Cool old People

My love of drawing old people continues….I love the distortions that happen as we age, how clothes hang differently and the body changes. I like how old people have their own very particular take on fashion and clothing. Sometimes its a throwback to an earlier era but I think often its arises from the restrictions placed on them by what’s available. They tend to wear more clothes than younger people and this also makes for a different aesthetic. Maybe I won’t appreciate it all so much when I reach the vintage stage of life myself…

Quentin Blake

As you might have guessed by now I kind of like sketching. Near the top of that heap of admiration and likeness would be the work of caricaturists and satirists, in particular the work of Quentin Blake, Gerald Scarfe and the lesser known Fritz Wegner.

Wegner illustrated my favourirte kids book The Fattypuffs and The Thinifers by Andre Maurois, which  if you’ve not read it is the fantastic story of two brothers, one thin, one fat, who travel to an imaginary world separated into the fat, pleasant and generous Fattypuffs and the thin, energetic and mean spirited Thinifers.

Quentin Blake is probably most famous for his illustrations of Roald Dahl’s books, most notably Charlie and the Chocolate factory, The BFG and Matilda… and I can’t imagine anyone else being more perfectly suited to the task than Blake whose  anarchic and unruly illustrations perfectly capture the comical, semi-surreal world’s created by Dahl…. Gerald Scarfe is a political satirist and cartoonist who has also worked as a theatre designer. His work is biting and vicious and at the same time funny, poignant and irreverent. What’s more incredible is that these guy’s have all been at it for more than fifty years apiece and are all still working as we speak. So I guess you can expect some satirically inspired sketches here soon…..

New Year 1012

Wanted to post these up last week. Wanted to do more of them. Wanted to do them all nicely in colour. But wanting and finding the time and energy are not always compatible. Still….they’re here now! I was fascinated and just a little appalled, but not surprised by the antics of New Year revellers in the UK on New Years Eve. The thing is if you don’t live in the UK you might be mistaken for thinking that this happens only on News Years eve, so that would be okay. But it pretty much happens all over the country, in small towns and cities, every weekend. It don’t know what it says about the state of the UK at the moment. It’s certainly a pressure valve, with out which, the frustration of living there would likely bubble up somewhere else. It does however make great subject matter for my art. I love the resemblance that some of the prostate drinkers have to dead bodies…i guess that’s why they call it dead drunk. You can see the originals here….

Udo di Fabio

This is Udo di Fabio. Udo is a grey haired man with glasses. He loves to play golf and buckaroo and Udo’s favourite food is beans on toast and boiled winkles. Udo’s mum was a basketball player and his father a train driver. He likes dressing up in suits and his favourite colour tie is blue. Udo wears black suits and sometimes navy. He’s Argentinian but he doesn’t like sausages. His best friend is John. John also likes blue ties but his hair is brown.

Paris

My favourite pastime while traveling…and no better place to do it than the metro and cafes of Paris…I would have liked to have had the time to get a few street shots in….maybe next time….Looking at these has just made me realise again how closed and introspective most people look in large cities, especially on the subway or metro…or maybe its just the ones I pick on?

The pope and the politicians

The Pope on his first official visit to Germany last month, with everybody smiling, but only small smiles.

good sketcher….baaaad painter

SO, I had a couple of hours off…great I thought and I packed my stuff and drove to a nice spot outside Winterthur to paint. It was raining of course, so that meant I was sat in the back of the car trying to avoid getting wet, but I’m just making excuses. Watercolours always look so easy when they’re done right (by someone with more practice than me!!).  I haven’t been painting outdoors in a while and I think by the end of each session I am starting to learn something. The problem is by the time I get to painting again, I’ve forgotten what I’d learned the first time, which says a lot about my retentive memory. In fact it seems the longer I spend on a painting, the worse it gets and here is a prime example.

The first painting was the one I spent the most time on and I totally overworked it. The second took me about 15 minutes and though not perfect, I’m much happier with it. Maybe you disagree? Anyway if your easily impressed with my work and need more proof of how to do it good then you should take a look at the work of the unpronounceable artist Joseph Zbukvic , who really knows his way around a pan!

Artem Krepkiy

 

I absolutely love the work of  Artem Krepkiy who I found recently on the Behance network. He is a Ukranain, artist and illustrator based in Kiev, who seemsto be generating some interest at the moment. I am very impressed by anyone who can heighten pencil work to the level of art where there’s no hiding behind colour. His work is full of textural emotion, created with soft and scratchy lead work and contrasting dark and light tones of distorted otherworldly figures taken from the metro or streets of Kiev. His work is challenging me strongly to break open a box of soft lead, Faber Castells and let rip.

Mr Bombastic

 

All the best summer songs were being played at the Badi in Wiesendangen last weekend, as a rural swimming pool party nod to the quite cool Music festival going on in big neighbour, Winterthur.  The Badi is one of several outdoor Schwimmbad’s, (large outdoor swimming pools, complete with bar, cafe volleyball, bbq area and lots of grass to sit on) which lie outside of Winterthur. It was actually a little more upbeat then these two fellows look, I think they were lost in deep dreams of bombastic 90′s, slimmer days.

Sunbathers

Still living a vacuous life (at least on the weekend) of burning under the sun, cooling down, heating up, cooling down and drawing other people doing the same, all dressed in brightly coloured pieces of synthetic cloth and eating ice cream.