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.

The pope and the politicians

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

Faces

I spend a lot of time filling up my sketch books with character studies like these. Either directly from life wherever I happen to be, or if I’m stuck indoors then from the T.V. and newspapers. In the end there’s nothing more fascinating to draw than people….

Old man in his study

I think all of my favourite paintings and doodles are a combination of precision and accident. Although it would be difficult to find precision in this sketch, it was actually taken from an original photograph and not from my imagination. I do envy those artists who can draw directly without needing some kind of reference, such as a live model or photo, (I’m not one of them). But I digress, this one was taken from a photograph, of an elderly man, standing in a library and he had on an evening suit, but the rest is a deliberate distortion of the original image, with the accident being in the unpredictability of the water and paint.

more Politicians….

This time working with the same flat brush but in gouache instead of watercolour which results in  a flat more opaque colour and a little more aggressive.

Politicians

I was working from photos with a wide flat No.10 brush for these images. Sometimes I can’t help but get too involved in the detail of a painting or picture, especially when I’m not drawing from life. Using this kind of brush ensures the final result is simplified and that there is more accidental overlap of colour, which for me gets closer to the goal.

political abstraction

How did I get to this? I guess I was trying to move away from straightforward representational sketching and find a looser more abstract style. I love the unpredictability of water-colour when used like this plus the fact that politicians look much better in watercolour than in real life.