Thoughts on imagination, a full sketchbook and a studio sale!

What I've been up to lately.

Firstly, I made a new video! I love filling these little sketchbooks, they’re such a nice record to look back on. This one came with me to London last year and has lots of quick sketches from a jazz bar there, and it also joined me on several trips to Paris.

For the past 7 weeks, I’ve been doing an online course with the Royal Drawing School called Observation & Imagination. Whilst I love drawing from life, I have never felt fully at ease with “inventing” things, so I chose the class to work on this.

It has really expanded my idea of what the imagination can be. It can mean drawing from memory, drawing intuitively, inventing colour palettes, responding to a text, moving things about within a composition, and more. It does not have to come out of nowhere and you can deliberately stoke it.

In one class, we built a mini scene using objects such as boxes and fabric, populated it with paper figures and then drew from it, allowing distortions and elaborations to take place as we went.

A mirror became a lake, washi tape became the base of a well, paintbrushes became tree branches.

For another session, we watched Orphée (1950) by Jean Cocteau, pausing the film for 6 minutes at a time whenever there was an interesting shot and making quick tonal studies in ink.

We then collaged some of our studies and expanded them to make a new composition. The use of mirrors in the film prompted us to experiment with framing and worlds-within-worlds in the drawing.

(The film was great by the way, very visually rich. Here’s a link if you’d like to watch it: https://archive.org/details/orpheus-1950)

Another week, we looked at the poem, Cassida: The Branches by Lorca. In this class, we were asked to make some drawings with no reference at all, just responding to lines in the poem. It was quite scary for me, but I surprised myself.

"A nightingale rounds up the sighs", "Two valleys wait for autumn", "There are many children with veiled faces"

We then worked on a large image of a forest, using the poem as inspiration and the structure of our rooms as the basis for the composition (my curtains became two large tree trunks; a chair became the dog lying down)

“The leaden dogs have come, waiting for the branches to fall”.

That’s not even everything, and I still have a few classes left to go, but it has definitely been worthwhile for me and opened up many doors for different ways of working.

Finally, I want to let you know that I’m having a studio sale! I found a small selection of prints which I’d ordered ages ago and completely forgotten about, so these, as well as some original paintings and some Christmas cards, are now up on my shop. It will only stay open until Saturday as I’m off to Antwerp, so get your order in by then. Shipping is free to France and 5€ to everywhere else. Thank you so much if you decide to take a look!

That’s all for this time, but I’m trying my best to keep to a regular monthly schedule here from now on because these letters are my favourite way to share what I’m up to.

So, until December,