paintings prints and stuff

A quick sketch of the crowd at the Renoir exhibition - done at the time in biro and coloured later with those Lyra 'skin tones' set of coloured pencils - I really like them :>) - these are on loan from the college I work at but I must buy a set. They have a lovely range of colours from honey, through siennas, cool browns, dark browns, honey and an almost caput mortem - that dead purple (literally dead head in Latin from the colour of corpses!) that's ideal for some shadows. The tiny lady with the bun at the front I just had to draw! She had so much character, She had a hunched back and this suit with incredibly wide shoulders and that lovely cottage loaf bun hairstyle. I was exhausted by then, sitting listening to the headphones on the benches and trying work up the energy to move on :>) Incidentally, this is my first sketch in a moleskine sketchbook - as people kept raving about them I thought I'd try one. On the first page I simply tried out scribbles of the ...

Finally I manage to write a bit about this exhibition. Renoir is not a favourite artist of mine, though I appreciate his work his good - his women are very simpering, shallow and sugary and having done some research for an art history assignment at uni, I found he had a very unpleasant attitude towards women, thinking women artists were an abomination and women should be in the kitchen or bedroom! He 'painted with his *****', he said. Some of his works, like the Bar at the Folies Bergere I do like, very much. Anway, to the landscapes. I really hadn't seen many of his landscapes before so was interested to see them. It was noticeable straight away that, unlike Monet, he didn't look hard at the greens that were there , but used bluey-greens and generalised, choosing his own colour scheme, though in the example shown here the greens aren't so blue - probably because the water is very blue and it simply wouldn't have worked in this case. The early landscapes were ...