Brown Nude

Oh Hello there!

Another nude.

I think there is something a bit wrong with her knee, but I like the line of her stomach and breast and I like the volumes created with the scratching and hatching of paint and chalks.

I gave this to my friend Mary One (she got her spake in first!) as a present for her thirtieth birthday. In fact i gave her a token that entitled her to come to my house and pick one out of any of the paintings or drawings off my walls or out of my attic. So she picked this one herself.

It is always hard to try and imagine which drawing someone else will like - taste is so personal. As it happens this is certainly one I might have picked myself. So I am glad that she also liked it.

I enjoyed drawing this. I liked the way of working quite quickly, splodging on paint and then working feverishly back into the darker colour with the white chalk to raise the highlights. Drawing on a brown ground helps to make the highlights stand out also.

I am going to boast a little bit here by the way - i drew this while in college and one of my tutors said that it reminded him of a Picasso drawing! Well, How's that! High praise indeed. I know what he meant - it does have a certain character of the type of drawings that Picasso did at a certain time of his life but I also realise that there is absolutely no comparison in Picasso's ability to draw compared to mine. He wouldn't have a wrong knee anywhere unless he was drawing one of his dismembered women - which, of course, was done on purpose.

To be honest you should be able to draw properly before you start to muck about with your subject, however i usually just start mucking about first, because i want to. I still have a bit more practice to do really - get those 10,000 bad drawings out of me!

By the way - and i know that this is an Irish obsession - the weather has unsettled again. I will never get a job in the Meteorology Office!

Teasels

When rifling through my portfolio in search of a suitable image for today, I thought that this picture had a certain Monday morning feel about it.

I know, you don't have to remind me that it is in fact now Monday afternoon. But when Monday morning is really Monday-morningish then it is not bound by time or even day.

If things are really bad you can actually have a perfectly respectable Monday morning on a Tuesday afternoon! or even Midday on a Wednesday if things still have not rectified. By Thursday that Friday feeling is starting to kick in 'Thank Crunchie!' so the feeling is a whole lot better and it is really hard to have that Monday morning feel any later in the week at all!

But for now - Monday Morning. All tangled and prickly with dark black coffee and an unpleasant deep red throbbing in the temples.

Although, to be fair, this painting was not done about Monday Morning at all. This was simply a celebration of Teasels. i do like Teasels - although after letting them loose in my garden a year or so ago I realise why some people view them as a scourge. They really do manage to seed themselves everywhere - even in the lawn. So I don't think that I will be introducing them into the garden in Spain. I am sure that in the mediterranean climate they would be even more rampant. I am also sure that there are plenty of indigenous weeds that will persecute me when I start to garden there anyway.

I like this drawing though - I like the lively quality of the plants and the perspective that I achieved in it. I also like the way it has other stems lurking darkly in the background.

On another note - the weather here is still phenomenal, although the sun is not shining through as much today. It was quite hazy this morning and now there are some quite serious dark clouds gathering. i wonder if it might not give us a thunderstorm!

Lucky i got the washing done over the weekend - all the sheets and all the towels, the lot. all washed and dried quickly and easily in the heat.

and on that domestic note - i will close for now and hope you enjoy today's picture!