07 May 2012

charcoal start to two new works

These works will probably remain charcoal sketchy with wash. I am really more happy drawing than painting.

Life is freely expressed in sketch lines and shades.

For me, when painting on from such a start, there becomes a need to work out the balance between the literal and artifice... with concern to avoid artiness and obscurantism. Involving a lot of thought about process... and all that becomes contrived, somehow, too much thought. Also the drawings take just moments or minutes, or a number of moments, after taking the eyes away for a time.

People have done various humorous things with the label of the old record company HMV ("His Master's Voice", including of Gromit from Wallace and Gromit and by the wonderful Michael Sowa (with whom the devil - or the cat in this case - is in the detail.

The original 'Little Nipper'
Gromit
 




















Michael Sowa's vision


Now I offer:

His Mistress's Poise  draft at 7 May 2012, charcoal sketch on acrylic on canvas 76x84cm




and ...

This second new work is just a ghost of an idea on a large canvas, but when to stop?

Already she asks 'Are you going to stop now?'

These drawings begin to talk.

Hopefully the characters in the novel will be talking again soon. I have to create for my female protagonist the office of General Secretary Hu Yaobang in the 1980s with whom and with Hu Qili I was privileged to spend quite a lot of time, though I knew so little of their lives or struggles at the time.. This is a gold mine for understanding the period, the history of ideas and debates, as also this is important.


For I am a Minimalist Girl draft 7 May 2012, charcoal on acrylic on canvas, 48x113cm
apologies for the bad lighting.

(These are both on large canvases (old, found canvases, painted over). So much more lively to work in a large space, it reduces my distaste for fitting the world into a two dimensional rectangle)






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