Sunday 26 February 2017

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!

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