You might be wondering why everything is so quiet on the blog front. It’s simple really. I am currently walking the Camino di Santiago across Spain with my partner. I am posting to other social media channels and I have run out of steam for the blog. Sorry!
We are sketching as we are walking. We walk up to about lunchtime, find our accommodation and then go out sketching in the afternoon .
The church at San Juan de Ortega Looking from our hostel to the church tower in Villafranca Montes de Ocas Abandoned buildings in Redecilla del Camino.The entrance to Burgos Cathedral
We have been doing a lot of walking since the pandemic started, originally prompted by restricted exercise periods for months at a time. Now walking is a regular activity and each week we try and do a slightly longer walk. We often break this up with a coffee, in our Thermos, or at one of the pop-up coffee carts that seem to be proliferating along popular walking tracks around the city.
Covered with a nice paperbag from a local bookshop
I hate carrying too much on these walks so I now carry this home made 10×14 cm sketchbook made of paper offcuts. Here are some of my recent sketches.
The sketches are adding up!Late afternoon around Lake Tuggeranong Coffee at the pop-up coffee cart Mt Taylor. In reality the Golden Retreiver wasn’t quite that long in the body!😄A Thermos of coffee when we walked around the base of Mt TaylorPatrons at the local coffee shop, a stop on our walk around Lake Tuggeranong Bonus Black Swans with an almost fully grown cygnet.
We found ourselves in an odd situation the other day. We went to see a major travelling exhibition, Shakespeare to Winehouse, which has come to Australia from the National Portrait Gallery, London. We knew that there was no photography allowed, but I was taken aback when the security guard asked me to put my pencil away as there was no drawing allowed in the exhibition either.*
Apart from being very annoyed I was at rather a loss because sketching is my favourite way of recording exhibitions. After going through the exhibition we beat a quick retreat to the coffee shop where I furiously wrote notes on the paintings/ photographs that caught my attention. Did I mention that you couldn’t even take notes in pencil in the gallery?
However, after we got back home, it dawned on me that I could at least try and paint some of the works from memory – it’s hard to keep a determined artist down.
This is a first for me and I can’t say that I had prepared myself for the experience. Nevertheless I managed two acrylic studies, neither of which give a terribly accurate rendering of their sources, but it was fun. (And yes, I do know that I can download all the paintings online. It was just more fun doing it this way).
Drawn from memory: partially completed, Richard Avedon, 1960, photograph of WH Auden in New York (NPG P614) – acrylic paint on collaged cardboardDrawn from memory: Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1829, unfinished portrait of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (NPG 7032)
If you are interested in 15 minutes of relaxing video you can watch me paint this study by following this link.
I have confirmed with the lending institution that both photography and sketching are allowed in their gallery. It just seems that our local host organisation has gotten all draconian. I don’t know why as so far they haven’t gotten around to replying to my complaint email. I will update this if and when I hear from them.
Shortly after posting this blog I heard from the local gallery to say that the restrictions were, in part, to do with copyright issues for living artists. Also that high visitor numbers in their relatively smaller rooms made photography and sketching a problem with obstruction (my words). They are at least holding out a ray of hope for the sketchers. Apparently, they are monitoring visitor numbers to identify quieter periods when sketching might be allowed.
The full text of both replies can be found on my Instagram account @leonieandrewsart.
I was doing a long overdue clean-up on the table today and found a small group of car sketches, mainly on the back of car parking tickets and also on a paper cutlery sleeve we got at a cafe.
Here they are, all stuck into my visual diary and also some closer views. Pencil and wax crayons.
leonieandrews 