New paintings and regular art updates.
Doodle of a woman in a bobble hat. Just a finger drawing, flooded with blocks of colour, done whilst listening to an online lecture about a deamon that someone has drawn over and over again.
My doodles are usually cats, nice, friendly creatures (with claws and teeth), but because this was a finger drawing it was easier to do.
Will I remember the lecture when I see this image? Possibly, but have I invested too much time in it so I have switched off my brain to the lecture? No, I don’t think so.
On my desk, it needs emptying. But I leave it. The colours from the shafts of the pencil (which I have hidden by turning it to black and white) remind me of the colour of the image I have drawn. The pencil sharpenings share its history. It is my memory encapsulated.
This was the function room, the Arnold Bennett suite, in the back of the Leopard Hotel with my murals visible on the walls. They were quite high up and I’m only short, so I spent a lot of time climbing up and down ladders! If I had realised it was likely to take me almost two years to paint them (there were eleven? ) seven on one side and four on the other if I remember?
Titles were :
The Leopardess
Umbrellas by Clarice Cliff
Arthur Berry, artist
Walter, the regular
Pot banks and woman worker
Murdered woman
The Leopard coat of arms
The Burslem Riot 1842
Wedgwood and Brindley
Molly Leigh, Burslem witch
Burslem Angel
I cannot remember if there was another one. I’m hoping to collect a full set of images of them. I hope that local people will be able to help me.
Spring cleaning and I found this card. It’s off a relative and it must be twenty or thirty years old. I was moving a bookcase amd found it down the back together with an A to Z of Stoke-on-Trent. Its so cute with the fire extinguisher and the startled bat!
It would be good to find more interesting things. Maybe a gold ring, or an earring that matches one I’ve lost. But no doubt I’ve already vacuumed them up!
Anyway I like this dragon, I will take him as a good omen for my college course project. Its about the mythology and history of dragons, and a children’s book based on a dragon story. So fingers crossed that I can get it done. X
Half past five in the evening and the clouds scud by. There’s still light in the sky but the rain showers keep pounding the windows. I love the newly washed look of the air. Almost sparkling. When I came here forty years ago there was far more heavy industry in the area. Smoke and dust polluted the air. A smog sometimes settled over the city and you could smell the fumes from the tyre factory or enamel being fired onto pottery if the wind was in the right direction. Now the wind is more a carrier of sound. The local A road and the motorway. The occasional sound of pile drivers when new buildings are erected, which is not very often. Sometimes smoke travels on the forlorn breeze as an old building accidentally burns down. So sad. So much bustle gone. We are a warehouse city of poorly paid jobs. No real chances. No ambition if the naysayers are believed. I think we can do better. Think creative, be creative. Let a bit of light shine on us. X
I painted these mugs with special overglaze paints about three years ago when our art group at Etruria were still meeting. We haven’t done anything recently because of Covid. It’s only when I look back at things like this that I realise I was doing so much more than now. It’s only when I remember these things that you know I am, or was, capable of so much more than I’m doing now. The designs were from my imagination. Painted directly, no sketching out first. Give me my Mojo back!
Fed up with being ill. Not Covid, but a cold/ chest infection. But I’m getting bored. I feel trapped but that might be a good thing. Perhaps I’m getting better?
Sundays used to be boring when I was a child. Nowhere was open, shops shut, nothing really to visit. If you ran out of milk you could not buy any. Memory of a different world. Time changes things. Then I was waiting for fruit salad with evaporated milk with bread and butter for tea. Watching my mom and dad doing the washing in a boiler in the kitchen that had a mangle on the top and an old spin dryer to get most of the water out. While they did that we played in the garden. Unless the weather was bad. Then I would read a book, or draw. Maybe it wasn’t all that boring?
How do I draw from imagination? I talk and think my way through things, by describing how they should look in my mind or verbally helps to make me think more about details of the image I’m drawing.
For example, this drawing was based on a memory of my walks in a local park as a child. There were trees that seemed to have faced in them. They were probably Ash trees, they seemed to have long spidery branches with tipped up ends like fingers. The path wandered around past stone walls that I used to balance on. Behind me was a play area with a slide, swings and a roundabout and seesaw. This is a memory drawing so it isn’t exactly accurate and things have probably changed a lot. I haven’t been back for years. But the face in the tree gives me a bit of a feeling of nervousness I used to get as a child.
I just found this photo, and my mind is taken back to a Sunday afternoon in Prestatyn, Wales. We were visiting family and decided to call in here to have a coffee and cake. The place was part cafe, part second hand shop. The window ledges were covered in succulents (money plants). I remember a huge Teddybear on one side of the room with a big nose. A teapot sign hung in the window. The cafe was near the railway station.
Taking a sketchbook out helps me remember places, it gives me a reference point, and as it takes time to draw the image its not like a photo, it’s got less information but you can choose how it looks (miss things out, add things).
I don’t always remember my sketch books, but when I do, and I have the time to draw or paint I really enjoy it.
A banner for one of our Penkhull Mystery Plays. We hold them most summers and the one this was painted for was about the pottery industry and its history. This banner was based on the willow pattern famous in the potteries. Spode was one of the factories that made plates and pots with this design, but if you Google ‘willow pattern’ you can find lots of images from many manufacturers.
Blue acrylic paint on a canvas cloth. It took me a while to paint. I also painted the local church and methodist Hall as they would have appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Mallaband-Brown