Lunch Dates

On many occasions I find my sketchbook keeps me really good company. This can be when I have cause to wait in places where everyone around me appears to be involved in some kind of communal activity. These drawings represent occasions where I have been the invisible guest at the lunch date of people I don't know . The more deeply the lunching strangers are involved in their private moment the more detail I feel able to draw into my own record of their experience. These drawings represent my shared experiences with complete strangers.

Chlorine Scented

Over a period of seven years I spent at least one hour every week at the Latchmere Leisure Centre initially ensuring that my children learned to swim and subsequently watching my son gain his distance awards. Eventually after swimming over one mile he decided that swimming was no longer fun and my pool attendance also ceased.
During the hours I waited and watched, I sat in the steamy, chlorine heavy atmosphere of Paco's cafe surrounded by yellow plastic chairs strewn around ketchup stained plastic tables populated by fractious families feasting on chicken dinosaurs. In order to mentally separate myself from this mayhem I would use any paper and materials I could find in my bag to draw, this is a particularly enthusiastic attendant who I recall made generous use of his whistle.These drawings are on the back of an old invoice for some animation work.

Lemon Scented

These drawings carry a really strong association with the the scent of lemons. Pearl was sitting under the shade of a huge lemon tree in the garden of a villa in a tiny hamlet called Horto on the Pilion peninsula of mainland Greece. The tree was our source of shade from the blistering sun and the children were happy to amuse themselves with an ancient hand operated water pump. A near perfect experience of a family holiday punctuated by minor incidents such as the small smoking piles by the adjacent river which on further investigation turned out to be the local method for eliminating snakes. We met a local olive producers son who had hopes of reviving his almost extinct (Trabant?) vehicle with some help from Andrew. This proved fruitless but he still rewarded us with supper on his beautiful terrace overlooking the sea cooked by his elderly mother, who never actually appeared in person.

Indian Slippers

I found the drawing of the shoe and I remembered I had bought the shoes in a market in India. I had seen the journal I wrote on that trip in the bottom of a drawer. When I opened the little green journal the first page was from Jaisalmer which is odd because that is where I had bought the shoe.

Drinking and drawing

At the Doodle Bar there was a really good Tuesday evening life drawing session that took place in a deeply hidden location in Battersea. The session seemed to be run by a girl called Jasmin with the advisory help of another girl called Emily. They used to serve wine from a bar, play interesting music and have excellent models. It was during these sessions I was introduced to the practice of drinking and drawing, this was quite a revelation and I remain rather surprised that I had never considered this option earlier, a good glass of wine can encourage a looser approach to the drawing and negates the artists fear of the blank canvas. On several occasions Jasmin modeled for the class and I found her to be one of the most difficult likenesses I have ever tried to capture. It became almost a mission for me to try but somehow her face was too serene, without geography. I made numerous attempts but not one was even close, then she moved to New York and the class shut.

Angela's Dogs

Today I was thinking about Angela and her lovely dogs. I spent some time in her home in France trying unsuccessfully to capture the eclectic collections of collections she has collected. The visual overload is impossible to convey through photography and drawing seems like a less rude manner to capture a visual essence of a place. This is one of her three dogs asleep on her bed. They are lurchers who in stature and physique are almost like Giacometti drawings, I tried to translate this inbuilt elegance from the dog to the page.

Children

I stared so much at my son when he was a baby, I could not believe he was really mine. I was conscious that he would change really fast over a short period of time and I wanted to recall the changes. Drawing can permit staring, it is a passport to a form of staring that would otherwise be considered rude and not tolerated. When I draw him now he is a tolerant model who can sit still without too much effort. We both learned from this process.