Window Work – May 2018

pencil, and watercolour

It's been a while, and as nothing I'm working on is going to be finished anytime before June, here's some Window Work. Some were done over the winter, but the most recent – the stripey lady with the pram - is from a couple of days ago, and what I'm noticing about the pencil sketches is that they're much looser and wispier – but still able to give a sense of weight and stance. 

A few of them depict several figures or couples. The four little sketches of the lady digging snow was done over 20 minutes or so as she cleared the pavement across the road. In the one with three figures, it looks as though the old couple are being looked at by the young woman, but actually they just happened to be the next subjects to appear in that session, so this is a false narrative. They make an interesting group on the paper though.

I find drawing couples very tricky. It's obvious why – I'm trying to draw two people in the time I normally get to draw one, so the visual memory is tested quite hard. Not so tough doing pairs of older folk, or couples approaching with a pram (which hides the legs very effectively), but they still have to make sense and link together as a unit.

I have to admit that the the monochrome watercolour wasn't done sitting at the front room window in Edinburgh, but while having coffee and apple pie with Madam at the Blue Teahouse in the Vondelpark. We popped across to Amsterdam for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and visited Van Beek's art shop just along from the Rijksmuseum. We'd bought some watercolours there - one of which was a tube of Daniel Smith 'Indigo' - and I thought I'd try that out while Madam was experimenting with the others. It's quite an interesting purply blue-black – a blend of Lamp Black and Indanthrone Blue pigments - quite unlike the greenish Winsor & Newton 'Indigo', which is a mix of Lamp Black, Quinacridone Violet, and Pthalo Blue. I don't there's any great merit in this sketch, and I really wasn't concentrating very hard, but I thought I'd include it as a bit of fun, and for the interesting colour. On the subject of interesting colour, the Vondelpark now has an established population of bright green feral parakeets. Local Amsterdammers are quite charmed by them just now, but I fear that they (the parakeets) may take over completely in the way they have in South-West London around Richmond Park. Which is not a particularly good way.

Just in passing, while we were in Holland, and it being quite possibly being the last time we were going through the EU citizens channel, we asked a few folk – at the hotel, in the local restaurant and coffee place on the corner (we really didn't stray far!) - what they thought about the United Kingdom's leaving of the European Union. It wasn't a huge presence on their radars it has to be said – one girl didn't know what Brexit was or that UK was leaving – but once coaxed a little, they opened up and pointed out to us what a profoundly stupid thing it was to choose to do. With which Madam and I both agreed. It was a nice little trip though. We didn't feel the need to 'do stuff', and spent most of the time within a few hundred yards of the hotel – which was admittedly on the edge of the park. We did visit the Rijksmuseum (twice) , but we baulked slightly at spending a whole day there, so just had a coffee and a rummage through the gift shop, and then went back for a pee after Van Beek's and a shady sit-down next to a canal. It was just that sort of a trip.

Oh, and there's a sketch of a dog. With a lead but no owner attached to it...