Dave came home from London last week with a set of unpainted Russian dolls for me so I spent some of last week, some of the weekend and most of today painting them.
They start with the outermost newborn or foetal doll and get older as they get smaller until in the centre is a skeleton.
Views in and around the site as the buildings came down. All of them acrylic paint on khadi paper, 30 cm x 30 cm.
Details from a huge, white mesh fence used to retain the steep side of an earth bank and weighted at the bottom edge with rocks from the site.
This was part of a larger painting, a still life, which I didn’t like.
I cut it into three and the first piece, which had on it a painting of a Lindt reindeer, was snapped up by a friend’s young daughter. The second piece was painted over and became a card for a friend and this is the third piece.
This morning it showed the little cup and part of the silver frame of a nicho on a green background. As I started to paint over it I saved the cup until last just in case.
My newest painting:
A Present from Swansea 20 x 17 cm
Photographs of dolls in cases. The first three are baby Jesus dolls in shops in Mexico, the last four are in a dolls shop in Amsterdam. The brown faced doll in the penultimate photo’ I regret not buying at the time.
A while ago I started to make two maquettes. At some point I showed images of them to my friend Clive who told me he liked them; he knows what he’s talking about – you can see his maquettes here . They were put away, nearly finished, until some months later when I unearthed them, reviewed them, decided I didn’t like them and threw them away. Fast forward about a year and I confess all to Clive who was angry. Then, a week later they turn up – how, I’ve now idea, since I remember the act of putting them in the bin. Anyway, here they are, probably finished and very rough, ready to send to Clive who will look after them far better than I have.
In their final making I suddenly realised just how useful and just how adaptable they could be, so these are the spring-board to a few more I have half-planned.
The baby doll maquette – the body taken from an old fashioned, new-born baby doll with a bandaged cord, the head is from a photo of the most lovely doll in a doll shop in Holland. It’s so clumsily made on thick card that it’s barely able to be articulated.
This maquette is cobbled together from all sorts of ideas; Dora the skeleton, a female, clothing from the Welsh Doll or from a fairy tale -
and confused further by her half flesh/ half bones.
On our way home from Snowdonia with friends Charlie and Rosemary Burton last Thursday we called in to see the ceramist Meri Wells. This is a photograph of her new kiln and the biscuit fired beast that was sitting outside it on a chair.
Meri’s older, log fired kiln sits nearby, still in regular use. The bricks are numbered so that they might be removed and replaced in the correct order.
Then, on Sunday, we called in to see Charlie and Rosemary. I took this photograph in Charlie’s studio – the photograph simply doesn’t do the gaze of the soldier justice. In reality he fixes you with the most broken and haunted stare.
Two artists and two studios.
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