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??!