My world of Contemporary Abstarct Drawing.

Wednesday:

I normally start my blog with a new drawing or drawings although I did do a drawing last night I have failed to take a pic of it. So a quick review of previous work and a little about my day today.

Today we had a busy morning workshop and  I did draw and tour focusing on building and this afternoon we got a load of 'stuff' ready for tomorrow, we have two sold out workshops another drawing tour and also an evening kids club to do. This evening I have given a guitar lesson and am now home writing this.

So below is a rough mix of some of my work.

So these represent some of my strands of drawing but certainly not all.

As usual I am off to draw and get some more work done which is my usual mode. I draw everyday I can, I only miss the odd one and will be back tomorrow to show you new drawings from the last couple of days.

Cheers.

Tuesday, drawing and stuff.

Above is another new drawing I started and completed last night, the 38th in my new book. It is going to take quite a few months to get this project completed but I won't let that daunt me.

Today started with a felting session at Barnoon that I was not involved in but I  did a tour and draw around the town and below is one of the drawings I did on our walk. It is a very simple line drawing of the horizon from Smeaton's pier with as few lines as possible.

This afternoon we ran a candle making workshop which was fun and some lovely candles were made.

After the workshop we met with our friends who are staying for a few days and also bumped into Bob Deveraux and also Lauren Sebastian who is back in town after a short stay in Spain.

Short blog today and onto some relaxing and drawing.

Cheers

Starting the week.

Monday:

Above is the drawing I had worked on and nearly finished last night and I managed to get the last little bit done today. So I have started the next one but have little time to draw tonight. We will see.

Today started as Mondays do with attending the drawing class at Barnoon and it was a lively chatty affair and below are the drawings I did in reverse order of a hanging basket in a bucket.....

Warm up negative space drawing without looking at the paper.

After todays workshops we got home and got ready for our visitors Melanie and daughter Rosie who are staying for a few days, escaping from the old country.

Above is the view before we met them off the train just before 9pm.

A brief blog tonight and as usual I am off to draw for a bit.

Back tomorrow.

One new drawing and many thoughts.

Sunday:

Above is the drawing I started in last nights drawing session, I didn't get to complete it but I was well over half way with it. In decorating gaps today I finished off the last bit and yet again which seems to be the norm for this book work, I am most satisfied with it the 36th drawing in the book. Later on I will start drawing 37 and by my reckoning only another 100 ish to go before it is finished.

Today has been a day of decorating and listening to BBC 6 Music which has been an uplifting experience after the events of last week.

Whilst writing this blog and reflecting I would love to do a much larger work based on this drawing, although many of the others in the book would also be interesting to scale up.

Below are a few that I would consider.

Cheers!

New drawings and my work. FA Cup, Jeremy Corbyn.

Saturday:

 Above is the drawing I had a frame works for the day before that I finished off in last nights drawing session and another successful page done in this whole sketchbook work. I am less than a month in on this whole book project. It is going well so far although I am only about a quarter of the way into it.

When the first drawing was complete I got the frame work of this one above started and got some of the detail done. I could get quite obsessed with this project and in some ways I would love to be able to put a few more hours in a day but it won't fit in with life and work. I do seem to get 3 or 4 hours in every evening. The reason I was able to finish this drawing before tonight is after running around a bit this morning and then getting some more posters out and distributing some leaflets getting ready for half term. At the end of that we went for a coffee in The Rum & Crab Shack to collect our thoughts and I also managed to finish this drawing above off.

So tonight I start on a whole new one. I will probably flick through the previous 30 odd and I will then choose a pen and off I will go. I don't seem to get at all worried about having a blank page in front of me as I have so many ideas at the moment that I want to explore.

Today I also have painted, well decorated some doors and also I saw most of the FA Cup final between Arsenal and Chelsea. I recently read somewhere that Arsenal are Jeremy Corbyn's team and they play in red against the blue of Chelsea. I took that as an omen for the result of the general election and low and behold Arsenal won 2 - 1. Personally I am not a great fan of either team but my wife's daughter is a big Arsenal fan and I took a dislike to Chelsea when the beat Leeds in the 1971 or was it 1972 FA Cup final replay when Chelsea won late on with some fairly rough tactics and in my opinion as a young football fan, unfairly. So today I am pleased that red beat blue in an entertaining game and after the political events and other sad events of this week I do hope it is a portent to a Labour victory on 8th June. I fear for our country and it's values if this doesn't happen and after a rather massive groundswell of public opinion that the unfair media bias might cost all of us who live in the U.K. very dearly indeed.

I live in hope and will keep drawing whatever.

Cheers!

New work and tour drawings.

FRIDAY:

 Above is the drawing I did last night, having already got the framework going it was the filling in and it took quite a long time. It is another variation to my new book and yet again I am very happy with it, you may think I am easily pleased but I am quite critical really I am just on a roll and in fact I can only really judge when I have stepped away from a project how happy I still am with it all but I do just draw for me and hope that others like them and I meet enough people who like them although as ever and as most artists would say I could do with more sales. I still have a hope that that will happen one day so that I can concentrate on my work for more hours in the day so I could do more large scale work.

 Above is the drawing I started today and also had a bit of time to start the 'filling in' and that will be my drawing task after I finish this blog.

 
 So as you might know if you have read my blogs over the last year and a quarter most of my work is abstract but I also get the chance of drawing real things as part of my job doing tour and draws and above is one that I did earlier in the week from Barnoon Terrace, a wonderful place to take on different vistas buildings, plants and the bay.

Also from this weeks tours is this drawing of the Church from Lambeth  Walk. I suppose these drawings I have a naive style, I find it fits in with my abstract drawing quite nicely and I love drawing with fine liners of various nib sizes at this present time.

The last drawing I shall share is basically a wall, I am enjoying trying to find the language of representing it.

Today was spent recovering from our School visit yesterday which tired us right out so we did a few things up at Barnoon Workshop getting it ready for our half term workshops next week. We took a break for lunch and below is the view. Sometimes you know you are really blessed to live in this place and today is one of them.

So I am now off to draw having done a load of other uninteresting stuff today but never the less and good day.

Cheers.

New drawing and a very tiring day.

Thursday:

Above and below are the drawings I worked on last night one completed which I am very happy with it's slightly more minimal approach and the other the skeleton/framework of what needs to be filled in.

Above is a little sand drawing I did today whilst we were teaching our school party on the beach it was done as an example.

Today after our workshop on the beach I was running around town getting ready for this afternoon. It was perfect weather and about 22 degrees without a cloud in the sky, here is a pic of the harbour and below are two pics from Barnoon Terrace just to show you how mediterranean it looks today, plenty of sun block and now aftersun.

It has been such a busy day today and I am pretty tired now but I have some drawing to get on with so not my most chatty post.

Cheers.

Beach art, new drawing etc.

Wednesday:

Above is the drawing I did last night and yet another work in my new whole sketchbook work and yet another one I really like. I am getting quite happy with the flow of the drawings through the book so far. I will be working on it later.

Today I did a drawing tour of the buildings around town between 11 - 12:30. After I went down to Porthmeor to find Zoe, my wife and Erin working on some 'land art'. We broke for lunch on the beach and then went back to finish a few ideas off for tomorrow's  workshop on the beach.

 Above and below are my quick contributions a sand 'hollow dot' taken from the ideas that are feeding into my sketchbook work and a pebble line.

Above is the seaweed ring from today.

After the beach we got ready for tomorrow and took some things down to the Island Centre, nipped home had dinner and then I went back out to do a guitar lesson.

Blog written and drawing to do.

Art Tour, New Drawing, life and stuff.

Tuesday:

Above is the drawing I did in last evenings drawing session and tonight I have a new one to get on with.

Today I did an Art Tour and draw around town and when that had finished went back up to the workshop to start getting things ready for the big event of the week. We have 38 primary school children and their four teachers for the day to do a 'sculpture day'. The morning will be on the beach and the afternoon will be relief carving in plaster. Should be fun.

Since then we have been into town to pick up our extra plaster that had been left at Osbourne's and on the way we passed this view on the way down Barnoon Hill. We then went home to work on the website and get teching materials together for Thursday.

I had such a happy day yesterday but catching up with the news of the Manchester attack last night and then finding out that an old friend I had been back in touch with for a few months but hadn't heard from for a few weeks died of a heart attack last Friday so RIP George.

Well I am off to draw and cheers myself up and reflect on the events of the last couple of days.

Cheers.

Boris Johnson, Grant Curnow, Jeremy Dellar and Barnoon Workshp.

Monday:

 Above is the drawing I completed in last evenings drawing session and I am really very pleased with it. I am not exactly sure why but it just really works for me.

When that drawing was done I launched into the next one but didn't complete it, so it is where I start tonight and lets see where this goes.

Today started as it does every week with attending and helping at the Monday morning open drawing group at Barnoon Workshop. The subject was using oil pastels and we all drew a variety of interesting and different vegetables, I forgot to get pics of mine but right at the end I had a little abstract moment as you can see by the drawing above.

The class this morning was a very jolly and vibrant affair a couple of our regulars couldn't make it this week but we had three extras drop in and by midday we had a huge amount of drawings between us.

Class over and I nipped off down town to pick up lunch items and found that there were quite a few policemen, none of them were our local officer so I started to wonder what was going on, I popped into the building society and on exiting carried on up the road observing more policemen and some rather obvious plains clothes officers too. I went to the co-op bought lunch and when I came out I was passed by a rather sleek and huge Jaguar with blackened windows and a Range Rover also with blackened windows. I just knew it was to do with our General Election and that it wasn't Jeremy Corbyn as he was up north I turned the corner, the cars had stopped and out popped Boris Johnson a little shorty and more rotund than I thought he would be and unfortunately I wasn't  near enough to him to be able to as k him an awkward question, so I headed back up to the workshop to assemble our new table and have lunch.

Lunch was had and the table got put together and we tidied up and headed down into town again picked up a bit of shopping and headed home to do some work.

Before work got started we both logged on to our social media to find a video from Cornwall Live. It showed our friend and ex fellow trader in The Drill Hall Grant having a bit of a loud 'chat' aimed at Boris, however Boris didn't seem to have any answers to Grant's awkward questions and scuttled off to his car to get away. By the time of writing this blog some of the video online has had more than half a million views. It does give an idea of just how unpopular the Tories have become and especially recently since their brutally uncaring manifesto.

I am now feeling hopeful that we will have a change of government when votes are counted the morning of 9th June and that our country will become a fairer place to live in.

I also read a Guardian  Online piece about the posters that have been going up in and around London with 'Strong And Stable, My Arse', proclaimed on them turns out to be an 'art piece' or just plain protest by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Dellar. Top Man! Quite a few years ago I met Jeremy Dellar a few times when I was teaching. My wife's art class at the time had a few visits from him involving her class in an exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery. He seemed like a very interesting well centred fellow an is a very interesting artist in many different areas of the art.

Anyway I am off to draw and see if some of the events today will make the news on the TV.

Cheers!

'Whole Sketchbook and other things.

Above is a drawing that was completed in last evenings drawing session. It had been started the day before but most of the work was done in one final hit. It is another drawing that I think has come out rather well and fits with my current themes and process in the 'whole sketchbook' that I am working on. I am less than a quarter of the way into this endeavour but I am getting deeply into it and enjoying it as it unfolds.

So with that in mind I then started this drawing above, all this work so far has me thinking about starting to draw a new larger drawing I have an unused A1 size sheet of Fabriano 300gsm left and I was waiting for the right idea to use it. I was spurred onto thinking about it as I only have a few weeks to enter The Exeter Open Exhibition which I entered for the first time last year. I didn't get selected in last years but I feel I must enter again and unlikely as it is you never know.

Today I have done a beginners guitar workshop so that was me 11am until 4pm it was a gentle day of teaching.

I now have had dinner, put the bins out and written this blog and then I am off to draw.

Not the most eventful day but a nice one and looking forward to the week to come.