New Drawings, The Monochrome Set and Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn

Saturday:

 Above and below are the latest two drawings to manifest on the pages of my latest project. I am toying with the idea of calling the whole book, The Monochrome Set due to my non use of colour and also a nod to the post-punk band of the same name that I still have a special place in my heart for. Strange Boutique their debut album is still one of the most delightful surprises and it has kept its musical hold on me. So at the moment it holds the possibility of being the first genuine idea for the title, it might stick.

Today has been an coming up with ideas day followed by some website work, this was all done whilst still letting the election news sink in. Mrs May looks and sounds in quite a desperate position and should really step down, her path is nearly at and end. I hope she doesn't do too much damage on the way out but she doesn't seem to able to help herself. It is quite interesting seeing the right wing tabloids turning against her she is really starting to seems like a dangerous headless chicken intent on hang on to anything no matter how ridiculous it would seem.back in the real world. I genuinely think she has lost it and her ego has just taken over. I am seeing a so called unelectable opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn looking like it might not be too long until he will become The Prime Minister. It seemed such a fantasy a few short weeks ago. However the campaign, well campaign of sorts that was orchestrated around her and by her, the manifesto blunders and then on top of that Jeremy Corbyn doing so well they couldn't ignore him as much so he actually got some positive airtime on the clearly and now generally accepted biased BBC News coverage. We are in for and interesting few days, few weeks few months but things will change. I live in hope.

 

Above is a pic I took on the way down The Warren after our ideas session in The Pedn Olva. It was really dull and misty and rainy and yet really bright too. I am not sure this pic completely shows that but it does go some way I think.

I am off to draw etc etc.

Four new drawings and today.

Saturday:

Here I go again sharing the drawing or drawings I did last night and above is no exception, I started and completed it in one session whilst watching the so called Leaders Debate Question Time. Blimey what a biased program that was but I think Jeremy Corbyn did very well whilst Theresa May looked rather uncomfortable and sometimes looking very nervous especially whilst lying. Anyway back to my drawing, well I am rather happy with it.

In the same session I started this one above, I did not complete it though.

In the morning I went up to the workshop, I offer a tour and draw on Saturday's but perhaps it is the wrong day for such a thing so I didn't have any takers but I was happy to use the time to finish off the drawing I started last night.

I popped down town picked up a few things and went back home for a quick spot of lunch and then we both went back up the workshop. We had a little experiment with the remaining indigo dye that was left over from a workshop session a couple of days ago, I did a T-shirt and Zoe did a duvet cover.

We had decided to do art after the quick shibori moment and Zoe got really stuck into two new paintings and I spent quite a lot of time outside drawing. It was a bit breezy but the sun was warm and it felt like the right spot to draw.

So above and below are the results of the two related drawings I did, two different treatments of the same scheme.

So I have added four drawings to this project I embarked on exactly a month ago and I think I am about a quarter through this whole sketchbook work so I am expecting it to be finished in September sometime if I can keep this pace up.

I am now off to draw and relax.

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 Drawings, St Ives Library and stuff.

Friday:

Last night I managed to the drawing above and started the one below. I think the whole sketchbook work that embarked on just over a week ago is going rather well so far.

So today I have been running around getting ready for tomorrow and also sorting many different things, finished this drawing off and ended up representing Barnoon Workshop with my wife at the Education Hub at St Ives Library. The Library is being taken over by the Town Council in the autumn and is going to provide lots of educational and creative opportunities.

While we were there handing out leaflets about future courses at Barnoon I managed to start another drawing as it wasn't that busy after the first 45 minutes and the event shut about half an hour early.

Whilst I have been writing this I have also been watching Have I Got News For You, which is a program that has always been close to my heart as the theme music was recorded by an old and sadly now deceased friend Big George Webley, who in the past also produced the first recording of one of my old bands New Mutants, the first time I appeared on record and also my old friend Tim Searle who was the head of Triffic Films who did the titles until this new series. I am biased but they seem a little sterile now also I played many gigs with as we were both members of The Blues Collective for many years. Another strange tangent was also on this program my facebook friend and former Factory recording artist Kevin Hewick appeared on the show next to Jeremy Corbyn when they feature footage from his rally in Leicester earlier in the week......

Well I am off to draw.

Cheers!

Art Drops, new drawings, crossed fingers and Tate St Ives re-opening.

Thursday:

Above and below are the two drawings that I completed in last evenings drawing session. The first seems to be a bit of a tribute to Howard Hodgkin who died a couple of weeks ago. I have been a great fan of his work ever since I was introduced to his work my my now wife.
The drawing below seems to be channeling something else entirely and I don't really know what, as my work started off being made entirely of dots maybe these lines on this drawing are 'long dots'. Maybe not.....

I did start another drawing last night but I didn't bother to take a pic because it is it's very early stages.

Today has been a day of updating our events for Easter so I have been working on Facebook and our website and we are now hoping to get some early bookings in as money is tight as it is at this time of year so very little time for art. Zoe my wife has been sorting out stuff at the workshop for our Your Face My Art portrait studio for the weekend and we are hoping there will be enough people around to pop in on us and get their portrait done with us what with The Tate St Ives reopening, so tomorrow is getting more posters around and a bit of an awareness campaign. Of course the Tate re-opening is going to help the town but we are still hindered at Barnoon Workshop with the footpath to the beach still being shut and it has been since the beginning of November. It has certainly cut off our income somewhat and made it a hard winter to get through. Hopefully this will all change after the footpath is open again just before Easter.

I am looking forward to attending the Tate opening tomorrow evening and looking forward to bumping into lots of old pals too, have already arranged to catch up with Shanty Baba, the St Ives Story Teller and I am sure there will be more arranging tomorrow.

I am also looking forward to the publication of the Spring edition of Art Spread and I have a two pages so fingers crossed that will bring a bit more interest to my work and get my name out there a bit more.

On that note views of my blog have gone up quite a bit over the last month or so and I am now getting something like a 1,000 views or so a week, mainly in America. So maybe maybe ,y work is getting out there a little bit more. So this year I am hoping to get more sales than before and some interesting exhibitions to be in. With this aim I hope to make more deadlines than last year and to seek out more opportunities.

I am going to try and find time to get a few art drops together for this weekend as there will be a higher proportion of arts people around. I will leave this blog and you tonight with some previous art drops.

Octobers 1st Tuesday,Tour & Draw, Brian Eno and The World etc

Above is a new drawing I did last night in my 'whole sketchbook' work, I am about a month in on this book and it is going well.

Above is the second drawing I did last night whilst watching the tele, slightly more minimal for me using a Letraset grey promarker, a white 'metallic' pen and a uni-pin pen.

Today I did my Tour & Draw around St Ives and had seven really nice people, I do enjoy taking people around St Ives and giving them an insight into the art colony we live in. It was quite warm but pretty windy with white horses on the incoming waves.

This afternoon my wife and myself have been out to Carbis Bay making sure hotels and holiday providers have our Barnoon Workshop leaflets. I now feel very wind blown indeed and am glad to be home doing this blog.

An old friend asked me today if felt doing a daily blog was a large responsibility for an artist to be doing and wasn't the life of an artist meant to be doing what you want when you want to. I replied saying it was actually a very good way of getting my thoughts and ideas together and that I enjoy doing it. My motivations for doing this blog is to communicate to the wider world, showing off my work and daily routines and to share 'What an artist does all day'. I think I finally decided to do this blog after watching quite a few of the BBC documentaries that formed a series of what we do to keep our art going. Ok those people in the series are a lot more famous than I am and it made me want to share what I do, some of it must be a bit ordinary for some folk but I have had over 5,200 visitors out of the 221 missives I have written so far. The other inspiration behind it was reading Brian Eno's book 'A Year: with swollen appendicies'. When I read this book it was such a good peak into the world of someone I think of as a creative genius of our age. I have always enjoyed so much of Eno's work although I can say it didn't win me over to his work with Coldplay, not Eno's fault but I just don't quite get them. However many other people that have worked with him, Talking Heads, David Bowie, James and many many others I get what he brings to the table. Of course I am a greater fan of the majority of his solo works and collaborations with people like Robert Fripp. Eno opened a whole new world up for me with his first four solo albums and his forays into 'discreet' ambient music and I have made many an ambient pieces of music myself in this vein. I can only ask you if you are not familiar with his work to go off and explore what this deep thinking man does. I also recommend the John Peel lecture he did a while back for the BBC. It encompassed a wide ranging set of topics around music art and suggesting the world isn't quite working as we thought it would and that we might be heading towards a more equal post capitalistic society that is fair, almost an echo of Jeremy Corbyn's mantra of a better and fairer world for everyone not just the 'chosen' few. We will see about that but I do feel that each nasty move Teressa May and her pals make to keep us poorer people down and dismantling of the NHS amongst many other horrible things they have in store for us all including lowering human rights do not seem to be a good thing.

To combat some of the things in this world that we seem to have no control over is part of why I am so involved with doing creative acts everyday, not that I am hiding but making a nice drawing does lift the spirit and that combined with doing something virtually everyday it does keep some of it a bay.

Good luck everyone in the world.
Cheers!

New finished drawing, new art stuff and Life.

Above is the drawing that has been added to each day whilst doing other drawing has come to a conclusion, 'Sampler is finished' although I am not sure I have a rest your eye spot on this one.

We have been off to Truro for art surplies, I got two new promarkers and some Fabriano A1 300gsm Rough so I can continue with some big drawings, we also picked up a piece of black lino and a lino cutter for us both to experiment with. I questioned Erin Lacy at yesterdays print workshop about it and thought we should have a go. I wonder what I will come up with and what Zoe will do.

Above is an update on the sharpie big drawing I am 'in' at the moment, I have replaced the dining room bulb over the table and it now gives these shadows from Zoe's 'sea glass' chandelier that she made a few years ago for her exhibition a few years ago at Cafe Art and then remained there until we left and is now in our room.

Above is that chandelier, I love its raw randomness.

I have heard on the radio news tonight that surprise surprise that Jeremy Corbyn has been re elected with a larger majority than last year, even with some 250,000 Labour members for being removed from the vote in one way or another. After seeing him speak at Heartlands earlier this year, he has become the first politician in years that actually strikes me as a normal person who wants a better world for us all and I for one would welcome a better world as I feel it is a harsh and unfair place to be even in this country. Hopefully he will win the next election and save the NHS that Jeremy Hunt seems determined to dismantle. Mind you that is not his only task he has many ahead of him I do hope the party unite behind him and put up a plausible opposition in the UK, the Tories want to know who they are fighting against because they don't actually seem to know who they have been fighting recently what with UK and their own back benchers and the Brexiters. I think in the news recently we haven't truly found out how damaged the Conservatives are with the infighting that is going on in the party because they were Corbyn bashing. Perhaps they ought to leave him alone and focus on the dangerous ones who are screwing us with information on arms sales and keeping the divide between the poor and the rich.

Above is Jeremy meeting the people after his speech at Heartlands earlier this summer and is a few minutes before he too the time out to have a little chat with my 15 year old son.

I need to get my hands on a copy of 'The Road To Corbyn' by Rob Donovan and read more around the subject, maybe I don't fully understand what is going on, I do like to try and keep myself informed.

I just want a more peaceful world where all people are less afraid.

Anyway I am off to escape this and do some art, it has a calming effect on me. It is a good space to be in for a few hours a day and helps me keep my ideas flowing and my mind a little more at peace.

Cheers!

Art, Sea Pottery and Jeremy Corbyn

Above are some drawings I did last night on sea pottery found on the beach yesterday, these will probably go towards my next art drop.

Above is a slightly out of focus drawing that I also did last night on a round piece of wood.

Above is a drawing from my sketchbook that I worked on last night, I am still not sure it is finished. Tonight will tell.

After running around to pick up and drop off clay for firing, we were having battery trouble so we went off in search of a new car battery and the first place we went to had no new ones but they did have a good second hand one that they fitted and sold me for £15, not bad. We then went shopping in Penzance and picked up a few things for the workshop and some new trainers for my son after he demolished his last pair. We also attended the last day of The Maggie Mathews exhibition at Cornwall Contemporary. Met a really nice lady who showed my son all the photos she had taken of The Man Engine and also informed me of how to approach the gallery, so I now have two galleries in PZ to mail images and my artist statement.

Below is what happened after going to Penzance, my son and myself drove over to Heartlands for his first political rally. Jeremy Corbyn had come to talk to us in Cornwall. There must have been 3,000 or perhaps quite a few more in attendance. There were many good and interesting speeches including one from a local school teacher that was fantastic.
At about 16:40 Jeremy arrived on stage and gave us an impassioned speech filled with humanity and a positive vision of the future that could actually be delivered. It is very interesting hearing him in full rather than the press/news report that just seem to slag the man off rather than listen to what he has to say, he is not into that thing that most politicians seem to favour these days of just slagging off other politicians. He said some great things about community, being fair and the quality of life that we should be expecting and about not having our human rights diminished by the quite frankly terrifying Teresa May and her cronies.
At the end of proceedings Jeremy didn't run off quickly he very personally greeted people, shook hands let people take phone pics with him and my son shook hands with him and they spoke. What a nice man. Certainly the most genuine politician I have ever met and he believes in arts and culture.

More drawing to do, Cheers!