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Met my web designer today (get me). He made some tweaks to my site and changed the images on the front page. It's a great site and has served me well over the last few years but we both agreed that the images need to be given more room, particularly on the home page. So, time for a revamp. I shall be looking at other artists' sites to see what's out there and what would suit my work over the next few weeks. Watch this space...
Back to Eric Meadus. To accompany the exhibition at
The First Gallery, Margery and Paul Clarke, who own and run the gallery, have put together a book of Meadus’s drawings. The book, titled Southampton: A City Lost… …and Found,
contains
drawings made of various locations in
Southampton with accompanying text about Meadus and his connection to
those areas. There is also a rather good essay by local writer
Philip Hoare about how the city has changed over the years particularly following the devastation of WWII.
Meadus
experimented with different styles of drawing in the same way he did
with painting. He seems to have settled finally on a quite stylised form
of line drawing without tone
or light and dark. These work very well and there are some good
examples in the book, but those I like best are his location sketches.
As records of places he visited to take back to the studio, these are a
lot looser and freer and show just what a good artist
he was. There’s a real vitality in these; the lines are quick and full
of energy, the unfinished drawings showing all that he needed for
reference at a later date. I can just imagine him standing on a street
corner in his lunch hour, a race against time to
get down the basics before returning to work to complete the day’s
shift. These underpin all the work done later in the studio.
This
is a really good book, one which I spent hours pouring over and to
which I will come back again and again I think. Available to buy
from The First Gallery and
Southampton
City Art
Gallery. Well-worth a look.
Managed to get the first acquatint done on PB4 this week; proof below. It looks a little dark but with successive etchings and some burnishing maybe, it'll work well I think. It's a good state. It won't be printed in black... sepia probably. Well, Pharaoh anyway. Still thinking about colour for the other elements. That won't come together until much later in the process. I'm pleased with it so far though.
I've been feeling a bit demotivated with this etching the last few weeks. It's partly looking at all the Meadus paintings I think, got a hankering to paint. Silly excuse really. And I can't think of a subject to paint either - even sillier excuse.
Anyway, the first Cowprint meeting of the year is next week and I wanted to have something to show for the two months since we last met (other than the Chicken Murderer) so that spurred me on. There's nothing like a deadline to get you working, even if it's self-imposed.
