Month: March 2019

No Great Shakes

I wouldn’t want my drawings to look too perfect but I’m frustrated when they turn out too shaky so, since we got back from Rome a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to do something about that and I decided to see if cutting down on my caffeine would make any difference. So far it seems to be working well. I can’t give up my morning coffee but most places can now offer a reasonable decaffeinated version.

My Home Gym

home gym

I’ve also been keeping up with the suggestions for exercises in the books that I read recently by Dr Chatterjee, which I’m hoping are improving my posture when I’m sitting at my desk or drawing. They should also help with movement as they’re designed to activate muscle groups, in my shoulders for instance, that might otherwise be neglected.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve bought myself an aerobic step, as recommended by Dr Chatterjee for improving balance. It sits in the corner of my studio under the bookshelf along with some dumbbells. The step was just £12 from Argos, the dumbbells £5 from Aldi, which makes them a bit of a bargain compared with gym membership. I do only about five minutes exercise a day so I couldn’t even get to my nearest gym in the time that it takes to go through a simple routine.

Eighteen months ago, I had a brief suspected TIA (transient ischaemic attack), which I now suspect might have been an unusual migraine or just the result of getting up too quickly after an overlong session on the computer. Because it was transient even the experts can’t say for sure. As a result I got myself a FitBit fitness tracker. I’m giving it a break now because I feel that it’s done it’s job of making us aware of how many or how few steps we might do in a day and it hasn’t shown up any problems with my heart rate.

During our three and a half days in Rome two weeks ago, we walked the equivalent of a marathon, according to Barbara’s iPhone: 70,000 paces, 43 km (0ver 26 miles), so I think that we’re fine for walking and, for me, it’s slouching at my desk and shaky hands that I want to tackle next.

Just my Cup of Tea

Blacker Hall

So at Blacker Hall farm shop this morning we both went for decaffeinated lattes and, it might just be coincidence, but my drawing of the old beams seemed that bit steadier than when I’ve drawn them on previous occasions.

I do feel a bit calmer. I’d describe the difference, when I need to perform a smooth movement, such as drinking from a full cup of coffee or starting a drawing, like this:

  • Before: I’d tense up and attempt to rigidly control my movement
  • Now: I feel more relaxed and happier to go with the flow

It’s early days so there’s no way of knowing whether it’s cutting down on caffeine or doing the exercises has been of any benefit. Perhaps it’s just getting over the excitement of our break in Rome and recovering from a cold. Whatever it is, I think it’s worth carrying on for a while.

Fountain Pen Sketches

fireplace

I’ve gone back to ink cartridges in my Safari fountain pen. The Lamy Ink is freer-flowing than my regular Noodlers, but I don’t have the option of adding a watercolour wash. This fireplace is at my niece Hannah’s Victorian terraced house and I wondered if it was original, but no, it’s a modern gas fire replica, which goes well with house, as does the tile surround.

Sofa at my brother-in-law John’s house
tree
Tree at Blacker Hall farm shop, Monday.

I feel that I have to press on just a bit to get the line that I’m after with the Noodler’s but in contrast with the fountain-pen ink, I can glide the nib lightly over the surface and pick up some of the texture of the cartridge paper in the line.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Beyond Gamma Cygni

comic strip

Before I consign my 1971 student notebook back to the attic, I couldn’t resist showing you this. I don’t remember drawing it but it seems to be nothing more than a doodle that got elaborated when I should have been working on my thesis. The space suits are from 2001: A Space Odyssey and from the Frank Hampson era of Dan Dare. The astro-physicist bears a slight resemblance to Hermann Bondi.

Had I drawn the Gamma Cygni Outpost as a more elongated asteroid, I could have claimed to have predicted the interstellar object Oumuamua, which passed through our solar system in 2017. I don’t know where the name Salodrin came from. I’m sure it’s not from any science-fiction story that I’d been reading.

Sadly, this is as far as the mission got, so the ‘beyond’ in the title is misleading. So often when I look back at the ideas that I worked on just for fun, I think, why didn’t I take this further?

Victor Ambrus

Victor Ambrus

I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.

sketch
Doodle from my notebook/sketchbook where I’m trying out Ambrus’s technique of adding finger prints to a drawing.

At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!

As the smoke cleared, he explained:

“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”

Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:

“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”


fox sketch
Ambrus-inspired drawing from my diary a couple of days after the book fair. I studied his illustrations in books that I borrowed from the children’s section in Leeds City Library. This was my impression of a character in Barbara Leonie Picard’s Twice Read Tales, illustrated by Ambrus.

But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:

“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”

The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.

Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy

Quentin Blake

The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.

I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).

After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:

Big Chief I-Spy
Peter Purves

‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’

And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’

The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.

Birds in Rome

birds of Rome

We didn’t see a single carrion crow during our time in Rome, the hoodies seemed so at home in the city. I like the Italian name for the hooded crow: corvo incappuciato.

The herring gull gets the name gabbiano reale, which literally translates as the ‘real gull’. Perhaps that’s like us describing one of our species as the ‘common gull’. We also saw a few black-headed gulls – gabbiano con testa nera – congregating alongside the cormorants, comorano, on a mud-bank on the Tiber as we crossed the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Tree Sparrow

Looking it up in my field guide, it seems that a female sparrow that we saw in the park near the Villa Medici would be the Italian sparrow, passero, although to us it looked identical to a female house sparrow. It was outnumbered by tree sparrows: ten of them were pecking amongst the gravel.

Also in the park we spotted a greyish bird, which looked smaller than a robin. It perched on the bark of a tree, then flitted off to perch on branches and on statues. We didn’t get a good enough look at it to identify it.

The Vatican Museums

St Peter's Dome
Coffee break at the Caffe delle Carroze, Vatican Museums.
ticket
Vatican Museums day ticket: Plato (a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci) and Aristotle, the central philosophers in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’

Raphael’s School of Athens was my favourite painting in the Vatican Museums. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement seemed so overblown and vindictive by comparison. It was my first opportunity to take a close look at the paintwork which was fresh and understated, not super smooth as you might expect from a Raphael.

But Morandi’s still lives – one of which included a blue cylindrical mallet alongside his more usual muted-colour domestic objects – seemed more moving to me than the grand set pieces. Although he went for such apparently simple subjects, Morandi was as philosophical about his subject matter as Raphael and Michelangelo:

Morandi, Natura Morta

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)

The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic

snail shell mosaic

The artist Heraclitus, who designed the ‘unswept floor’ mosaic made by Sosos of Pergamon, Greece, was equally skilled in evoking our confusion between appearance and reality. I wonder how many times a servant, sweeping up after a real banquet, mistook the actual debris of feasting for one the playful depictions of discarded shells, bones, fruits and nuts.

unswept floor mosaic

It was found in the ruins of a villa on the Aventine Hill in Rome, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, (117 to 138 A.D.) but the mosaic has been dated to three centuries earlier.

Spiral staircase
The magnificent spiral staircase that leads from the museum shop down to the exit reminds me of the spiral of the snail shell on the mosaic . . . but also of the Nine Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, a timely reminder to us all as we prepare to make our exits!

Links

Vatican Museums, you can book online to avoid the queues, although there weren’t any long queues when we arrived at about 9.45 a.m., and I’d recommend going as early as you can manage and preferably at a quieter time of year.

Raphael’s School of Athens

Morandi’s still life

The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic

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Categorized as Drawing

The Blackbird Diaries

Blackbird Diaries

You can learn a lot about someone from the pile of books that accumulates next to them. Amongst Barbara’s current reading is The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Wildlife by Karen Lloyd, who is based in the limestone country of the Southern Lake District.

I’m trying out one of the ‘Realistic Watercolor’ brushes in the latest version of Clip Studio Paint; after quickly sketching with the pencil tool, I go for the Real G-Pen then try the new Rough Wash brush. In the real world, I’d never try for such a rugged effect in my ink or watercolour washes, but perhaps I should give it a go. After forty-odd years in the business, trying something different is one of the reasons that I keep experimenting with drawing on the iPad.

For the tall, folksy hand-lettering, I took my cue from Andrew Forteath’s striking, friendly cover design for the paperback.

The Travel Club

YHA group, Honsiter Pass, c.1961/2
Fourth-year boys from St Peter’s Juniors, Horbury, taking a break halfway down Honister Pass, Lake District, early summer, 1962. I’m the good-looking guy at the front of the group. No, NOT that one: that’s my red-headed friend Adrian: I’m the one on the left.
Back row: Ian Morley (like me, a member of the Great I-SPY Tribe), Trevor Wales, Marshall Coates
Boy on rock: unknown
Middle row: Remember him, but can’t remember his name, Peter Coates, Stephen Downing, Robert Bishop
Front: Richard Bell, Adrian Littlewood
Photograph, Derek Harker (or possibly Mr Lindley).

Horbury Carnegie Free Library, last Saturday, 11.45 a.m.

“Let’s see, is there anything I’d be interested in?”

It’s my teacher from junior school, Derek Harker, who’s interested in the books that Barbara is packing away in her bag.

“The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Nature, by Karen Lloyd, that should be right up your street,” I suggest, reading the blurb, “and she won the Striding Edge award for the Lakeland Book of the Year.”

“Put my name down for it! Have you ever walked along Striding Edge?”

“No, that’s far too dangerous for me!”

“Striding Edge isn’t dangerous, I’ve walked it several times. Sharp Edge on Blencathra is the dangerous one.”

In my second year at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury, 1959-1960, Derek organised a Travel Club for our class. We’d contribute sixpence a week and sometimes the walk would start from the school on a Saturday morning and cost nothing but, when enough sixpences had accumulated, we’d go further afield, for instance taking the train from Horbury Station to Hebden Bridge for an evening walk to Hardcastle Crags.

The photograph of us in Honister Pass was a couple of years later, in our final term at the school, taking things one stage further and setting off for a week’s Youth Hostelling, walking from Keswick to Buttermere, with a couple of nights at Borrowdale along the way.

St Peter's juniors at Buttermere Youth Hostel, 1962.
St Peter’s juniors, fourth year children at Buttermere Youth Hostel, 1962. Mr Lindley, then my form teacher, on the far left, Mr Douglas, our fell-walking, pipe-smoking headmaster in middle at the back. This must have been taken by Mr Harker, as he’s the only member of staff who doesn’t appear on it, but I have a feeling that it was with Mr Lindley’s camera.

Barbara started at the same school a few years later but she never got the opportunity to head for the hills. So why was St Peter’s so focussed on hill-walking in the early 1960s? A lot of it was down to the headmaster, Mr Douglas, who was a keen fell-walker but the Travel Club was Mr Harker’s initiative. I’d often wondered how it all started and on Saturday he told me that his enthusiasm for the great outdoors started during his school days.

In the final months of World War II, Derek and other boys from his school, Thornes House, Wakefield, went off on the first of several annual camps, a kind of boys’ version of the Land Girls, to help with forestry in North Wales. He was sixteen at the time, so he and his classmates were capable of helping out with tasks such as clearing debris.

One of his friends had built himself a battery-powered radio, which was about the size of a shoe-box.

“One evening he rushed from his tent shouting ‘They’ve dropped the A-bomb!’ I didn’t even know what the A-bomb was.

“My brother, who was older than me, had been serving on an aircraft carrier in the North Sea, protecting convoys, but by the end of the war they were sent to join the effort to defeat the Japanese. They’d just arrived when news came that the bomb had been dropped. The Japanese in New Guinea surrendered immediately.”

Links

Karen Lloyd,  award winning writer and environmental activist

Andrew Forteath, Glasgow-based designer

Corsican Pines

Bluebell leaves are emerging in the mixed woodland on the slopes above the boathouse at Newmillerdam Country Park but there’s no sign of a herb layer in this conifer plantation above Lawns Dike. These appear to be Corsican Pines, a fast-growing variety of the Black Pine, Pinus nigra var. corsicana, which was a popular choice for forestry in the 1970s, when these were planted.

mallards
mallard

The wintering wildfowl that we’ve been used to seeing have dispersed and we see just a pair of goosanders standing on the causeway amongst the black-headed gulls with a second red-headed female on the water nearby. Considering that we must now be well into the breeding season, the mallards are looking relaxed this morning.

Coot by the dam head, thinking about nesting?

Roman Graffiti

Graffitie
Suburra poster
Suburra: Blood on Rome

Lock-up on the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, a back street behind the Colosseum. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to photograph graffiti in Rome, but Barbara had set herself a bit of a challenge, so photo credit to her for this one (although can I just mention that I did the location-spotting?).
I love those textures and colours and the way the graffiti echoes the shapes of the wrought iron. Would make a great location for the gangsters’ hideout in Netflix’s Suburra: Blood on Rome, which was advertised on a huge billboard at the end of the street.

Link

Suburra: Blood on Rome, Netflix.