meldrum artIt was a lean evening at life drawing last night. I only managed to produce one sketch that I was reasonably happy with. This means the next life drawing session can only be better. Something to look forward to 🙂
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| Watercolour nude 20131023. Canson 200g, 24 x 32 cm ( 9 3/8 x 12 1/2″) |
It was World SketchCrawl Day today and I met up with Nina Johansson to sketch at The City Museum (Stadsmuseet). The watercolour below was sketched from a third-floor window overlooking “Slussen” in Central Stockholm. It was a beautiful autumn day but too cold for us to be outside sketching.
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| Slussen 2013.10.19 |
I don’t watercolour as much as I’d like to. I’m going to try paint for an hour or so after each evening meal. Go to less to life drawing evenings, I need to sit down and paint, practice and paint. Play, I need to have fun too, very important that.
Here are some recent watercolours and yes, they were fun to do. The first wash was done at life drawing and the darker tones where added later.
I paint these Naked Hands at lunch time, I take my time and invariably I overwork them, I get scared, I have too much time to think, I dab the brush 100 times too many. Life drawing is different, there I have only five or ten minutes to execute the watercolour, the result is a painting that contains life and energy. I am learning, in the mean time; here is a muddy, overworked Naked Hand.
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| Naked Hand 20130910. 9 x 14 cm Moleskin. |
It sounds like one of those bad newspaper headlines. As for the watercolour which took me two lunch breaks, – it’s all right, I learned a few things which is the point of drawing and painting these in the first place. I’m happy enough with the result, a mixture of success and failure.
Life Drawing starts again tomorrow, I’m really looking forward to starting, it feels like it was a very long time ago since the last session.
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| Naked hand holds stopwatch! 9 x 14 cm Moleskin. |
…and one backwards. The last week has been a bit of a backward step for me. Seven days ago, I thought I had mastered it, watercolouring. I was silly of course to think this way. I was painfully reminded that I am in fact a student of art. My last four watercolours have been flops, very frustrating. This quick watercolour below, which I painted this evening may mean that I am starting to move in a forward direction again. What a relief if this is the case, but then again, I haven’t started my next watecolour yet, so we will see.
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| Moleskin watercolour notebook, 13 x 20.5 cm. |
I gave this hand two washes and then stopped, I was planning to add a few more but realised that I was happy with it after two. It is interesting when one gets the message to stop. Sometimes, it comes too late of course.
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| Moleskin watercolour notebook, 9 x 14 cm. |
Firstly, I would just like to say that I am very happy with the execution of this painting. It was the first time I used 100% cotton paper (Arches Rough, 300gsm), and wow, what a difference it makes. It is so much easier to paint on high quality paper.
The only problem I have with this painting is the subject matter. Why is it that a naked person who looks you in the eye, feel pornographic? Why do naked models who look away from you or have their eyes closed feel like classic art nudes? I have a problem with this, Lucian Freud did not but then again, he was not exactly glamorising his subjects either. The next nude I paint will have a cloth over her head, let’s see how that feels!
I paint, I learn and I paint some more…
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| Autumn, 38 x 76cm / 15 x 22″ |
