Shows

I had a couple more exhibition-heavy days a couple of weeks ago. Swung by the Brighton Ill. & GD London private view at Rochelle School in the East End. They made very good use of the space: it's pretty cavernous and spread over two floors, but they managed to fill the walls, which I found impressive. Good open rooms and well-lit also, especially on the bottom floor.

I also made a morning visit to New Designers in Islington, to check out my friend Chris Parsons' graduation exhibit. He's a product designer and belt-wearer and also my old running buddy. We wandered around and had a good look at the product design shows- some really good new creations, and some really weird ones too. Didn't have the time to look around much of the Illustration stuff though.

I would also recommend the the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. This wasn't my favourite year, but it's always ace. And the National Gallery's Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries exhibtition was really good too. Equipped with the accompanying leaflet and its glossary of obscure art restoration terms, it was fascinating to nose at the broad range of paintings and read their stories, trying to guess the fakes from the real deal. It made me want to be an art restorer a little bit. And the Portrait Award always makes me want to run home and paint portraits.

Pat sleeps while I watch The Fugitive.

Jack Bauer

Train

Old

My class' graduation website from last year has long since gone deadlink, but a found a cached version and screenshotted and reassembled my page, so I've at least got a record of it to keep. I was really pleased with how my paintings looked on there- really big and lush. The gdi09 identity was designed by Connie Dickson, Aneel Kalsi and Joe Porter, but until someone reminds me I can't remember who built the website.

I honestly can't get my head around how rapidly this past year has shot by!

Extracurricular

I've been spending too much time doing necessary stuff on the computer lately, getting a bit annoyed at not spending enough time drawing and painting.

I have been pretty active in terms of getting out and doing things though. I caught the now-finished Christen Kobke: Danish Master of Light exhibition at the National Gallery. He's a 19th century painter virtually unknown outside Denmark, but the man was incredible. Incisive documentation of everyday street scenes, use of landscape compositions that seem daring even today, and the aforemetioned mastery of light blew me away. Best exhibition I've seen in a long time.

I'm utterly gutted to realise I've just missed the Ronald Searle exhibition at the Cartoon Museum. I even set off there twice, both occasions being on mondays when the museum's closed... Damn.

I will though be swinging by the PV of the Brighton Uni Illustration & Graphic Design exhibition in London on thursday. I caught their Brighton show last month, so I'm keen to see what they'll do for this one.

Also went with my girlfriend to the WWT London Wetlands Centre in Barnes a couple of weeks back. The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust sites are some of my favourite places in the world, and it's an organisation I'm very passionate about. The London Centre is brilliant; less developed than Slimbridge, but moreso than Arundel. The landscaping particularly is awesome. It's almost in the centre of London, but apart from the planes flying overhead you'd never know. A full-on oasis in the city.

Bones

I decided a few months ago that I really needed to properly re-learn my human anatomy, from the bones up. I haven't gotten as far with it as I should have really, but here are a few of my sketchbook pages. Effectively all of the images are copied from Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist and Sir Alfred Fripp and Ralph Thompson's Human Anatomy for Art Students, which are both very good books. The Peck particularly has got to be one of those essential books for anatomy learnin'. The latter, being an unabridged reproduction of a 1911 edition, has some fantastically entertaining snippets of text too:

'Sometimes the nostrils are much narrower than is usual or natural; in such cases the subject will be found to breathe almost entirely through his mouth, which he keeps constantly open.'

And:

'It may interest the student to consider the association of a small chin and weak character. If he will take the trouble to notice a man who has recently passed through a great physical struggle, he will find that the jaw is dropped...He is not in a position now to force home arguments, even to a child.'

Worth buying just for those, methinks.

Something

I've been very slack with the posting this past few weeks, so apologies for that. This is partly due to me wanting to keep some new work in reserve for when I launch my new website, and partly due to me being busy making that site and working on a few promotional bits. The site's almost finished though and will be live quite soon. In the meantime, a few sketchbook sketches.