Simon's Blog

Over the past few weeks I have noticed that my drawings of people have been slipping into old habits of not being anatomically correct. In one sense this is may not be important but having seen the wonderful draughtsmanship of Jenny Saville I have taken the decision that it is important and so I am going back to the drawing board, quite literally, and practices my drawing bodies. To help me with this I am using the irreplaceable Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. I believe I have written about this before but if ever you want a technical book on drawing the body you can do a lot worse than give this book a look.

Sent from my iPad

So I have over done things. Last Saturday and Sunday I just watched the olympics far too much and by Sunday, even with Bolt running his miraculous race, I had had enough. Of course I will be watching just not to the extent I did over the weekend.

As the great Saturday seeped into Sunday and all the newspapers were full of the success I started to wonder what next. Those seasoned Olympic watchers will know that Britain doesn’t do this well – even Beijing wasn’t this good – we were a nation of one or two outstanding performances but over all good losers coming seventh or eighth, if we qualifies at all. Now we are an olympic powerhouse and we have come to expect victory and then more victory. An example of this would be the rowing on Saturday. After winning two gold medals in a row the third race only produced a silver, ONLY A SILVER! The rowers were totally distraught and kept apologising for only coming second. Is this what the olympics are going to be in future? We must win otherwise it is consider an utter failure? I hope not but I suspect it will be. You can guarantee now that there will be no cuts in funding for elite sports – if you think that Lord Coe is a formidable political operator then imagine what would happen if Jess Ennis started to protest about cuts. In fact the money will be increased. I wouldn’t be surprised if the stadium is now saved for the nation to slowly rot in east London as no football club would touch it without basically pulling it down. So whilst it has been a great time to be British it must be remembered that this comes with a great cost and one of the prices we will pay is the end of the romantic image we have of the plucky under dog winning against mighty foes. Now we are the mighty foes and we had better get used to paying the price for such victories. Of course it could all be a dream and reality will come back and bite our collective back sides. Twelve years ago Australia was under going a similar metamorphoses and now look at where they are with only 1 gold medal to show for all their much vaunted ‘sports’ culture. Sent from my iPad

The last post I bemoaned the BBC talking heads – this doesn’t include Michael Johnson – a man who takes sense whoever he opens his mouth! A world class person in every sense.

Sent from my iPad

What could be better. Athletics on Eurosports, far far better coverage than the BBC’s because they just cover the sports rather than endless talking heads when there is no British interest. At my side I have my iPad with updates from the BBC sports web site. Delux vegging I think!

Sent from my iPad

The photographs of the two paintings mark another big step forward. They were both painted during my weekly life drawing/painting class. The painting on the left was painting two weeks ago and at the time I said it was ‘crap’. It is true there are many things that need to be attended to but it was unrealistic to expect to be able to produce a final product is just one hour.

This is where the second painting comes in. Here I never expected to be to produce a ‘finished’ item, indeed I never set out to do so and instead I concentrated on producing something interesting in the time available, again just over one hour and I think I did that. The lesson of all this to have realistic expectations as to what you can achieve in the time available and you’ll be surprised what might happen.

Sent from my iPad

Over the past few days I have felt my creative juices dry up. I lost the urge to paint and even draw. In short I was in need of a break from it all. Well I have had a bit of a break and spent much of that time watching the olympics and it seems to have recharged my energies a bit. Here is the first fruit of this. The red man painted using Brushes on the iPad.

Sent from my iPad