Bollocks to Brexit

Here is Parliament Square this evening, as people mill about not quite ready to go home after the People’s Vote march.  The statue of Churchill facing into the gale is silhouetted against the white cladding covering part of St Margaret’s Church.

We are in this odd position in which Parliament cannot bring itself to ratify the treaty by which we leave the European Union with a transition period and without immediate chaos.  All arrangements ending our membership are detrimental to the wider economic and political interests of the UK,  so whatever might be the stated opinions of individual Members of Parliament, psychologically and collectively they just cannot bring themselves to commit this act.

The small number of die-hard radicals of the Conservative Party actively want to leave without a treaty, the so-called No Deal, so they and their class can profit financially from the chaos that will impoverish the majority.  The even fewer Northern Irish Democratic Unionists prop up the government and are unrepresentative of the people of that province.  They reject the treaty because it makes transparent the political reality:  after Brexit, Northern Ireland must have a status different to mainland UK if there is to be no return to a hard border with Eire and the sectarian polarisation that would bring.  My party, Labour, reject the treaty not because it is bad (because all routes out of the EU are bad) but because we have three more years of government by a wretched Conservative Party unwilling to seek a consensus vision for Britain after Brexit.  It is a certainty that the Conservatives will cast in law a post-Brexit settlement which undermines workers’ pay, conditions and rights and environmental protections.  They will be free to enter trade deals with other countries to reshape our National Health Service on the USA for-profit model and prevent government limiting the exorbitant prices of pharmaceuticals.  This is the one chance for Labour to bind the government’s hands.  However, strategically they are on the back foot as Theresa May doggedly refuses to compromise, beyond all reason.

So here I was at the the largest political protest in the UK’s history: a million people united in demanding a second referendum and a chance to reject Brexit this time round or at least a way out the impasse Parliament has created.  Still, even if Brexit were to be overturned, what will we do about the conditions of austerity and inequality which so disaffected people in the first place, and which are frankly so much more important than whether we stay in or leave the European Union?  I begin to realise Brexit is a side show.  In or out of the EU, what we need is political vision which addresses with intelligence and compassion the real issues: planetary destruction, violence and poverty.

Note the most middle class insult ever on a banner (or is this reverse snobbery?) “Theresa May puts the milk in first” with a picture of a cup of tea.

Bearman does Bowie

This is another Saturday view of St Paul’s church in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham.  The tools here are brushpens delivering waterproof ink, a limited selection of watercolour pencils and a waterbrush. The exercise is to draw sparingly but build texture with pen marks.

The night before we had gone to a Birmingham Jazz gig in the 1000 Trades pub in the Jewellery Quarter.  The singer was Fini Bearman, supported by amazing jazz pianist Tom Cawley and bassist Calum Gourley and the songs were lyrical, syncopated versions of Bowie classics.

I was moved to draw, but also to stop to just watch and listen.

Here are the few sketches I did that evening.

Under 12 parsecs?

This is another Saturday sketch from St Paul’s Square in Birmingham again using ink marks to build texture and tone without wash or water.  It is clear there is more work needed to use just the varied marks themselves to narrate the scene.

I have switched inks to a permanent black carbon which may permit watercolour over it once dry.  I also want to use less colour, adding a few simple strokes in key areas, not colouring in the whole picture.  Less is more.

I am not-drawing

I am not-drawing these last few months.

These are the few sketches that have slipped through.  On holiday, I had some hours walking the Devon clifftops on my own, not-drawing, looking at the size and shapes of eroded rocks, their highlights and shadows, and the kestrel plummeting down the cliff face and skimming the beach.  Eventually I stopped not-drawing in pen and conte crayon.

Some days earlier at Tintagel castle, I stopped not-drawing for a while looking down into the rocky bay.

A girl, about 7, called Charlotte, came to watch (with parents).  I suggested to her that the way to draw was just to believe you can, look and feel, and put the marks on the paper that seem right.  I gave her my pad, graphite stick and crayons and she drew.

Today my son went to a youth drama group in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, giving me 90 minutes to wander the empty streets not-drawing the varied buildings in the drizzle.  I drifted to St Paul’s Church and not-drew the gnarled trees in the graveyard.  I called in at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and viewed their Next Wave final exhibition.  I was taken by Clare Pentlow‘s paper cut sculpture, made of waves of small projections which could carry data like an old printout from a Sangar sequence.  Yasmin Bowle‘s etched metal plates showing a formative images of gender stereotyped roles from the 1960s with pattern instructions for restrictive corsetry.  The intimacy of Emily Sparkes‘ painting I Sleep contrasted with her frankly disturbing pastiche of EH Shepard’s drawings, HUIINY.  I think she also painted my favourite piece Froot, which is nowhere referenced on the internet, in which pieces of fruit are painted in a picture encyclopedia format, described in corrupted text speech in terms showing increasingly bizarre anthropomorphism.

In the last fifteen minutes before returning to the theatre, I found myself not not-drawing in a small pad in ink and raindrops.

felt tips

A couple of weeks ago, I went drawing in Birmingham with the artist who blogs as outside authority. OA had recently been at a workshop led by Sarah Cannell and had been encouraged to draw using three randomly chosen sharpies, using colours to annotate the composition, for example to outline shapes of interest or represent receding layers. After OA caught the train home, I nipped into the art shop just before it closed and bought three felt tips – chisel tipped at one end, brush pens at the other – and went in search of a subject. In this view of the old Curzon Street railway station behind the Woodman pub drawn on a scrap of brown paper, I almost but not completely missed the point of this technique. My colours were not randomly chosen – by selecting a cool lilac, warm orange and a green I found myself representing the colours I could see. I slipped into using a bit of conte crayon to bring out highlights and darks, pulling the pub forward. Still, it made me think differently.

The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden is a 3 1/2 acre site, a haven amid dense housing, implementing organic permaculture of plants and promoting wildlife.  It is run by the charity Mind to provide people with an environment supporting mental health.  My son has the great good fortune to be support worker there.  He originally trained in 3D design and then horticulture.  He is using these skills in a way that makes the garden accessible to individuals and which also reaches out to the community.  Weekends during May, they are raising funds through plant sales.  My wife, nephew and step-daughter have all been baking cakes for this enterprise.

The beds contain diverse growing frames, some simple and functional, others spiralling out of the ground.  I spent a few minutes yesterday sketching, in my smallest pad, first a willow growing frame and then a metallic sculpture turning gently in the wind, both set by the pond, home to newts.

Drawing cold

This week I went drawing with a friend, who posts under the enigmatic name outsideauthority.  We met in Cromford, a village in Derbyshire where the abundant running water became the driving force for the first powered factories at the start of the Industrial Revolution.  From the start I was fascinated by this construction which took the oily calm waters from outside the mills and dropped them into subterranean tunnels.

The purpose of the first sketch of the day was to warm up, to open my vision and loosen my hands.   The weather was icy, so as I warmed up, I became progressively stiffer and colder, my legs lost feeling and my ungloved right hand became numb.  Interestingly, in the time it took me to draw this first sketch, in graphite stick,  OA had drawn about eight simpler, smaller, dynamic, expressive views around the mill yard.

For my second drawing, of the same structure, I set out to work faster and looser in fountain pen and water.  This version has been minimally revised with a knife to make clearer the shape of the falling water.

A short way along the canal we found a stone bridge which lifted us above the canal and the families wandering along the towpath.  Beyond the gate, rough pasture led up to the bleak dark woods along the road interspersed with houses, under a creamy winter sky.  Here I roughed out two views in fountain pen with a light dusting of conte crayon.  The second version is dominated by the curve of the bridge wall in the foreground.

 

When I got home, I set out to rebuild this second sketch from memory, trying to find the tones and textures of the light lichened coping, smoother dark building stones, the rough concrete gate post and vegetation beneath.

Lastly, I looked along the canal.  What I saw was a glow of light catching the tree in the left mid ground and, at the back, a dark mass of wood spilling down from the hill, throwing black reflections in the flat grey water.  In the cold, conte crayons were hard and unyielding of pigment and brush pens made miserly marks.

At home again, I drew into this, but in the revised version the bare winter branches are at odds with what seems to be the bright colours of early spring.   Where are the dark trees which threw the black reflection into the canal?  The cold bleak dusk is lost and this sketch has become a confection.

Reflecting on our approaches to drawing, it seemed to me that OA made sketches, many very brief, full of life, replete with shape, line and feeling, which were complete in themselves, their purpose to carry information and ideas, perhaps for other times and new pictures painted in the studio.  I rarely now undertake new studio pieces. When I walked away from this last scene, the struggle with the sketch was not over.  I am on a journey with this particular piece that will not have reached a destination until I have taken charcoal and white gouache to it, and found again the feelings of that cold day in my marks.  

Mark-making I

Birmingham Central Library has been rehoused and the old concrete building is being demolished.  The machine sprayed the structure with water while clawing at it.

At the beginning of May, during an outing for my son’s birthday, I stood in a vantage point and drew this in fountain pen and conte crayon while waiting for my family to catch up with me.

 

Urban sketching: Soho House II

This is the second set of sketches from a day around Soho House in Birmingham at the end of April. 

Just round the corner from 18th century industrialist Matthew Boulton’s grand house I found a view down the road of a boarded up burnt out pub, the Beehive.  I chose a spot to draw where a wall served as a table, although this meant the composition was divided in half by a tree trunk.  This sketch was done on the wreckage of a previous drawing, scrubbed out and painted over in irritation with  white gouache.  I was curious to see how this surface would react to another layer: it resisted the crayon and lifted and merged with the new marks when I applied wet media.

Earlier in the day, I found a place looking across rough grass, weeds and a display of daffodils in the yard of the Church of England parish church, looking at the Methodist chapel across the road.  I was fascinated by a group going in and out the doors near me, mostly men, all young with very dark skin, speaking low  a language with (I guessed) African cadences, several putting on and taking off white robes.  They told me they had just finished rehearsing the Passion for Easter the next week, the Orthodox festival for the Eritrean community.  Had I realised sooner, I might have asked their permission to draw the rehearsal.

Urban sketching: Soho House I

Soho House was the elegant Georgian dwelling of the industrialist Matthew Boulton who, working with James Watt, developed steam power to support mechanisation in factories.  HIs mint first struck the large British copper penny which I remember being still in circulation when I was a child.

The Birmingham urban sketching group met there a couple of weekends ago.  Walking there along the dual carriageway opened my eyes to the varied urban landscape, dotted particularly with widely diverse places of faith.

My first sketch, a warm up, was lightly drawn in pencil, worked up in pen and then again in crayon.  It was intended to be much more abstract, incorporating the lines of the building right into the tree shape, but deviated to become more straightforwardly representational.

I was less interested in the House itself than in the backdrop of smaller homes set at angles to one another yet sharing one roof.  This I worked up in pencil then pen, aiming to capture especially the reflections on the windows.  Eventually I brought in a wider range of colours and tones with conte crayon.

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