... "of grace and beauty" in bolted purple sprouting broccoli. B allowed two plants to go wild, knowing how much I love to see flowering veg, and they really are beautiful. Of course this sketch doesn't show the colours - deep purple, bright yellow and green set against a bright blue spring sky, but the elegance of those S shapes! In the foreground is one escaping through the netting, and just behind it where the net has been pulled back for new planting is the one I sketched.
Not much action this week, but quite a bit of research and rabbit holes while I plan what I am going to make with the primed panels B gave me last week. My first thought was to treat them like I would with a smooth, hard gesso on board: scratch into the surface and rub over the etched lines with diluted oils. However, the white primer contains some lead, so it would be a bad idea to disturb the surface and create dust. I didn't realise that at first because B's boards feel like gesso; it turned out B had applied a layer of gesso (made the traditional way in his shed) to the Irish linen he stretched over the boards before he laid down his own white oil-paint recipe as a primer coat, avoiding the slithery surface often associated with oil-base primers. I would really like to create sgraffito drawings like the photo of ice crystals above. It has been a long time since I used oils, and did terrible things with the paint like mixing it with polyurethane varnish (incidentally, ones I made over oil-based gilding have totally stood the test of time and still look great, but I don't want to do that now) so I began researching to refresh my memory with Copal varnish, stand oil, turpentine and lavender spike. I even went down the rabbit hole of drawing with oil-based Sharpie pens but in the end decided against that route. So, I need to seal off the primer with oil paint, let it dry, and apply more paint. I want to scratch into the surface when it has dried to avoid sludge around the edges, preferring the natural imperfections and irregular, woolly line which occur with a dry surface. Then I remembered Paul Klee's scratchy paintings; he must have done something like that - here is his Cathedral from 1924, now in the Phillips Collection. Isn't it glorious!
During the week at my day-job, during my break (and nearly got into trouble for), I zoned in on some details of that rusty old skip of joy at the back of the building I posted last week and photographed them. The photo above is one of my favourites, and so like some of my drawings. The yearning for paint was still niggling away. Then as if by magic, B said he didn't want some primed panels he had made, and would I like to take a look at them to see if I wanted any before he took them to the dump?
I took the lot. Ok, they aren't the 8-foot beasts I was dreaming wistfully about last week, but how much more suitable for my work - intimate in scale, beautifully stretched natural linen on board prepared with oil-based white primer B made himself. His craftsmanship is always excellent and thoughtfully executed (well, how could I let these beauties go to the dump??) Talk about timing! Here they are, stacked in a corner of my work room while I consider what I am going to make of them. I think the skip photos are a big clue. I'm turning over several options as to media in my mind right now. This is a skip standing outside the building where I work my day-job. It's a bit of a wistful thing for me; the glory of the colours (I had to do nothing to enhance or change the photo), the shapes and characters I see in its worn surface and the downward movement from rain and rust all make me long for an 8-foot linen canvas, stretched tight as a drum, with pots of paint and huge brushes, just as the old days in my studio at Chelsea. I love drawing with a passion, and it has been forever the smallest, tonal exhibits in an art gallery which pull me in (I'll never forget being blown away by a Francesca Woodman exhibition of tiny photographs in Artist Rooms - at Tate London, I think) - but every so often when I see something like this rugged skip, the old tug at the heartstrings for large scale, muscular painting comes back for just a moment.
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Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |