Sketchbook - autumn sunshine

This is such a lovely in-between time of year: bright and warm, mellow in the shadows, flickering, glinting greens shifting into lemons and rusts. I thought I'd have a little go at collaging the feel of it in my scrappy sketchbook:

I splashed watercolour on one page and then folded two pages together and quickly pulled them apart. I collaged on bits of napkin, kitchen roll, origami paper and the painted ripped remains of corrugated choc croissant packaging (thanks, Waitrose!).

I think this is what's meant by just using your sketchbook and not worrying too much about how glorious the results are. It kind of has the feel of how life is right now...

My kind of lovely

Just come across these two makers. Love them both.  I think I somehow connect with their sense of the eccentric, I suppose with an edge of the macabre.

Sophie Woodrow is in Bristol, so I'll definitely follow her up:
http://sophiewoodrow.co.uk/work/

Mr Finch is in Leeds so that's less likely. Pieces like the bees, below, are actually quite big. http://mynameisfinch.blogspot.co.uk/

Mr Finch sells his pieces on Etsy so I'll be keeping my eyes peeled...

Owls

Why are owls so beguiling? For me, hearing them outside the house in the dark is a tucked-up cosy, secret thrill: 'listen...they're here....'

Peter Doig sprung another surprise: a couple of lovely aquatinted etchings of owls, just dashed off this year. This one is subtitled Boscoe.

Owl (Boscoe) (2013) - Peter Doig

I really liked the fact that he'd structured the thing so differently. Here are my sketches of his two. I couldn't find the right-hand one on the net.

So I scribbled a couple (one 'positive' one 'negative'), much more cliched than PD's.

Then I hacked away at some Adigraf to give me a version, using some linocut tools, below with a tryout.

And here's a finished version. And thanks must also go to Olwyn Pearson, whose work made me realise that a dark print on a bookpage worked really well. Thank you, Olwyn.

Edinburgh - my delights

So, my first visit to the Fringe, staying just outside the city in Dunbar on the east coast.
What made the biggest impressions?

The Peter Doig exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery. Sort of itchy and shimmering at the same time. Lovely vast canvases, dribbles aplenty, very compositional, practically abstract sometimes, and yet very subject-focused too.

What do I mean?

Metropolitain (House of Pictures) (2003-04) - Peter Doig

This picture manages to be both flat (2D-ish squares) and not flat (landscape and a figure with depth). It's happy to mess with your mind. There was lots of this.

Then this: lush paint, loads of it. Standing in front of it, you could feel the heat and the humidity.

Grande Riviere (2001-02) Peter Doig

But the painting that totally blew me away, that I wasn't expecting, was at the City Art Centre, a John Bellany early painting. And then I read that he died on Wednesday, paintbrush in hand, at 71.

The Obsession (1973) - John Bellany

I nearly fell into this painting. It was huge, raw, bitten, phallic. It made me think about the fishermen I had seen in Dunbar that morning, mending their nets by the harbour. The hardscrabble life. In the painting the figures look like weathered standing stones, been there for centuries, part of the sea and sky, ready to be swallowed up by either. Wow. This is why I love paintings.