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!