Picasso Santa

This week I went to the Picasso exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. It is a huge exhibition from the Musee National Picasso, Paris, while it is closed for renovations. You have to buy a ticket in advance and go at your allotted time. This quite simple drawing of Sacre Coeur was probably my favourite of all. This image of a seated woman was probably the one that most inspired Santa. There was something about this one I liked too – particularly the mouth – though I do rather like Cubism  after  quite a lot of exposure to it at art school.

The sculptures were all quite interesting. There was one I loved, but do you think I can find it online? No.

What spoilt the more recent paintings for me were ugly strokes. Wonderful composition and colour, but strokes put on roughly. What was that about? More sales?

Solar prints from the Asian Gallery

Last weekend I went printmaking. I had made some new solar plates from my drawings  I did at the Asian Gallery of the Art Gallery of NSW one wet day. You can see the original drawings here.

I printed these in some brighter and more vivid colours, but these are my favourites.  I think the pale colours are more serene - like the buddhas.

I inked the plates up in black, then put a colour roll of a blend over the top.

28th Worldwide Sketchcrawl

For the 28th sketchcrawl  we were drawing in the Asian Gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW due to a totally wet Sydney. The rain had stopped by 10am but everything was soaked. There were four sketchcrawlers.
Borromini Bear is with Urban Sketchers in Portland Oregon, so I had to draw FAST to make up for that. She’s usually the most prolific.  I put on my timer in my phone and all my drawings took about 15 minutes. One time the timer alarm went off and workmen who were in the gallery but just out of sight said ‘what’s THAT”.  I think they thought they were going to have to evacuate.

We went to the Asian Gallery first so that any latecomers could meet up with us there. However there was so much to draw that we just continued there. The pinkish statue on the right reminded me of Percy who is an art school friend. I was very surprised that it was from Vietnam as I had convinced myself that it must be Sri Lankan like Percy.

The only way I could achieve my fast drawings was ‘straight in with the pen’ – no pencil. Then at the end I used Prismacolours to add colour. Trouble is – those Prismacolours break all the time and that means lost time while sharpening. I’m using Como paper ( like a cartridge paper about 280 gsm I think) and I’m not using wet media at the moment as a challenge.

This last drawing took 25 min. I drew some lines with pencil first to get the angles of the limbs correct. It is on the title page of my sketchbook where my name and address go, so I didn’t want it to be a disaster. I have yet to draw a suitable border.

Missing Monet

On 2nd January we went to the Art Gallery of NSW to see the Monet Exhibition. We thought it was so quiet, everybody away, what a good day to go. Wrong!

We arrived just after they opened at 10am and there was an enormous queue right around in a circle. OK, coffee now, we thought. But it was no better after the coffee, and people were still pouring in the doors. We did the Japanese exhibition and an Australian Landscape exhibition – no change – they were still arriving. Round the shop (no purchases this time) and they were still joining the queue, so we gave it a miss.

We went to the gardens, had lunch outside (hoping to draw birds, but they weren’t co-operating) so we went to the lotus pond and drew that. Well, I wish I’d just drawn the leaves really. The flowers make it look too ‘pretty’ and I was more interested in way the light felll through the leaves to the ones below.

Playing with Bologna bits and pieces

Glad you liked my Bologna book. Yes, it has been submitted for the AGNSW exhibition – that’s not to say it will be accepted. I’ll post more pages when I’ve had time to crop them & so forth.

This is something I did to let off steam when the book was finally finished and all the deadlines met. I had all sorts of little bits and pieces left over. I have been selling some art books on ebay, and I quite often put in a handmade bookmark and I was running out. I’ve also used some credit card paper and a piece of itajime paper. The second set is what you see through the window when you pull up the red blind.

This artist comes from Bologna.

Who is he? Alison, from scribblesadagio has been using him for inspiration.

I also did some bookmarks with credit card papers glued onto matt board I bought at Reverse Garbage. I’ll show you them soon.

Bologna book finally finished…..meets deadline.

Thirteen days of rain and finally today is sunny. I’ve finally finished my Bologna book, photographed it, and it’s ready to deliver in time to meet the deadline for the exhibition. Aaaaaaaaargggggh. It took so long.

Bologna is one of my two favourite cities in the world. (The other is Barcelona.) When I saw a wonderful Peter Lyssiotis artist’s book of Paris at the AGNSW, it was very abstract to me, who doesn’t know Paris at all (I’m a Rome girl). It gave me the idea that I could make a Bologna book, which would also be an ode to red, and possibly incomprehensible, unless you know something about Bologna. Each page is painted, in a sort-of faux fresco in many layers of acrylic paint and medium like the red buildings in Bologna. Then I let the paint cure before working on the images. On the cover I have used three colours of bookcloth to abstract Bologna’s famous towers . The endpapers are copies of an oldish map of Bologna I got on ebay, scanned, printed and treated with shellac. The book starts with the things that Bologna is famous for – not only ‘la rossa’, but also ‘la dotta, and ‘la grassa.’ The book begins with the lighter side of Bologna, but then becomes political and ‘dark’ and leads towards ‘la strage di Bologna.’ Bologna is full of arcades, and I have made stencils from photos of the light and shade that is created by the pillars. The image with the arrows is where the book begins to become political. The arrows point right and left (destra e sinistra) – the choices in politics, and the arrows made by the stitching on the spine reflect this too. And guess what is behind the red blind when you lift it up?