"Sea Pictures" is now on show at the Art Lounge Gallery in Merthyr Tydfil. You can find the gallery here.
There are thirteen works on show, eleven are acrylic paintins on board, and two are mixed media drawings.

Another of the "new" drawings, part of the series on which the profile portrait was featured last Tuesday. They are featured here as well and on another site here.

New drawings. I am currently making a series of drawings on separate sheets of A2 cartridge paper. I was impressed recently by some minimalist b&w photographs and decided to make a few drawings where only the centre of the field has any great detail and then periphery is considerably lessened. I find the result rather encouraging.

By coincinence, one of our Studio members showed me some photos taken with a pinhole camera. Visual field is almost 180º but what is striking is the white vignetting which looks not unlike what I have been doing. Pinhole photography, by the way, has an aperture around f400 and an infinite depth of field. The exposure time is almost glacial.

But back to drawing. The information on the paper is enough. I think the eye can read what has been omitted. Or the imagination of the viewer can fill in the gaps, perhaps.

Edgar Degas was noted for his portrayals of ballet dancers. Its not only his paintings that are worthy of note, but his drawings too. As can be seen from the above example, he gridded off the paper to arrive at correct proportion. What I find interesting here, is that although the size of the squares equals one "head" as is the general rule of thumb, the rest of it appears at first to go out of the window. Normally a free-standing figure is about seven and a half to eight "heads" tall. But here, the figure only takes up six squares. Yet the thing is right. And the reason is, - foreshortening of some of the limbs. The lower part of the forward leg is correct at two "heads" from foot to knee, but the upper leg is angled away from the viewer. This is neatly hidden behind the dancer's dress. I could rabbit on.....

The message is as always in life drawing, - draw what is really there, not what we think is there.

There is another aspect of Degas' depiction of these ballet dancers; while the dancers themselves create the illusion of grace and delicacy, Degas shows in his work the sheer hard work that goes into doing this. Backstage the grim reality is far removed from the floating dreamworld shown on stage. Indeed some of the "dancer" pictures have a lot in common with his Ironers, a picture of girls working in a sweatshop.

What Degas had to say about drawing: *

"Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see".

"I am a colourist with line..... To colour is to pursue drawing into a greatetr depth."

* = " DEGAS by himself " edited by Richard Kendall, Published by Time-Warner Books

ISBN 0-316-72810-1