Winter survival kit

(view out at the back garden...a steel cold sky, photo by Gwen Turner)

The drawing board...a helm of change in deep winter tides. Moments of progress spent 'paper acting' (I have coined the phrase). A subterranean heaven in my studio (the cellar)...I have good daylight bulbs though, so I won't get S.A.D.

...H.A.P.P.Y N.E.W Y.E.A.R!

Photo of me by me!

Cold though, hence the rather attractive hat gear, and essential head phones for important transporting tunes (Robbie Williams, is actually good, but I feel abit bloated after a session with him...his greatest hits 1990-2010 album, 'In and out of conciousness'). Got heater sorted the other day so snug as a bug.

I found this invaluably handy before, and am likely to call on it's assistance again, as well as the heater!

...Oh, and my pen!

Insert, 2nd Feb 2011: I have further enhanced some theories that I wrote last March, here.


More inserts, 20th August 2011: Only now after summer highs, do hindsight benefits dribble together like Mercury. Looking back over this post is strange, I am able to see it with some clarity and confidence now. At the time it was a kind of fake "I am o.k." yet the feeling was of excitement and real fear. I can describe it better using the film Point Break as an example. Those bank robber surfers called 'The Ex-Presidents' choose to live on the margins of society and life, tripping in excess. But at a certain point in the film there is something sacred about it and it is simply just allowed; this feeling. A feeling that the character (played by Patrick Swaze) is so determined about before he takes his surf board to the giant centennial wave at the end. It can be madness but it is real, people cannot stop him (though they all try) and he will get no medal for bravery. That's it; that wave, that chance of the moment. His right to do it will be his only smell of true freedom (for him, it means right now, and ultimate death).
With it's different degrees, I won't need to go to the extent of their criminal violence to get to such a feeling. Surf board?....Nah...drawing board any day!

Happy Christmas!

My Christmas cards for this year... (2010, what a crescendo!), a continuation from last years editions...(to be continued for next year too...)

Domestic Bliss (and hard-bound gift editions over the Christmas period), now available at The Courtauld Gallery shop.

Here I am below, binding my books under the watchful gaze of my cat Snuggrand!

Fall (and professional Illustrators now)

Trees are now stripped bare of their leaves, all has fallen away. My drawing board calls me...a welcoming recreation for hibernation this year, but...procrastinations..."Procrastination across de' Nation"!!!

There isn't even an exciting swell in winter, hence the need for festivities, you have to summon it up from various withering resources...those hopeless trees do not inspire, I shall look away...toward...a blank page! I have to stoke up that fire inside, yes Camus... "that invincible summer within".

Some lovely encouraging sales going on though, I love it that commerce ignores the seasons at times like these....I am now back at my studio at home and no longer hiring the space I had been working in and sharing the warmth and good company of professional illustrator comrades through the winter hours, with many a cup of hot tea. ((Some of these Illustrators have been working freelance in Clerkenwell at the hired studios (The Drawing Room and The Courtyard) for over 25 years; when, I add, the humble post was still the major method of correspondence. The Mount Pleasant central postal sorting offices reside just round the corner. I was introduced to the place by a colleague (Clayton Junior) who I had met during the first year of my M.A. studies and whom also hires a space there. My time there was a period to complete a challenging stage of work where momentum could easily just drop; and a very steep learning curve, (insert: 31st Dec 2012)). May the forces be with me in getting through a possible back-draft in the next few months as I try to find my own balance at my home studios.

Italy

I have just returned from a two week trip to Italy with my partner Andrew. We were very fortunate to be able to stay at a friend's flat in Arona, a town situated by Lake Maggiore in the north. On the first morning we awoke to tolling bells (...very loud as the church was literally next door!)...and were soothed at the heavenly beauty of the Lake, and surrounding mountain vistas of the Alps and could feel the timeless sense that drew (and still does) artists to paint the landscapes, the light was sharp and low being late October. Stresa; one of the lake's elegant resorts, was where Hemingway stayed at The Grand Hotel and eventually escaped in a rowing boat with his lady across the lake to Switzerland, running from the Italian authorities and from the war.

Urban experience was brief and we took a trip into Milan for one of the days. A change really is as good as a holiday, and visa versa...nothing is familiar, everything is new, although there exists in me an affectionate acquaintance for a country that I have visited as a child and also used to live for a year or so, when I was a baby. 

Italy, the place where the capital game all started. Here are a couple of shots...

Photo by Gwen Turner


Photo by Andrew Bridgmont

Once back in England I created this illustration as a gift for our friends out there...

Caption: "Move over Carlos!"

Saint Carlo was a respected saint in Milan (1538-1610), there is a vast statue of him by Lake Maggiore up the mountain side, and below are some of my reference photos to give an idea of the scale of this thing...

We climbed up inside him ascending to the top and looked out from the guy's nostrils, we came out feeling as though we had travelled through his whole digestive system......(we were like a little team of purging irrigators)...quite a spiritual experience!


To see all pictures at their larger original size, click on the image once for the light-box viewer.

Last M.A. ponderings before galloping off into the sunset...

One of our information sheets (hand-outs) stated the meaning of: "to illustrate"...several meanings followed, two of which: to shed light upon and to illuminate...this inspired me.

winding down...

I am ruffling my feathers for work on the next episode. I find I have to go in wide and I have other projects in toe. I feel stifled at a tiresome need in me that could become addictive, to tap into the world (perhaps more regularly than things naturally evolve or bubble to the surface) via the web and state progress (as I do now). I am probably still shedding the last remains of (my perceived) institutional expectation since the M.A. which I appreciate very much as there is a degree of urgency when establishing something like this.

Now, I find the idea of pioneering days-on-end in the wilderness of existence and focusing on my work an attractive homecoming, but to life's university. I have broken this blog in and chartered progress on Bliss as she cut her first teeth. I now take the reigns off, and lay the saddle aside...

With respect to a long established and published illustrator (a children's book illustrator), I have been intermittently reading one of Jackie Morris' enchanting web-journals...her blog called: Drawing a Line in Time.
I like her cat blog too. She lives in nature, which very much shapes her work. I feel revived after a dose of Jackie...(me being in the London smoke's borough of Hackney). She lives in Pembrokeshire where my mother also lives and works as a painter.

rough sketch rummaging...

Mr and Mrs Hobnob on their only day off from location shoots...

Mrs Hobnob suffering from either a chronic bad hair day or an alien identity crisis...

Bliss just looking a little moody...

Next!

Already, come the pleasant utterances from various customers who have bought my book..."so when is the next episode"? I am going to make some headway on pages quite slowly to start with, and this will rev up.