Cycling adventure

Well, I was going to post drawings from the past few days before I leave Stockholm to cycle home to England. However, the scanner, the camera, the computer and even blogger seem to have other ideas, so I'll just have to sign off temporarily in writing! I will be drawing daily over the next month and 2000km, and will post the drawings when I get back to Bristol. So, if you happen to be in southern Sweden, Denmark, northern Germany, the Dutch or Belgian coast or northern France, look out for two heavily laden cycle tourers, one with sketch book in hand!

28th- 30th June

28th June: 'modified' contour drawing i.e. looking at the paper some of the time. The view from Detroit Gallery- again.

29th June: 'expanding' drawing - adding new pieces of paper as needed to end up with a big drawing, by stealth! From the Friday night workshop I ran on blind contour drawing.

30th June: drawing from an object while listening to different types of music. From Jenny Soep's 'Drawing with, to and from music' workshop. I loved this little monkey sculpture so much that I drew it over and over again.

26th- 27th June

26th June: playing around with contour lines and, ahem, colouring in!

27th June: another chunk of time sitting in the gallery- a good excuse to draw.

21st- 25th June

21st June: Detroit Gallery & studios- where I've had a space for the last six months and joint exhibition on at the moment. I'll be spending a lot of time looking at this view this week!

22nd June: Midsummer Eve, this much bright light around at 10pm.

23rd June: watching a documentary about a nuclear waste storage place in Finland. Not what I would have considered a particularly interesting subject until I watched it, but actually a superb piece of documentary and imaginative fim making. Into Eternity- worth watching!

24th June: near the end of a 50 mile/ 80 km cycle. Interesting working with a watersoluble pencil which had got wet in the two downpours we rode through... also while standing under a dripping tree. I might have to try pre-wetting the pencil again sometime- I really liked the waxy marks.

25th June: lettuce on the windowsill is the extent to which green fingers can be indulged at the moment.

18th- 20th June

18th June

19th June

20th June: an experiment, playing around with words in Gimp so they become- maybe- like a drawing. I was very tired after a long day and our exhibition opening and had a vague idea of experimenting with a drawing with words... after all, it's all just marks on a piece of paper.
Ahem, some daily drawings are better than others!

15th- 17th June

15th June: aspen

16th June

17th June

12th- 14th June

8th- 11th June

8th June: 11 quick observations in the forest

9th June: blind contour poplar tree

10th June: blind contour poplar leaf (notice a theme here? These are the trees outside our windows.)

11th June: (extract from) first portrait by touch that's not a self portrait. Maybe this technique needs a bit of work!

4th- 7th June

4th June: experimenting with ink and a reed pen; now, where does this line want to go?

5th June

6th June

7th June: moving on from staring at shadows to staring at a tree- this time for a whole hour! An extract from visual notes I made at the time.

1st- 3rd June: a rainy day's walking, Kazakhstan on tv and a museum full of stuffed animals.

1st June: a particularly rainy day walking in Tyresta national park, just a quick sketch when I stopped in a wooden shelter to get out of the rain. As I sat there looking out over the lake, a woodpecker obligingly landed on one of the trees in front, though not for long enough to get a very clear sketch.

2nd June: keeping the pen moving while watching tv- a programme about Kazakhstan.

3rd June: Biologiska Museet. An old museum which consists of a huge panorama of stuffed - Scandinavian- animals with painted backgrounds and scenery that shows their natural habitats. I don't think it's changed much since it opened in 1893, and everything is fading a bit, but it's an interesting, if slightly sad place. Plus it's entertaining to try and identify all the birds and animals from the list they give you.

29th- 31st May

29th May: a quick sketch on the way to the station.

          30th May: I've been doing an exercise that involves staring at the shadows in the corner of a room for fifteen minutes and describing them, then doing the same with an un-changing object. After the initial 'What? Fifteen minutes?' (and so on...), it was interesting to notice the difference between describing something with words and by drawing- I felt that I could be more specific with words, somehow, and had to work a lot harder to be precise with lines and colours. From 'Learning by Heart' by Corita Kent and Jan Steward.

31st May: same again!

24th- 28th May

24th May

25th May

26th May

27th May

28th May

18th- 23rd May

18th- 19th May: cycling and camping training trip

20th May

21st May: quick(sort of) gesture sketch

22nd May: Tyresta national park sketch

23rd May: colour chart for a new set of watercolour pencils;inspired by Sue Brown.

14th- 17th May: a cardboard owl, a national park, a bag full of washing.

14th May: the end of the tissue paper sketchbook at last. Sadly not drawn from a real owl, this is a contour-ish sketch of a cardboard cut-out that lives in our kitchen.

15th May: I've started going to Tyresta National Park for a day each week since the weather got better. It takes about an hour by bus, so is pretty accessible from the city- and it's a real national park/ nature reserve where if you leave the main paths you can see nobody all day.

16th May: one of those things I thought I ought to record as being a significant feature of living in Sweden. Not the big blue Ikea bag, obviously, but the concept of using a shared laundry room in the basement- and getting all your washing done in one big go.

17th May

11th- 13th May: Copenhagen

 Just back from a long weekend in Copenhagen, a great adventure taking the sleeper from Stockholm overnight on Thursday, and arriving- theoretically at least- refreshed and ready to go at 7am on Friday. Most of the drawing I did was in galleries- it wasn't quite warm or dry enough until Sunday to sit outside for very long.

Statens Museum for Kunst- the Danish national gallery: an installation made of brightly coloured fabric in a modern extension to the old building. I loved the way you could see the old brick building inside the airy glass extension, and some windows at the end were open so the sound of the breeze came inside.

The other superb thing about Statens Museum for Kunst: a drawing room! As it sounds, a room for drawing in, complete with shelves of paper, pencils, drawing boards and interesting sculptures and images to draw from. And not just for kids. Heaven. This plaster cast of  a roaring bear was in the middle of the room. The slight dizzying effect is due to using two pencils held together; I've decided it's good for fur texture, but the head and mouth would probably have been better if they were a bit clearer- ie with just the one pencil.

Saturday 12th May: Giacometti sculptures at the Louisiana Gallery, half an hour from Copenhagen on the train. Apart from the artwork, the building itself was worth the visit. Apparently an example of '50s discreet modernism'- lots of big glass windows and beautiful wood blending into the surrounding landscape. I could go on! One day, when we build a house...

I couldn't resist including these too...

Sunday 13th May: I was on my way to spend an hour in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek- another big museum- when I spied a round bench on the sunny square in front of the building. Next to the bench was this olive tree-in-a-bag. Funnily enough, I never made it into the museum...

And looking the other way, this was what I could see.