It was only twenty four hours to Preston...

Friday 12^th June. After a wearisome 24 hour journey from Poitou-Charente we change into our glad-rags in a back street of Preston and are cheered and revived by the UCLAN Fine Art Degree Show's private view.

We meet friends and family- hello to Jude, Bob, Sam, Dan, Roo, Steve and the boys, Wendy, Vincent and yes! we'd like a plastic glass of Bowland Dragon full bodied golden bitter with rounded fruity hop flavours........

......while being reminded by tutor Dave Alker that Al and Bob's degree show (twenty years ago in 1989) was the first to take place in the Hanover building.

It's photo opportunity time for yours truly, with the stark white walls, artworks and Artyfarty Folk milling around.

Here's a taste of the evening- sorry, the beer ran out earlier!

To The Chateau Borne, Part Three

By the time this
is published I'll be ensconced at Chateau l'Age Baston
for my fourth year, tutoring the
Art Course there.












I'll let these pictures from previous years speak for themselves.


Back soon!

Hare's Running

Good Luck with her Fine Art degree to my daughter Ruth and her fellow students at the University of Central Lancashire... the words 'Preston Poly' still spring more easily to my lips, I fear.
Four hard years have passed, raising two boys, house-movings, long journeys in unpredictable cars , family troubles and losses.. the horror of written work and the dread spectre of Power Point Presentation.
Then the artwork- a dozen Liverpool pigeons in waste-papier-mache, drawings, photos, a city made from scrap packaging, plaster Cokeheads, prints, gossip engraved on a hundred pub glasses.... half a dozen life-size sprinting greyhounds (involved a 'Godfatherly' sawing off the head of one!)..big prints, drawings, even bigger prints...
Well done, Ruby- and well done, too, to her partner Steve-it's the end of an era, the nightmare's over!
See you on the 12th- with the champagne!

All work: Ruth Orrell

Station Approach..

I'm cracking on with my artworks for the expo in July at the Gare de Medreac, and I go to the station at Lamballe for subject matter.
Architecturally, the station building's fairly simple and functional.
Far more interesting are the houses across the road- they're grand villas in that 'with knobs on' French style found also in some of the old fashionable watering places along the coast- Dinard, for example.
I can't get on the station platform without a ticket, so I get some photos of the quaies through the fence on the car-park.. there's a weird canopy, a bench with folk waiting, a glimpse of rooftops . Vertical poles and the dark horizontals of tracks cut through the composition- and there are wires overhead, masses of them, madly dissecting the sky .
Back in the studio I enjoy working on this scene, putting down a grey ground on paper and drawing in black and white conte crayon with the subtle addition of colour in gouache and pastel.
I'm pleased with the results, especially the fine details- a distant parked car, piles of gravel, a black bag by a bench, that man leaning, this woman's shoes, a discarded crumpled packet.
And those round glass things on the wires, what and why are those round glass things??!

I thought I saw a Puddy Tat!

Since our dear cat, Sparky, died, I've put out food for the strays who hang around.
Most of them ping off when I appear, but here's one who seems interested in me, as well as filling an already ample stomach, and who enjoys being stroked.
A few days later he's ventured into the kitchen....and here we are a couple of months down the line .... he's a well-established lap accessory- he's Ours and he's called Jumbo!
He's also new subject matter.
Like most animals he doesn't stay put for long, but it really sharpens the eye to line-draw quick glimpses, even if it's just the curve of a back. Once you have a few of these together on a page there's a lovely feeling of movement.
Charcoal, conte crayon, pen or soft pencil suit this- they give a good strong line.
At Art school we drew the moving model as a limbering up exercise, or did thirty second poses. And yet, come to think of it, I don't think the model was allowed to move then- this came in later.
Thankfully so for the 65 year-old monumental Mrs.Goldy who was our introduction to Life Drawing in the Sixties...phew!..I'll go and sketch the cat!
Pictured here: 'Jumbo' 2009 ADPrice
'Pebble' 2007 & 'Stray Cat' 2001
Caroline Johnson.

Salad in Peckham Rye

I've been invited by the lovely Florence who runs the Velorail de Medreac to show my work for the month of July. The old railway station's been re-vamped and there's a trendy cafe room with good wall-space for paintings.


I'll be surprised if I sell anything and if I do 'je montrerai ma derriere dans la vitrine de Dior'! However, it's a good opportunity to follow through a new theme of The Railway. This fits in neatly with my other urban works and it isn't as though I've suddenly started painting flowers and kittens, or bowls of cherries with dewdrops on them!
I also want to put on a good show for Florence who- apart from giving us gainful employment- over many years has struggled against financial odds and local Breton intransigence to improve the Velorail.
So, for these few weeks I'm out following the tracks, looking at railway architecture or the spaces where it's been. I'm sketching, I'm taking photos .
There are some stunning train stations world-wide, and few, I fear, are round here.
This is a challenge, and it's just My Thing to reveal the yashmaked face of Beauty in the mundane and overlooked. The grey and graffitied gare at Caulnes on a damp day, a street festooned with telegraph wires near the old station at St.Meen, a bright vegetable stall by a dirty railway bridge in Peckham Rye... and lots more to come!

The Agony and.......

Life can sometimes be a bed of pain and believe me, dear reader, I’m no stranger to a bad back or lady's 'trouble down there', necessitating a couple of days staying warm in bed.

I flatter myself I'm in good company with other, more famous, artists who’ve carried on creating regardless of their circumstances. And my own paltry complaints are diminished by their bravery.

Auguste Renoir, crippled with arthritis, chooses to stay in his wheelchair rather than use up his limited energy in walking- energy which he can then use for his paintings.

The painter Henri Matisse is diagnosed with cancer , but after an operation he finds renewed energies and the beautiful Russian-born assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, to keep him company. Delectable! He turns to ‘cutouts’- cut paper collages he calls 'gouaches decoupes'. These are lush in colour and are among the most admired and influential works of Matisse's entire career.

"You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird."

The list goes on...

Michelangelo exists on a diet of bread and wine, drinks the latter from lead containers, builds up uric acid in his kidneys and paints the Sistine chapel racked with gout. You can see his swollen knee- should you wish! in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens' ;

Van Gogh has epilepsy,... and, oh my, that ear really must sting- but this doesn't stop him!

Monet in his garden at Giverney struggles to see with his cataracts-a condition suffered by other Impressionists.

Hang on a minute...misty, sight-blurring cataracts. Aha! This, then, in a chicken-egg way, now begs the question ‘Does the disease produce the art? Or?’ . Such a vast subject, and we haven't even touched on Mental Problems... one to return to, I think!

Reflect now, if you will, on young art student Ronald Searle, called up in world War Two, and taken prisoner by the Japanese. Starving and diseased himself he draws the appalling scenes around him- on pain of death if his work’s discovered . Searle hides his drawings under prisoners in the last stages of cholera, knowing that the guards won’t come near. In a much later TV documentary a fellow inmate of Changi jail describes how he and others carried the dying artist outside to spend his last moments in the sunshine …..Searle demanded his pen and paper and continued to draw. And survived.

I've heard a thousand and one reasons why aspiring painters can't manage to even do a few quick studies in a sketchbook between classes. I've used some excuses myself- too busy, no time, not the right time, not the right weather, need a new book, pen, pencil, will do more when I retire/divorce/ finish this project/ kids get older. Someone once said to me, brutally, "If you're interested, you make time!".

And with that thought, and the examples above, I leave you.

Pictures: August 07, my Vertigo; Henri Matisse in his Studio; Ronald Searle sketch; view from my bed 20/03/09.