and some other colours.

Working on Rakes Lane

Rakes Lane WIP 
(acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm)

I've been wondering where to take the small plein air canvases I started at Lesley Seeger's workshop in Huttons Ambo. It became clear to me quite quickly after the workshop that I don't really like the thin layering method of painting that works so well for Lesley. The end result looks lovely online but doesn't satisfy me when I see it in actuality. I need some body in my painting.



As a result, I've been working over this, one of the three Huttons Ambo canvases. First of all, I tried drawing out some of the definite shapes I could see in the original, using the one photograph I took at the time and relying considerably on my memory. Then I applied quite solid, opaque colour to the drawn areas, arriving at what I think is the beginning of a painting that might work for me. More in due course.

Lesley Seeger Workshop

Last week I travelled down to Huttons Ambo with my Sketch Crawl mates, Richard and Mike, for a one day Exploring Abstraction workshop with Lesley Seeger. We had a great time, the weather was excellent, the food and company were great and Lesley was a warmly enthusiastic and encouraging tutor.

Her methods are unusual, or they are in terms of how I'd normally work, even allowing for the fact that I don't normally work in acrylic. At her suggestion, I took three small (20x20 cm) canvases, two tubes of acrylic, a few brushes, a pot of acrylic medium and a little pot of water out into the local fields and from the vantage point of the hill in the photograph above, I made a a tonal drawing in blue acrylic - the canvas above - which I later worked on back at the Village Hall.

Moving on to Rake's Lane, a beautiful nearby hollow way, I made this second image with two colours and again worked on it back at the Hall.

From just up the Lane, looking back at the village, I made this third canvas. At first it was quite like the second one but somehow I managed to slop a dollop of painting medium onto the canvas and the whole affair took on a completely different character - hence the very pronounced linear quality. Again, more work was done on it back at the Village Hall.

Apart from being a really enjoyable experience, I learned quite a bit about the nature of acrylics and how they might behave. These three canvases are far from finished, of course, and whether I continue in exactly this way is uncertain, but I have a better idea of where I might be going if I pursue this medium.

Old Drawings #27

In the Hatton (Charcoal, compressed charcoal, A2 cartridge paper)

I'm still in that inevitable post-Xmas slump, but hope to get a new painting going tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's another in what must seem like an inexhaustible supply of Old Drawings. This was done at another drawing workshop, this one run by Tracey Tofield at the Hatton Gallery, again probably in 1995.

I quite liked it at the time, but now recognise that it only really works because of the dynamic "railway viaduct" sculpture in the gallery at the time. The lighting in the gallery is rotten, which may account for the interesting patterns on the ceiling.

Old Drawings #26

Black Still Life (Charcoal, compressed charcoal, A2 cartridge paper)

Another from 1995. This was done at a drawing workshop held in one of the studios at Newcastle University. Everything laid out was black - black brushes, plates, cups, jars and lumps of what I think may have been tar. I also remembered that I thoroughly enjoyed drawing it.