Work in progress, Barnoon Workshop and drawing.

Tuesday:

Above is the drawing I continued with in last evenings drawing session, I am now well into stage three with putting black sharpie dots in each box of the grid, it now remains to be seen whether there is a fourth stage or not. I might not be able to stop myself from circling each black dot, which could take sometime but if it makes me feel it is completed that is what I will do. If I am satisfied before I start that I might just stop, I will give an update tomorrow.

Today has been a reasonable busy day to day, first I opened up for Erin Lacy's Coastal Printing workshop and then at 11am I took 5 out on an art tour and draw which I think we all enjoyed me included.

I went back up for a quick lunch at Barnoon Workshop and  led a Paint a Mini Masterpiece based on Patrick Heron and below for better or worse is the small homage canvas I did.

So today I am blogging a bit earlier than normal for I have a stinking cold and drawing might just take my mind of it and after all it seems I might have quite a lot to do in finishing the drawing I am on and I so want to start the next one. I am really enjoying doing slightly larger works again and I am looking forward to when I can embark on something even larger. As I always say I have so many ideas to do and each twist and turn of my drawings throw up new ideas all the time so I don't really have the time to do all the drawings I think of. I am still pleased and happy with how many drawings I do do or should that be the 'amount of drawing', either way I am happy with how much work I have done in this last year. You have to keep your discipline and get on with it.

Cheers.

New works and a round up including David Bowie Blackstar/Starman.

Tuesday:

 Above and below are the two drawings I managed to get done in last nights drawing session, I am happy with both and have more to do later to get this monochrome journey nearer the finish. I hope to finish this book work by the end of the month, we will see.

As I have been rounding up some of work with forward thinking to what I will produce next. As usual I have so many ideas burning away in my head waiting to get out and of course not all will make it because I just don't have time to do them all or even remember all of them.

All my work is to do with pure pattern, most are drawings but also I do like to do a bit of environmental sculpture although most of it still relates to my drawing work as show by the four limpet drawing pics below.

The next 3 below are from one of my 'obliterarty' books which is actually the three book project that moved me on to this current monochrome book I am in at the moment.

Above is a much larger work done on 300gsm Fabriano rough press and was made starting with a new 24 set of sharpies with the black taken out, it kind of represents time and the usage and deterioration of the pens if you want to add more meaning to it feel free.

Along with using sharpies I like to use Winsor & Newton Promarkers because the have a wedge tip and a bullet tip and it fascinates me how the ink changes as it dries and bleeds depending on the type of paper or even the other media I draw on.

Another theme to my drawings are grid works, they come in many forms and the one above is from one of the obliterarty books but it does give you the idea.

Much of my early drawings involved dots and millions of them but through exploring my more recent obliterarty works I have now found myself doing circles which I kind of jokingly refer to as hollow dots above gives you and idea.
Below is one of more incomplete conceptual works. I need another eight of theses sea washed plants stems I find on the beach quite a lot but not this time of year so I have only done two so far. When I have 10 of them I am going to offer them out to the first curator who wants to show them. It is a conceptual sculpture work with instruction to take all of them in one hand and 10 inches above the ground dropped and how they land and remain on the surface is how they should be, All I need to do is do the other 8 and then find a way of interesting a curator. I will have to work on that bit of the concept.

Above is the single drawing that I have done so far with the most dots on. It came about through the death of David Bowie someone that I was always a great fan of since the age of 10 and Space Oddity was a top 5 smash and Bowie's first hit. I was deeply affected by his death as it all seemed such a shock as his last album Blackstar was so close to his death. I couldn't listen to the whole thing although I heard most of it on BBC 6 Music and have still not actually had that moment where I listen to the whole album in one go as I have done with every other album he has ever made. That aside above is my drawing Blackstar/Starman is I suppose my tribute.

Cheers

Last blog of the week about my drawing and nearly a 1,000 views in a week, wow!

This is Sundays blog showing what I drew last evening and some other thoughts.

Above is a drawing I started Friday but I had only done the sharpie circles, last evening I chose to fill them in and now it looks like this. That done I then had to think how I would approach the next drawing.
 

Above is the result of all that thing and I think that they work well together in this book. These last two drawings were done with Sharpie pens and for some reason I am very happy with it. It looks quite pure, simple and even dare I say it quite minimal.

I now have to think up my next drawing and I will leave that decision until I open my book and start drawing.

Today has been a busy day doing a day course of beginners guitar up at Barnoon Workshop, Zoe brought my lunch up. I got home in good time and since then have been soaking up the news and a big dinner listening to Tom Robinson's Now Playing show on BBC 6 Music and two hours of music in the honour of Rock 'n' Roll great Chuck Berry without him where would music be today.

Below are a few more drawings that I have done over the last year. I am caught sometimes when I am looking at previous work I have a general memory of doing the work but also I sometimes see little levels that I had forgotten I had put in so I find that I have put in or left out detail in a way that I enjoy and interesting. For example the drawing immediately below where I have not put white gel dots on every purple dot but missed some. It took me quite a while before I could start leaving a drawing and thinking it was complete if I hadn't done every option to it and now I can.

 Above and below are more of my grid drawing experiments, even though I say 'experiments' I do feel they are still works and enjoy the freedom of making them. So here are three quite different takes on them.

I am off to draw :)

New drawings and a bit of a round up of stuff from my early blogs. Day 366

So as last year was a leap year I am celebrating my blogs first birthday over two days, yesterday was 365 days of this daily activity and today is the date anniversary. Skewed logic I know but no more skewed than my eyes. I realised early on that I wasn't doing traditional op-art. I think my work sometimes nods to many different bits of modern art. I don't really try to do that but it does seep out from somewhere. I suppose with all the art I have seen and like comes out in unexpected way.

Above is the first drawing I did last evening in my now nearly finished altered sketchbook and if I was going to stretch the point of influences coming out, when I had completed this drawing I was slightly reminded of Ian McKeever not in it's bright colours but just the circles.

The second drawing done last night is this one it seems to nod to both Andy Warhol and Terry Frost in my head and anyway whatever I am pleased with it.

I am also pleased that my wife, Zoe Eaton is getting over her painting block over the last little while and has been painting again with new ideas behind her and feeding in to her new works. I will share when they are finished.

Sunday started with me going up to Barnoon Workshop, I was meant to be  delivering a days guitar course but I had no bookings this time but thought I would go up there as we had had a couple of enquiries and they might have just decided to turn up, they didn't so I did 40 mins of work on this drawing. I started work on it at an abstract drawing session I did a couple of weeks ago now. It could have been finished but I decided to echo a work I did and is further down this blog with it's riffing from more recent work in my obliterarty books. So thirty more grids to attend to.

I often work in 'sketchbook' mode, when I first started on this drawing and getting deeper with my work and taking it a lot more seriously. I treat my sketchbook work as whole entities and therefore at some point when I find the right gallery or forum will put them up for sale as I would Individual drawings. This all came about from my very first book work. That book as I have mentioned before in these blogs helped steer me in this direction. It was a book of dots done with only one type and size of pen, some of the images took a week of drawing time alone without filling the whole book so it took me 4 or 5 years to complete it. When I started showing it to people they took it as a whole work. I did start showing it as I was working on it to the Crit Group that was run by my wife and the studio that she was in in those days in Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes and even got a commission out of it. I was a bit shy of it at first with the group as they were all art graduates and I came from a non-tutored background. However the reaction was far better than I had expected and spurred me on. It is good to share work with others you respect or people who you don't know. There was a time when we ran an arts cafe in St Ives Cornwall and sometimes we would have our own work up and because we were 'behind the counter' people where free to say what they liked or disliked about the work up on the walls. A recurring favourite of mine was and probably will be again is, 'Anyone could do that' and to that I think yes you could if you had enough time and patience to do so and most people would have the skill base to do so. I actually like that comment and I certainly don't blame them for saying it either. It is certainly number one in the top ten comments I do get about my work and the other close second is more often or not give or take a word or to 'F**k**g Hell, do you do all those dots one by one' answer is always 'Yes'. There is normally a silence after that and swaying heads although I have had that followed by, 'you nutter'.

Anyway that aside above and below are two examples of double pages from more recent 'whole book' works.

So as part of me having done a leap year of blogs I am showing some of the works from my early blogs. Above is one of my pebble/stone drawings. I still really like it too.

Above is a larger rock piece, I wasn't thinking of drawing on larger bits of rocks or minerals but as luck would having I was taking a walk around Barnoon and came across this that was rather randomly left on the side of a path, it wasn't part of anything so it just felt a very inviting thing to use for another drawing and a couple of hours later it was a completed work and we still have it.

Above is a work using a set of sharpies and this is the bleed through side and it looks even better that the originally intended drawing on the reverse. It sort of reminds me now that it is a bit like a hand drawn window of pixels.

This one is from the sketch book a few pics above but I thought it would go nicely with the previous drawing however this one was done with gel pens.

Above is a much larger drawing completed in the last year or so and was quite a mammoth feet and where the echo came from for the colourful grid drawing near the top of this blog.

I am now off to do would you believe more drawing and I will be back tomorrow to let you know what I have done. Cheers!

The first year of my comtemporary abstract drawing blog plus extras........

365 days ago I started to blog and I have done it everyday since.

Why did I start it?

• As an added discipline to my work.
• To Share my drawing and parts of my life.
• To show how I work and think.
• To get my art out to more people.

One of the main features of my blog is me showing the work I have done over the last 24 hours so above is a drawing I finished last evening, I had started the previous evening but hadn't managed to complete it, so that is just what I did.

Above is a drawing I started and finished in last evenings session and yet again which seems to be a feature of my recent drawings, especially on this work I embarked on over the last three weeks or so. It is an altered sketchbook and doing something to it that I have now christened 'obliterarty', I feel it is a playful term and thus sums it up really. I am on the last few pages now but I am happy that it is working well in my eyes.

To celebrate that I have now been doing this blog for a year below are a few of the first images I shared into the blog world.

Above is a close up of one of my larger drawings that I have done in slightly over a year and gives you an insight into the kind of work I do, I like to be lose but detailed and some works can take many many hours or even sometimes days that can sometimes be spread over weeks and months. The bigger pieces I work on can only be done normally in free time and snatched moments although I work everyday on smaller stuff and on average a few hours every evening.

The drawing above was started in Oxford when we were last up there visiting family just after Christmas last year, I was just starting to explore a new pen type that I hadn't explored much but I was given some Letraset Pro-Markers as a present and had to use them. It is by no means a large drawing but took many hours and has a lot of dots and no I am not counting however you are welcome to if you wish.

Above is a drawing done on mount board. This one took probably 3 sessions to complete and looking back at it again I like it and fits well with my work in general.

Above is another drawing on mount board and I do love drawing on it and it is also good that these scraps get used to bring something into the world.

Above is one of the first photos of me actually drawing and thank you to Jordan Jackson for taking this pic and so many others for me over the last year or so.

 So the question in my head having just got to this first year in the blog world what have I got out of it?

• I have gained a greater idea of what I am doing with all this thing I call contemporary abstract drawing.
•  I have shown off what I do on a daily basis to a small part of the online world who want to look.
•  It has made me think and order my thoughts so I am able to talk more in depth about my art if required.
• I am surprised that in this last year that over 10,000 people have viewed my blog.
• I have received some lovely comments from a few buyers and quite a few people who have found my 'art drops'.
• I have thanks for all that have read and shared.  

• I feel more cohesive about what I do having written about what it all.

So as per usual I am off to draw and I think I will continue sharing.

Sunday:

Sunday was a few hours of website work and .....

However here is the first drawing from last evenings drawing session and it is the circles without the coloured dot in the middle. So kind of a naked version of a few of my recent drawings.

Above is a grid drawing that I also completed last night and I like it's simplicity.

Above is the drawing I started last night but did not complete.

Above is a drawing I completed in the last few mouths and gives an insight into one of my series of work.

Not much to say today but thinking and ready to draw whilst watching a fascinating program on Tom Waits.

Saturday stuff and my contemprary abstract drawing.

Well I am here again to show what I did in yesterday evenings drawing session, this is what I do when I get the chance. So it is built into my daily routine whilst relaxing in the evening but being productive although I happy to sort of watch TV whilst drawing, so I think I use my tele time productively. Above is the first drawing I did last night and is another small step in widening my drawing language. I have never really drawn circles around my dots before and I like it so it will absorb into future drawings I dare say.

So having enjoyed drawing circles so much in the previous work I thought it was time to use that riff and change it a bit so above is what happened.

Today has been a bit of a change, we spent some time updating our website for Barnoon Workshop and coming up with new ideas for courses. Then we nipped out to go to the shops but had a little beachcomb and to a pic on Lambeth Beach with plenty of balanced stones on it. Not Andy Goldsworthy but nice to see.

Above is the inside cover to my last but one whole sketchbook work 'Really it is about the permutations' If I could find somewhere to display it it would be up for sale.

Above is another permutation from the previously mentioned work.

And above another permutation, I think these three show some diversity and fit with the way I am exploring this world of pattern I have worked for over the last years ploughing the furrows of my field.

I am now as ever off to draw a bit more.