What else can you do with an old sketchbook page?

I don't want any half-hearted sketchbooks. So today I started a project to go through my current "Reportage & Copying" book and add to some of the pages - adding tone with ink and water and pencil into line drawings. I just wanted to take an insipid page and see what I could do with it.
Looking at the results, I see that much as I love line drawing, a fully fleshed out picture with a variety of tone, sometimes created by different media, is more captivating. On the picture of the houses  I filled in with diluted ink washes, grey crayon, and yellow felt tip pen. The white window frames are done with a Tippex pen.

Monoprint and collage.

"You Are the Frame"

The original idea of this comes from a letter my friend David Loft sent me in 1975 or 76. He was in Paris and he wrote something about the faces of people, and other things he was seeing, and he wrote ..."you are the frame". So that's the idea. When I did this I was working in a very free and experimental way. It was really lovely working like that. 

The background is a quickly done mono-print with some words in, not very legible. Then I made the faces and figure by first creating textured paper with thick acrylic brush strokes with white paint on cartridge paper. I painted the people with gouache on that textured paper, and cut them out. I glued them on to the monoprint. It is A3 size.

A chalk pastel picture.

This is an A3 picture done in chalk pastels. It was part of a project I did at college based on people in the streets of Cambridge. The pose of the woman comes from a real person who was sitting on a bench looking lovely, so I asked her if she would mind me taking a picture of her. She didn't mind, but her whole demeanour changed when she knew I was taking her photo, she looked quite stiff and shy.

Anyway, she was wearing a pale blue jacket, so that changed. And the odd figure beside her is just imagined by me. And the huge flowers.

Wonky drawing.

This is not totally invented, but nearly. It just has one small link with the real world, which is that I was thinking of my friend Marion's kitchen when I drew this. She is an architect and designed her own house. The kitchen has nice, squarish proportions and lots of drawers, and a big table. And some of the walls in her house are painted a warm, terracotta-ish orange. Neither of these women is Marion, though. They are just strange people I drew out of nowhere. 

The medium is Caran d'Ache crayons and obviously it was done very quickly. The chair is really a bit of a problem - it's not that I can't draw chairs, either. I don't know what I was doing. But there is still something I like about this picture. There is a kind of intense drama about the two characters.

I did this in about 2002. I don't think it has a title.

A Dream

It is a pity this is in black & white - it's a charcoal drawing - because if it had a title it would be "The Blue Ring". It's about a dream I had where I was walking along the road in our village one evening, and a blue ring of light appeared above my head.

The ring of light somehow lifted me up into the sky with it, high up above the rooftops of the village. It wasn't frightening. I felt completely safe. The ring then floated me far away across many miles of dark forests. All was dark and murky, no colours.

Then, eventually, I floated beyond the dark forests and then down below me I could see a whole landscape laid out, in daylight, with green hills and fields, and trees in bright leaf.

After a while, I saw a cafe with tables and chairs outside in a meadow. There was only one person sitting there, and it was my father. In real life, he had died a few years before I had that dream.

I floated down to sit with him. I held on to him and asked him if he had been stressed when he died, and he told me that no, he hadn't been. I was aware of the warm sun and the fresh air, it was like an early spring day. There were no other people in that landscape, just me and my Dad.

A Severed Relationship

This painting originally had a feeble sort of man approaching the table carrying a casserole. I called the picture "Supper Cooked For Her" and, once I had cut the dopey man off, I sold it at an exhibition at St. Cyriacs church in Swaffham Prior, near Cambridge.

I really had fun painting her. Her lovely, bold patterned dress just materialised (haha, one of those unconscious puns but I will leave it there) on the paper and it was all so easy and natural to do. Sometimes pictures just go like that. It doesn't happen very often, but it is such a gift when it does. 

But I was left with the problem of the man, and there was only one brutal solution. He had to be deleted.  And the bold woman was left alone with her thoughts.

By the time I had cut it in half, this was about A4 size and it was painted in gouache.

Autumn in the City

The thing I remember about painting this is my feeling of excitement when I realised I could dress the man in a pale pink shirt and a diamond-patterned cardigan. And he could carry it off! I think he does - he looks quite cool, I think. He's only slightly feeble, and as all my men are a bit weak looking, he was never going to be macho. I guess he looks like a metro-sexual. What is that small book he is reading, or has been reading, before he took a sidelong look at his confident companion? I think it might be poetry.

This is A3 (it's really not my favourite size, ideally I like something less long and thin, but paper is always this size so I often just use it as it comes), and acrylic.

There are times when a painting seems to appear so easily, it's like those magic painting books where you just add water and you see the picture. This was one of those. I didn't do a thumbnail or have any idea what my subject was going to be until it painted itself.

A Serene Afternoon

Something I always struggle with is my tendency to use every primary colour in every picture. So here I was consciously trying to use a limited palette. It is painted with acrylic, and some of the interesting textures and distortions came from making mistakes. I think there was a second figure at some point which I painted over. And somehow, by not giving up on it, and continuing to paint over, and re-work, until I could feel settled about it, this painting acquired its own integrity. 

It didn't come easily, but in the end a serene feeling prevailed.

Thumbnail Sketches and Finished Paintings

Here on the left is a typical thumbnail of the kind I do. I don't like doing them, so they are very scribbly and small. The picture is an illustration of a little poem called The Blackbird. The sketch is probably just a few inches square. The other image is a black & white version of a coloured pastel picture (A3), in which the girl's dress is a muted acid yellow, but the rest of the picture is mostly brown and grey. 

I was pleased with the finished picture, but now when I see them side by side, I feel a bit sad because the people in the first sketch are somehow way more interesting than the others. I feel sad that those characters got left behind in their line-drawing world. I abandoned them!

 I know this is a perennial problem for artists and illustrators - initial quick sketches often have a lot more life in them than the worked-over painting that comes after.

So the answer is: don't put the two pictures side by side!

George the Flying Rabbit

Excerpts from George the Flying Rabbit - written by Imogen Davies, aged about 6!

"George knew it was supper time but he was lost. At last he saw a light and headed straight for it. When he got to it, it was a rabbit hole for him. When he got in there were doors each side of him. He peeped into the door closest to him. There were different sorts of animals. George thought there was every kind of animal or insect there except a rabbit. By the time he had finished thinking they'd seen him and were up and out of their chairs. George ran as fast as he could and shouted "HELP!!!!!!!" as loud as he could."

"George asked his mother if he could go out in the wood by himself. So he started off to the wood but then he remembered the map and it was too far from home to get it so he had to manage by himself. He tried to be as brave as he could walking along in the mud. There were twitterings and hoots and all sorts of noises. Then he saw a cat up a tree and he helped it down and became friends with it. The cat's name was Ginger."

The Night Air

Pencil crayon on A5 size paper. As well as cutting things out, I really love scratching and scraping and colouring in, so pencil crayons - or coloured pencils - are good for me to use. In this picture you can see that I was enjoying making little marks like stitches along the edges of areas of colour.

This was just "free expression" where I started with the oval shape of the face and followed on from there. I like marks, and any kind of pencil makes the best marks, I think. Better than paint in that way.

Circle Line and Waitrose Bags

I am not going to sell this picture because a) I am too fond of it and b) my daughter is too, and she asked me not to sell it.

I know why we both feel attached to it, and that is because of the subject. We both love observing people travelling on public transport. I have done quite a bit of surreptitious sketching in this situation, and this painting was created from a quick scribble done on the tube in London. 

This is one of my favourite kinds of moments - if I can manage to capture a little bit of the natural and beautiful magic and complexity of people's everyday lives, the activities they do all the time while being lost in their own thoughts, that means everything to me.

While I am on that subject - dear to my heart - here is another of the same kind of picture. A little moment half glimpsed, half invented, in the streets of Saffron Walden. It's called "East Street Post Office", and I am very proud of the Waitrose bag.

I Love Chocolate

I thought I would keep this picture in my "landmark picture" collection, and for many years I did have it on the wall of my own house. But in 2013 I tried putting it out into the world, at a worthy price, and somebody wanted to buy it. I miss it but I am glad to think of it now hanging on a wall in another house, and hopefully enjoyed every day.

If I stop to think about that process - of these very personal images that usually are quite painstakingly dragged out of the depths of my soul (..it's really true, though it sounds over dramatic...), flying off into another life, then I start thinking how amazing it is. The most astonishing and strange thing is that each person who looks must have their own specific vision of each picture, and I can never know exactly what others see.

This is a picture of two real people in a real place, but I won't say who they are or where, so that anyone can have their own imaginings.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

The Sea People

An illustration from a folk tale. Acrylic on paper.

Before the Journey

The Companion on the Journey