Misty Morning

 Watercolour - in a format which suits the Isle of Wight coast - I ought to make use of it more often!

And a small one:

The Pastel that nearly blew away

 My flat is dark - so I have to take photos of pictures outside.  At the moment, this is a question of dodging the rain, and battling the wind.

This pastel nearly blew away - hence it's skew-wiff.  I rarely use pastel, but apart from the dust, they're a bit of fun now and then.

This is based on a lane near here, and I say based because (as is typical) I've forgotten where I sketched it; I've changed the sketch a bit, to reflect the fact that everything just now is wet, muddy, and generally 'orrible.  It's got to dry up a bit soon, hasn't it.....? 

Whale Chine, Isle of Wight, Winter

 Two paintings, oil, 8" by 10", of the ever-changing Whale Chine, subject to frequent erosion and land movement.  I confess that I used an old sketch for the view from the sea, and an old painting of my own - it's very dangerous to get down to the beach, far too risky for someone of my age - and anyway, the Council warns you not to try.

These are both in oil, colours used Ultramarine, Cerulean Blue, Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Chrome Yellow (Hue), Flake White, and Quinacridone Violet - just the Siennas, Ochre, the two blues and white used in the second painting. 

And a very small watercolour of a frequent visitor to this coast, 12cm by 17cm - too small for me to photograph well, so I had to scan it, losing some foreground depth of colour in the process.  But there we are, such is life, and the Shag has a harder life than mine.  (A now deceased colleague and I were visiting St Mary's Hospital on the island, on an inspection: we saw a magnificent specimen of this bird alight on one of the ponds in the grounds - my colleague wanted a closer look, so cautiously moved nearer: "If anyone asks," I wittily remarked, "don't say you're looking for a shag."   My how she laughed .......

Footbridge, from Somewhere in Sussex

 

A rather selective version of a photograph from my brother - so selective that I doubt he'll recognize it.  Showed it on Painters Online, but I think I've managed to take a rather more accurate photo here.  Oil, on birch panel, 42cm x 30cm.

For sale, as is everything on here provided I've not sold it already.....  Inquire within, on anything.  Well, it nearly rhymes.

Chine, Isle of Wight

 We have chines on the Isle of Wight - and doubtless they have them elsewhere.  Areas of eroded land, bordering the sea - sometimes quite a long way back from the coastline - forming a valley.  Some are well-known tourist areas, such as Shanklin Chine.  This isn't Shanklin Chine - its a composite.  Call it Composite Chine....

Watercolour on Hahnemühle Rough Torchon, 12 x 17cm. 

 

Colwell Bay - as it once was, before a "skeletal, stomach-churning stairlift" was installed a good many years ago.  And as I preferred it.  Very small watercolour 12 by 17cm.  

New Year's Greetings to All

 And to kick of 2024, a year that has started - interestingly; i.e. some problems on the horizon, but then, aren't there always? - I have a few drawings to show in some of my favourite media.

If I can find them, that is - with increasing age has come increasing forgetfulness: I once knew where I'd filed things without having to look; now - I save something, file it away neatly, forget where it is in a matter of hours.

Still, never mind eh?  And Happy New Year to my devoted followers and those who visit without following - come on, FOLLOW!

A varied selection, I think you'll agree: from 1) ink and a splash of diluted Chromacolour - from one of my photographs of fields at Perreton, Isle of Wight; 2) a footbridge in Sussex, from a photo by my brother Brian; 3) a little watercolour of the revetment, at Ventnor, IW; 4) Magpie, eyeing up the last of the figs; 5) a visit from an old friend; 6) Wild, forlorn, overgrown - I was in Dickensian mood at the time.  Pen and ink.  

I have paintings to show too - once I can get good photographs of them; dark flat, so need to be photographed outside - when, if, it stops raining/blowing a gale.  

War and Peace

 At last - at last!

I have finished reading W & P, realizing rather too late that the version I have, the Constant Garnett translation from 1904, is the clunkiest, most turgid version available - for all that it was a magnificient achievement at the time, completed when Garnett's eyesight was fading.

He was a cruel devil though, was Tolstoy: you plough through nearly 1300 pages of novel to be confronted with another 40 pages of Part II, his epilogues, which don't bear on the characters in his novel other than Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander, and they're completely unnecessary - he's implied every point already in the novel itself, but garlands the ending of it with almost endless repetitions, parables, analogies, analyses, presumably just in case you'd missed the point.

Particularly galling, when you discover that in later life he changed his point of view on many of the positions he advanced.  It's called "the greatest novel ever written".  Perhaps it is - but that doesn't make it a novel which is any great pleasure to read, and over the last 20 years I've broken off from it and come back to it as time permitted; I say 20 years - I see now that my copy was published in 1972.

I began to enjoy it when I'd reach the quarter way in mark - I understood what he was saying, why he felt he had to say it, I grasped the politics, social and military; and I'm glad I stuck with it (to the extent I did - at least I kept coming back to it).  I'm told that people who have read it once tend to come back and read it again: well, 73 now, I doubt I have another 20 years left to me; so I suspect I won't - but if I do, it won't be in this translation.

It would have been much quicker to have learned Russian, and read the original. 

Another Watercolour

Well, the last post seems to have been emoting for posteritiy, because I don't think anyone read it.

Ah well.  The lot of the Lone Blogger.  We can but try - we may be doomed to fail.

We're certainly doomed to fail against this appalling weather - rain, rain, more rain, and then - a spot of rain.  Taking photographs outside, which given my dark flat I need to do, is impossible.  So I have to scan them.  

Scans, however, do not produce high quality results on the whole.  And I've still not got the Ipad to work - because I'm too frightened of the blessed thing to really take it to task.  If this is what old age does to you (relatively speaking old age) who needs it? 

So, scanned photo of my little 12 x 17cm interpretation of a section of the revetment at Ventnor, Isle of Wight.  On Hanhemühle Torchon paper - just about the best I've found for many years, for my particular touch, anyway.

 

Pornography - in its place, OK - out of its place: Not

 I don't have strong views against pornography. I don't object to good, honest smut.

And yet -don't tell me it's art.  It just - on the whole - isn't.  Tom of Finland was an artist - well yes; he was; he used pornography to express something deep within him.

But Tom of Finland was an exception; Robert Mapplethorpe was another.  Are these lines clear?  No - no of course they're not.  Pornography can be be many things; anarchic, revolutionary; disrespectful of a polity that doesn't deserve respect.

It can also be repellently exploitative and voyeuristic.  

I've had more than enough of an artist in digital media posting on Painters-Online, who posts pictures of highly pneumatic women, in a repulsively salivatory representation that affords them no respect at all - it just ogles them, and some stupid people, invasriably men, then trot up to tell us how "beautiful" it is. 

But it's not "beautiful".  It's sexist voyeurism which those who produce it and those who claim to find it beautiful need to grow out of: tabloid newspapers used to present their page 3 "stunnahs", displaying as much respect for women as the worst lech you could seek to find.  

I've no objection to a bit of smut: but sly, dishonest, sneaking, slimy smut, pretending to be something else, is nauseating.  Dirt, not art.  Those who produce it need to grow up beyond the smutty schoolboy stage, and admit their work is - well, shall we say meretricious?  I can think of worse interpretations.

Most of them can do better than this: and they should.  

More drawings

 Ever since I bought two Fude pens - the ones with the nibs turned up at the end - and a brush pen, I have been playing with ink, carbon pencil, and conté crayon drawings - and, hitting the wallet again, I bought some torchon watercolour paper from Hahnemühle UK - which is as good as I remember it being when I last used it, and enabled me to finish a small watercolour.

Unlike Arches rough, which I have been using, it doesn't guzzle the water as though it were suffering the devil's own thirst.  Try it - Arches is a good paper, but I don't think I've produced one good painting on it. 

It is I think very true that for every watercolour painter - not my primary medium, be it said - there's a different paper to suit their work; I've got on with Bockingford, The Langton, Canson, Saunders Waterford; not with Arches - I think I'll stay loyal to Hahnemühle (especially now I've learned how to insert the Umlaut - Alt 0252, if you're interested....

Here's a selection - photos could be better, a bit difficult to take 'em outside at the moment: dodging deluges...  The middle drawing was, I thought, suitable for Hallow'een.  

 Gatehouse

I've drawn this before, and painted it - but have lost the painting.  Probably as well, it wasn't that good.

However, drawn to it again, I've drawn it again .... as it were.  Mostly pen and ink, with bits of black and white conté crayon.

 GOODBYE, FACEBOOK/META!

I left Twitter, now X, long before Elon Musk took it over, and miss it not one little bit.

However, while I may miss Facebook/Meta slightly more - initially - I'm leaving both of my accounts there (once I've worked out how to get right of them).

You will still be able to contact me through this blog if you like, but even if you manage to get a message posted on Facebook, I won't see it.  My email address is: robertphillipjones.napa@gmail.com.

 Time for a bit of pen and ink

The top one, an experiment with two different types of ink, non-soluble, and soluble, with a wash of water activating the second without disturbing the first.

The lower one, a very distant memory - I was probably around 14 at the time, so close on 60 years ago - of a boat house on the River Thames.  The roof gradually giving way at the time, I doubt it's still there now.  

To "Susan" - an apology

 Dear Susan - you made an inquiry about one of my paintings some considerable time ago, and I didn't even notice, so didn't reply.

I'm so sorry about that - unfortunately, that piece is sold now, but my pricing isn't standard - I can make special offers when feeling generous, and staggered (as opposed to staggering) payments.

For some reason, Blogger seems not to have notified me that I had a comment, but I'll keep a closer eye on things in future.

Yours, Robert