Was back in Rome in early December, with students for two days and on my own for another three days, drawing. Filled a couple of sketchbooks (one, long and thin, and the other, big and square) as well as a folded-sheet, which turned out quite well. Happy to say, one of the better ones; the way the drawings relate and interconnect across the page. Partly, because I was using different materials to picture the scenes, the rhythm of textures and spaces (between the drawings) happen to weave an interrupted optical pattern over the surface, which together with the changing near-and-far viewpoints, all chance to strike the intriguing visual balance we like the folded sheets to have.

The patch which got my interest this time, which I returned to every evening once the crowds had thinned, was the Capitoline and Michaelangelo’s start on redesigning Rome, the Campidoglio. Always extrordinary, the place took on extra poignancy as Stephanie called with tragic news as I was about to cut across the piazza around midnight. Unable to take another step, crying for sadness, taking in the fact of a teenager dying, the scene I’d drawn many times before began to materialise after the blur of tears absorbing the shock started to clear. Deserted in the lamplight with a biting winter wind gusting across between the ordered stone of wall and pavement, my blind gaze started to see it all in another light, as from staring unseeing it took my melancholy eye into, around and upwards in a manifest display of architectual genius; geometry, seemingly of  benign magnificence. From deep shadowed archways to the subtle-domed oval rising and framing the equestrian statue with its rider pointing. All held in the wide windowed & balconied well of three palaces’ walls open to the night and the starry sky; Micaelangelo’s Campidoglio.

So it was why, I popped back at the end of every day to draw until m’fingers froze.

My friend, George Noskov, had five of his short plays performed at Teatro Technis in Camden Town, London. I got a call from the director, George Eugeniou, when the plays were already in rehersal, asking if I would be able to put some drawings up as a little exhibition in the theatre foyer. Possibly some portraits of the poet? Invited over to talk about it; I turned up while the actors were in full swing, and being signalled to go over to sit next to the director on the couch in the middle of the room, I watched a run-through of two of the plays. Then, calling a break the director introduced me to the company as an artist…, who’s kindly going to hang some pictures etc etc .., and a very good friend of Noskov who will now tell you all about him.     Eh!? That woke me.

Caught on the hop; put on the spot; and definately not rehersed, I buried my instinct to protest ‘n’ refuse and held forth, horrified at having to do a simultaneous translation from the affectionate familiar to the spiteful unknown. I started to tell about my friend, not to friends who know George, I realised, but as a construct for public consumption. To promote the guy for goodness sake, I was saying to myself as I was talking, wanting to turn my friend into someone important for these actors to believe in. Searching, while speaking, for what it is about George which makes him special to me and, at the same time, looking for the detail which will make my Russian poet friend come alive to these people who will play  the parts he has written for them.

If I had been able to do it I’d tell you. It wasn’t that I was stuck for words, it was the direction they were taking…. Never mind, I made myself more work – volunteering drawings for the performance itself – for the prologue and the epilogue. A picture book of sketches of the poet and a flick-book style type-animation, which, with help, might get loaded up onto here. We’ll see when.

Stepped off the country bus between Reading and High Wycombe deep in rural England.  I’d been looking vainly out the window of both the train, between London and Reading, and the bus, as it bounced along the narrow lanes, for herds of cows in the fields. Where do you find one when you want one? They appeared to be as rare as hen’s teeth – but, as the bus drew away, there in front of me, across the road in a farmyard, was a herd of “entires” – young fellers with their tackle intact.

I came to be in that spot because I’d mentioned to Stephanie I was looking for a big, ol’ bull to draw and she had done some detective work. Remembering she had read in a newspaper article a reference to a herd of pedigree cattle. She busied herself, pinpointed its location, found out how to get there and packed me off the first fine day that came along. We had to wait weeks and weeks, the weather’s been so bad recently.

The place where the herd had been reported, was a mile and half walk from the bus stop, and when, a couple of hours after I’d arrived, she called to see how I was getting on and had I located the beasts? I had to say I was out in the hot sun, in exactly the same place as the bus had dropped me. And, although it may’ve sounded like a lot of bull, it was for very good reasons I hadn’t moved – there was plenty of action delaying my plan to walk up the valley – with men falling out of the sky and red hot metal on hooves – a horse being shod next to me from a forge in the back of a van.A white transit van had pulled into yard, behind where I was drawing the young bulls. The farmer walked a beautiful grey around the corner by a rope halter and stopped next to where it was parked. I glanced over my shoulder to look and seeing a blacksmith about to shoe the horse there and then in the yard, the focus of my drawing did shift from cow to horse double-quick.Half-way through the shoeing the blacksmith asked the farmer, “Have they done the jump yet?”

“They’re due to do it about now.” The farmer replied, looking at his watch.

“D’you mind if we go and take a look?”

“No, not all, you can cut across the field round the back of the stable to get there.”

There’d been a clattering of helicopter blades while I’d been drawing the young bulls but hadn’t paid it much mind, their bovine curiosity as to what I was up to more ‘an enough fulfilled that impulse in me. And anyway, the scene in the farmyard, with the farmer gently, tenderly, examining the grey in the bright sunlight framed by a geometry of strong shadow, was more to my liking.

As is the way, I didn’t scan the one drawing with the two bird-men winging their way to earth – -  two little diagonal dashes in  the sky above the stables. I stepped back to look across the fields to see the first one slice into a three-storey high stack of cardboard boxes and the second one open his red ‘n’ white striped parachute wing to come fluttering down. Gary Connery, the first man in Britain to step away, land uninjured, after jumping from half a mile up in the air without opening his parachute. Looking at the Hummers and trucks drawn up alongside I did think, free-fall = very expensive kit.

 The blacksmith from Twyford and his two apprentices returned, and, no longer in a hurry, took extra care and attention with the grey’s softer than usual hooves.

How did I come to be searching for cows to draw? (…and getting distracted.) Ah well, that’s another story.

I had forgotten how closely my street drawings follow his tradition of topographic art, and also, how innocent his nonsense is …,The Bug with a Fiddle

When asked if I’d contribute to the show by my friend, Andrew Baker, who organised the exhibition with his wife, Linda, I began to sketch ideas, until I’d fished out a book of his, with what I quickly and shame-facedly realised was a false memory of his work.Elvislookalikia Contesta

Lear suffered from terrible depressions and, perhaps because of that, there is no hint of darkness in his nonsense. Stephanie bought an Edwardian edition of his Book of Botanical Nonsense to give me for my birthday and I took it with me to Cologne to work from.DJ Sparrow

Cow knitting jumpers with a penguin

Tortoise Traffic Cop and Halting Hare 1

Tortoise Traffic Cop Halting Hare 2

Is almost ready for screening.

In seven parts, like seven sides of the same coin, or seven facets of a polished gem, this film follows an artist (myself) and film crew (Gilles, Julien and Deniz) for a few days while I wander around Istanbul drawing.  Parallel narratives weave a scenario with no plot in the best tradition of the French flaneur, except my observations take on a form. Two, actually; the drawing done at the time and later studio work. In the studio, I take a still from the film and, using stop-motion photography, morph the video image into a painting. When edited these

In Berlin over the weekend to see my friends Mary and Markus Gertkin, Markus was wondering where he could find my motion-painting film of Istanbul – at the site above.

Made a portrait book while I was there (book number 54 in the Portrait Pages series) and some other watercolours and drawings while wandering around in a separate sketch-book.

The person portrayed wants to look good, to project some image they wish to have of themselves – there is the famous contact-sheet of 35mm photos of Marilyn Munroe where she has violently crossed-out the ones she disliked. Come to that, who of us doesn’t have the same urge with the photographs we get for our ID? Is anybody happy with their passport photograph? Nonetheless, photography is the medium of choice for portraiture, whoever it is for and whatever purpose the portrait is supposed to serve.

Still, the tradition survives, the hand-made, non-mechanical portrait continues to be commisioned, whether from Lucien Freud by billionaires or from an anonymous artist by tourists in Leicester Square, or Montmartre…, people will sit for as long as it takes to have their portraits “done”.  Aside from the integrity of the artist, what the depth and extent of their motive and belief  in portaiture is for the likes of Lord Mayors and University Chancellors and whoever else continues to think of their appearance as important enough to make a claim on the artist’s time, i cannot say.  As Fred Licht says, “The portrait in modern times has shrunk to the closest circle of the artist’s friends and family. The same model painted again and again exposed to the artist’s way of working, revealed by their way of seeing.”

My first thoughts on being asked to take part in the exhibition, were of some recently completed, larger than life-size, portrait drawings. Attention grabbing, with an imposing presence, I considered putting them into the exhibition only to decide to do something quite the opposite. Before I say what, perhaps I can describe them and say why. Striking, only partly due to their scale, their authority (any they may possess) is commandeered from earlier portraits. Arising from a chance remark by the artist, Freddie Morris, I decided to imagine the person I was drawing to be a character derived from historical antecedents. For example, Alan, a mild mannered, gentle giant I pictured in my mind, while I rendered his features, as a proud and ruthless Flemish warrior baron, reversing and undermining the cherished notion of the artist “looking into the soul” to reveal the sitter’s true character. Perhaps, because of the “Flemish” connection (the exhibition was to be in Belgium, in Flanders – where the renaissance portrait began) was also why the big, “acting” portraits were the first to spring to mind.

However, what I decided to do, as my contribution to the exhibition, was to go to Ostend and fill a sketch book with drawings of people I’d see there, and instead of one, or two, over-life-size, metre high portraits on the wall there would be a little book with dozens.

Going to to buy a sketchbook, I came across two music manuscript notebooks on the shelf, the like of which I’d never seen before. It wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind when I went into the store but it was just right for what I wanted. I only needed one, but bought both. I’d never confined myself to a single subject in a sketchbook before. The change intrigued me. I did the same in the second book and half-way through found myself saying, “Let’s see what it would be like to do one of these a week…, for how long? A year!”

That was in September 2010, and so far we’re still going (the books & m’self).

They’re laid out, with their pages open, over on the other channel (www.portraitpages.com). And what started as something to do on the side while I was busy with teaching and working on a film about drawing – stuff that would keep me busy and away from my painting for six months – has turned into the activity everything else revolves around – to get the book completed – to draw at least a hundred different people’s portraits. To try and “get” them, each one as quickly as I can, as I come across them. Each, a random individual who happens to be in the same place I am, keeping in more or less the same position, for long enough to draw.

Sometimes it’s a push to fill the book by the end of the week, sometimes it seems to just happen, all done, before time’s up, other times it spills over.
I carry two books for drawing in, one, the little music manuscript notebook exclusively for portraits, and the other for anything else I want to draw. The drawings above come from the second sketchbook, they are extra to the portrait pages because I’ve got a rule that says, a maximum of one double page spread for one person…, I’m not allowing myself to turn the page and try again if the drawing isn’t right, doesn’t go well, or the person assumes a more striking pose; but I can turn to the other drawing book, where no such strictures apply, and go through as many pages of studies as I want. These are portraits of people I came across in Cologne, who I met while I was there for the opening of the annual Kunstgruppe exhibition which happens at the time of Art Cologne.

Another point about the portraitpages is that there’s no narrative, no sense of it being like a diary – you get a sense of people in different social situations, but that’s all. The people are largely anonymous but since these portraits were drawn in another sketchbook those strictures no longer apply and so I can tell you who they are. I can also say it was my birthday and by chance, although I kept it a secret on the day, and in between drawing who I could, there happened to be dancing and revelry, between Monday and the Saturday, when I found myself in Ostend in Belgium, which I might report on later…

One hundred portraits every week for one year. Why?

I’m still trying to work out the answer to that question.

Nothing gets settled immediately, there is a time of flux before concepts become fixed (if they ever are) and, if ever this happens to count for anything, then it would be interesting to learn what its significance is.