Drawing Tuesday at the Queens House

  Drawing Tuesday this week was at the National Maritime  Museum, Greenwich  but as the Queens House had only just reopened after a lengthy refurbishment I  stopped off  for a quick look around. Only there was so much to see  in the end I only had about half an hours drawing in the museum itself.
Besides the portraits and pictures of battleships at sea there were some contemporary  work on display alongside older  pieces.

  My favourites were the panel of tiles hung opposite each other : the panel of old Delft tiles  showing whaling opposite 'Sea Marks' by Tania Kovats.  Her inspiring book 'Drawing Water'  shows variations of this done in ink. 

  To get to the galleries you have to climb the gorgeous 'Tulip Staircase'

  Besides paintings, they had some quirkier old artworks like the woolwork embroidered pictures ( don't you love those skies!) and the Working Mens Educational posters of the stars from 1850's printed on cotton ( they could be easily  rolled and hung up in different venues)  

 Another fabric wall hanging was this fantastic  huge screenprinted  commemoration of the Glasgow shipyards by Alexander Hardie Williamson. I'd never heard of him - apparently he's best known for designing Ravenhead glassware.  The subject matter also had resonance for me - my grandfather was a pattern-maker there ( he was involved with the refit of Queen Mary)  and my dad an apprentice , going to evening classes to get a HND in engineering.  

Scattered around several rooms were the paintings of Herbert Barnard John  Everett who apparently has the largest number of paintings in public collections of any artist!  Definitely worth finding out more about - I loved his stylised designs and colour

  He was particularly known for recording the 'dazzle' designs on ships

 

But enough of looking at paintings , I was determined to  do at least some drawing, attempting from a dark corner to draw this 'Scare devil' from the Nicobar Islands . Difficult foreshortening and poor lighting  means he looks more like  Noddy  than a power figure! 

 A long train ride home ( we were stuck for half an hour  outside Dartford due to signaling problems) had me  doodling in my handbag sketchbook with a biro, I'd been reminded by   Janet's drawings how versatile  drawing instrument it is.

Paul Nash at Tate Britain

 Another Friday, another exhibition, this time Paul Nash at Tate Britain . It was great to see so much of his work altogether  and see the progression of  ideas  along with repeated imagery. I'm so used to  paying homage to  favourite individual paintings , like the 'Winter Sea' (above)  I visit every time I'm in York and 'The Shore' (below)  in Leeds so it was interesting to see them in context.

The 'Dymchurch' painting drawings and prints  that informed my ' Bexhill Breakwaters' quilt continue to inspire

 It was great to see some of his lesser- known photographs - I've got a  large number of shots of breakwaters and sea defenses too!

 I'm not usually a big fan of  surreal works  but seeing how he used scaled up  objects that had meaning for him set against the landscape  has given me ideas of how I might  combine my ' small treasure' drawings  with seascapes

  I've seen this painting ' A nest of stones' recently at Margate  - it was good to see it  in different company. It features in the frontispiece of my favourite art book  ' The Experience of Landscape' . I've had  it for over 20 years but still find new things  to enjoy  among the combination of  artworks and poetry.   

My journey from the Tate to City lit by bus was fun , on the top deck of a double -decker going via the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square, some interesting details at roof level along the ministries on Whitehall .
In the  Advanced Painting class   we were looking at colour strategies - limited palette ( eg complimentaries, monochromatic, analagous )  and colour inventories.  Enough exercises to keep me happy for months, I love mixing paints.

 This Picasso ' 2 women sitting at  the bar' is  another one of my favourite paintings. , I love the shapes and colours. I once saw it in an exhibition  when I was abroad somewhere, paying a fortune for entry so I could spend 20 minutes absorbing it.

 Many in the class chose to carry out an inventory of a painting, placing squares of colour like  Paul Klee's paintings

 I chose instead to  try and mix the colours found in this photo of 2 boats

  The squares did remind me how useful the 'pixelate, mosaic' filter is in Photoshop as an aid to simplification and identifying the colours

And while I was in Photoshop, I had a go at combining the stack of limpets  collected at Margate  overlaid on the  canvas I painted in Weymouth which I'm thinking of using as the basis for further experiments. Definite possibilities

Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe at Tate Modern

 Part of  my reasoning  behind doing  an afternoon painting course  in London  was that I could either take advantage of cheaper  train fares ( which I did for the first week  , going to British Museum for lunch in the members room ) or I could fit in a visit to a gallery in the morning.   So last Friday I managed to fit in a visit to Tate Modern to catch the Georgia O'Keeffe  exhibition  before it closed. 

I've always  had a soft spot for her flower paintings partly because they weren't the accurate botanical illustrations I was surrounded by  but nevertheless showing their essence. Name drop alert : when they were filming 'The Private Life of Plants' in the lab I worked in  ( I set up some of the plants they used for time-lapse shots in episode 5 ), David Attenborough had an enormous book of her paintings which they were consulting to work out interesting close-up shots.  

But this exhibition  revealed so much more. I filled pages in my sketchbook with  quick drawings to  analyse what in particular interested me about certain paintings and drawings. There's nothing like seeing them in the flesh to see the subtlety of her marks,  particularly the quality of line.

Having got all my  old sketchbooks, paintings ( mainly watercolours)  and drawings out of storage, I've been looking at them  with a fresh eye. I've shared a few here , not because they're  great paintings  but because I realise they have some of the qualities I picked up on in the exhibition and  am working on some ideas to take further .  

G O'K   East River from the Shelton No 6

G O'K Oak Leaves Pink and Grey

In the inspirational classes  with Sandra Beccarelli  in Brentford, we looked  at Georgia O'Keeffe's leaf paintings   in interpreting Autumn colour  in watercolour ( definitely an exercise I will be repeating soon )

G O'K Blue II

G O'K  New York -Night Madison Avenue

I loved these  aerial view abstracts,  from both early and later years  but sharing some of the same characteristics of space, light and line. They remind me a bit of the Peter Lanyon's Glider Paintings ( hardly surprising in the top one which was inspired by flights  and the view from planes)

G O'K Drawing III

  When I went on painting courses  at FSC Nettlecombe  in the 1990's , I frequently drew and painted the remnants of trees in the grounds, liking how the  twisted  and broken branches   framed glimpses of the landscape beyond.   I don't  think I'd seen these tree pieces by Georgia O'Keeffe  before  but I particularly like how the  thickness of the lines vary, almost disappearing into the surroundings with strong, almost dominating use of negative space.

G O'K Autumn Trees- The Maple

G 0'K Clam and Mussel

G O'K Shell no 2

  When I was sketching mussels on the train going into London, I had no idea that  she had painted quite a  few shell compositions !  Again it's given me lots of ideas to scale up my sketches.

Tomorrow it's Paul Nash at Tate Britain!