Recent works...

Above are recent works, that I have made in my sketch book mainly using a trusty berol fine liner although there is one in pencil-this one took me ages, it's not really finished, I hope I can bring it to a point of being finished, I was sketching it in a cafe and exhausted myself with detail-you can prob tell where I started and where I finished. The top two are sketches I did whilst sitting by the Garonne after a picnic lunch in the sunshine, I sat with my ersamus friends, i like working with other people around me. The others are sketches made on my road-avenue de lavaur. I really like the palm tress which intersperse the concrete of the suburban houses. I also like the telegraph wires that criss cross the streets-I find them oddly quite beautiful-though so far haven't quite worked out how best to depict them. I hope to use these studies to make other works. Perhaps even just to do bigger ink drawings from them, as I find the ink quite effective. The piece at the bottom is a woodcut that I have started based on the drawing on the right of it. I like the palm tree, I think this will end up being quite a detailed woodcut but I am tempted to make another perhaps just very simple because I really like the looseness of the lines of the palm tree on the left which is something I didn't think about atall when I made them, infact I was thinking of working into them a lot more. Also I think the looseness of my original drawings is perhaps something I should think about a bit. I think sometimes you think you know how to do something like a woodcut but while all the cross hatching and detailing is good it isn't always necesary. Last term in my paintings I tried to work on reducing the details so that I only included what was esential and thought carefully about the amount of detail that was required for a set piece. I have always thought that prints require a lot of detail but I realised that this isn't always necessary either. So I will finish this one but I will perhaps do another of the same image where I reduce the detail and I will try to see what works best. I guess I don't want it to lose the expressiveness of the original study, although the study isn't perfect there is something pleasing about it.