BEING BAD

TULIPS

As you may have noticed earlier this week my watercolour “skills” are appalling if not non-existent. Often my drawing skills go out the window as I labour to get the colour onto the page in some kind of intelligible way which will explain the short-assed tulips here. Oils are much more my medium.

TULIPS AND MY NEIGHBOUR AND PAL

Still I am determined to get some colour into my sketch pad so you’ll have to bear with me. I have heard it said that to be an artist you need to to be able to be a bad artist-something which a lot of people seem to have taken too much to heart in recent times. This just means that you have to be prepared to make alot of mistakes and to turn off your inner-critic to carry on. It doesnt mean of course you should hang these mistakes in a gallery and charge €1000 for them.

ABANDONED PRELIMINARY SKETCH FOR SAN FRANCISCO TO YOSEMITE

Having said that some “mistakes” can end up being very successful or popular, like this preliminary sketch I abandoned. More than once I have had people in my studio who have ignored my “masterpieces” for some abandoned scrawl on a paper or board.

SAN FRANCISCO TO YOSEMITE (OIL ON BOARD)2006

So I sat at my front door in the cold, with my tongue jammed out to the side, sitting splay-legged on the cold ground (for the first time in years it came back to me that sitting on cold ground can give you piles, but I don’t know if this is true?)and produced these tulips which I am showing them to you to prove to myself that I can suffer being bad-you’d think I’d be used to it by now of course. Be assured that they ain’t going to be hanging in any gallery any time soon.

SKETCH PAD

Trying out the Sketch Pad as a gallery this week. Assuming you can as usual click on each image to see a larger version. You will notice many cats, check out the previous post BEARA PART ONE. Things got a bit strange with REMAINS OF BREAKFAST when the sketch pad on which I was drawing became a part of the sketch as did the sketch itself….. See you next week.

BEDROOM

CASTLETOWNBERE CHIPPER

CAT

CAT

CAT

CATS

CATS

CATS

CATS

CHAIR

CHAIR

COTTAGE KITCHEN

COUCH

DRUMS NOT GUITARS

PANTRY DOOR

REMAINS OF BREAKFAST

PICTURE A DAY (21-25) TRANSMOGRIFIES INTO SKETCH PAD

CAFE

MARCH 9TH:Well I said I would review Picture-A-Day after a month and see what way it was headed. I had hoped it would galvanise me into doing something creative each day and brush up my drawing skills, which it has done. I also thought I would be chronicling the daily life of Westtown with colourful pictures of flowers and bunnies.

TWO:SHELL

There was another thought lurking in the background, which I didn’t articulate properly to myself,  and this was the intention that a project could be seen to grow from a kernel to a finished group of pictures or works in a nice, neat, ordered progression.

TEA

Hah!Well as I have learned plenty of times that doesn’t really happen. You can order all of your pictures into a nice story after the fact but the reality is a bit messier, at least for me. That doesn’t stop me trying to continue to order my chaos, a sisyphean undertaking I know but I probably need that tension to get anywhere. As for the colour, who knows where THAT went. I’m sure it will come back….unlike the bunnies who were scared off by all the monsters who trampled the flowers. Sigh.

BOXES

Still I figured this Picture Post needs to be renamed to encompass all that it is which is a bit of everything including some kernels of projects that may or may not happen, random doodles, landscapes and squiggles. And all that it is, without getting too fancy, is in fact, my sketchpad.

DRAGON DOODLE

SEVEN:SHELLS

DOOR

So from now on, on a Friday(mostly, you will get at least five pictures posted here under the name SKETCH PAD to give you a glimpse inside my world. This week I’m giving you ten pictures to look at, out of fourteen I uploaded, just to start us off like.

THE TYRE CENTRE ON BRIDGE STREET

I had them all numbered and was going to put them in order, all nice and neat(sigh)but then the chaos took over again because they look a bit better all mixed up. I will review it again in a month.

As for the evolution of my next  project(s), I think I will probably post picture updates in separate random posts as they happen.

In the mean time, CLICK on any of the images to see big versions. Enjoy.

ONE:SHELL

T-BAY SURF CENTRE