After drawing all those bottles of ink I thought that it was time for a change. But it’s drawn and coloured in inks.
Acrylics
Tag: Acrylic
Birch Mirror
In the spring of 1996 I’d just finished my book Yorkshire Rock which for several years had involved drawing lots of small illustrations, mainly from reference, so I felt the need to get out to draw from life again.
I took a portable easel and a set of acrylics into Coxley Valley and painted entirely on location, making a point of never finishing anything off when I got back home. I’d had enough of being stuck at my desk, now every brushstroke had to be painted directly from the natural world.
This silver birch grew on the slope directly beneath pylon cables. My theory is that while still a sapling it had been flattened by falling ice or snow but it continued to grow, framing the view beyond.
To keep things simple I took only the three primaries with me, plus white. I used an enamel jug or billy can which I dipped in the beck for my water. I used the billy can itself for cleaning brushes and the smaller enamel mug which served as a lid was for clean water for mixing colours.
Ex-Indian Army Plimsols
In the spring of 1978, I’d just finished a big black and white project and I was ready to burst into colour. I went back to the acrylics that I’d used at college and set about painting ever-more ambitious still lifes, flowers and landscapes. At one stage I remember setting myself the goal of one painting a week, but I think that it was after meeting up with my old tutor Bryan Robb at the Royal College of Art, that I speeded things up. He had chuckled and said he’d done a similar thing but he had set himself to paint one a day.
I painted these ex-Indian Army plimsols, which I remember had cost me just fifty pence at the Army surplus stores, on a primed postcard size piece of hardboard which was most likely recycled from a previously abandoned painting. An unfinished painting of South Kirkby colliery and another of my mum and dad’s back garden got recycled in this way.
Of course, I couldn’t afford to have the paintings framed professionally so I made my own, not just to save money but because I thought each frame should be a one-off for that particular painting. This one was dropped into a small tray-like frame of recycled materials, the inch or so around the glued-in board painted in a matching or harmonising coat of acrylic.
Once I’d got a dozen or more paintings together, I arranged to show them to the assistant curator at Wakefield Art Gallery. I packed them in the backpack that I’d used in Iceland and cycled to Wentworth Terrace. I got shot down in flames. One thing the curator rejected, rather scornfully, was that I’d framed the paintings, as if I was expecting her to offer me an exhibition there and then (I was!)
So that was the end of my fledgling career in fine art, at least for the present but some years later, in a new tasteful professionally-made frame (and I’m sorry that I haven’t still got the homemade version) from John at Art of Oak, Tammy Hall Street, Wakefield, this went into my first one-man show at the City Museum, then housed in the Mechanics Institute on Wood Street, Wakefield.
My dad insisted one buying it, and I’m so glad he did, because it’s now come back to me, and I couldn’t bear to part with it now, because it’s such a reminder of those early days.
The plimsols are on a workbench that I’d constructed in my small room in a shared flat. The plant box behind was made in my student days at the Royal College of Art for my room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington. And, no, I don’t still have those plimsols: I’m afraid that eventually, I wore them out.
Greenhouse Mural Sketch
I WAS LOOKING through my 1972 student diary recently (see Student Days) and was reminded that on 4 October that year, at the start of my first full month at college I drew:
‘ . . . a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!’
This ‘identification chart’, which grew into an 8ft x 4ft acrylic on chipboard mural, absorbed a lot of my time for the next three years and I was still adding details to it – I think the last thing that I painted was a leopard frog in the foreground – on the eve of the degree show.
To demonstrate the process that I’d gone through, I included the original sketch in my show but I was surprised when a fellow student – a young man from the jewellery department who would go on to make a name for himself as a goldsmith – asked if it was for sale.
I was taken aback by this and explained that, as a working drawing, it was never intended to be for sale. It’s on the cheap smooth offset paper that they sold at the college shop, folded down the middle and on the back there are streaks where I’ve cleaned my brush, ring-marks from a coffee cup but at one end there are some delightful sketches of frogs in ballpoint pen, drawn by my tutor John Norris Wood when he was advising me to add some reptiles and amphibians to the painting.
I’ve just come across the sketch in a drawer in the plan chest and I can now see why my college friend was attracted to it. It’s rough and splodgy but there’s spontaneity about it that is inevitably missing in the laboriously crafted finished product.