Digital art work with a poem ( This Landscape Before Me By Sarah Holland-Batt)
The Landscape before me
A digital drawing
Using Krita and a Wacom Tablet
Nigel Borrington 2020
This Landscape Before Me
By : Sarah Holland-Batt
First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum.
Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms
and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain.
I have no proof, but I tell you
there were leadlight windows here once, barred.
They cast a little striped light on the women.
Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history
braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists.
The rope and span and carded wool are unpicked
as are their faces and names.
Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare—
as I say the words they are sucked away
to a hemisphere in darkness.
I will not presume to say
what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place.
At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell.
But this morning I saw a young rabbit
hunched in brush and shadow.
I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble,
the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye.
It had caught the disease
we brought here for it
and wanted a quiet place to die.
And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get—
there was time and light, the hawks and dogs
had not been written yet, and were still out of sigh
Isolation in landscape a Charcoal drawing …..
isolation in landscape
Charcoal on paper
Nigel Borrington
March 2020
Fresh from my drawing board 🙂
To be honest it taken me a few days, just like us all! to come to terms with world wide events!
I hope everyone in the wordpress community is well and keeping safe and health !
This afternoon I setup by drawing board i did my first charcoal drawing for a week “isolation in landscape” is what I am going to call it 🙂
Can I pass on some wishes for you all!
Eat well !
Sleep lots – go to bed way to early and listen to Music not the news !!
Take Vitamin D – it helps you fight off infections !!!
Do not stress – its the Number one biggest enemy of the Immune system !!!!
I am going to add don’t drink alcohol of any kind its also a killer of the Immune system !!!
Read lots of positive things, watch Positive TV !! Talk , have family fun or fun with your friends, get outside 🙂 🙂
Please look after yourselves the world needs you as Do I xxx
New Art work 2020, A still life drawing of two Pears using ICON – Chalk Pastels
Still life study ,
Two pears,
Icon Chalk Pastels on Paper
Nigel Borrington 2020
Created as one of my first still life studies while attending an evening class at our local art school KCAT, located here in Callan, County Kilkenny this drawing is made using Chalk Pastels on cartridge paper. I love this type of still life study very much , it gave me a great chance to use ICON Chalk pastels for the first time and I loved the experience of using them and the results they created. The strong marks used to build up shades and form I truly feel creates a very strong result. 🙂
A weekends Drawing – Manchester’s Industrial Landscape ( Charcoal on Paper )
Manchester’s Industrial Landscape
In the style of Trevor Grimshaw
Nigel Borrington
March 2020
This weekend I gave myself sometime to add a physical Charcoal on cartridge paper drawing to last weeks Digital version in my last post. I wanted to do some work in the style of Trevor Grimshaw as I like his drawings very much and felt there was a lot of value in attempting to produce my own versions, I feel that his use of monochrome with its many varying tones, so carefully worked is wonderful…
So here is my first attempt to produce an A3 size drawing 🙂 I am happy with the results but will keep working hard in order to refine this style of working with Charcoal as a medium ……
I also want to add some Acrylic painting works to the project but for now I am loving using Charcoal 🙂
Charcoal drawing – A tribute to the work of Trevor Grimshaw …….
Digital Charcoal drawing
In the style of Trevor Grimshaw
Following my post yesterday, I have started working with my PC based art application ( Krita ) in order to use its charcoal drawings tools to recreate as best as I can the landscapes style of Trevor Grimshaw.
Tomorrow I will give myself time to work at my desk with actual physical charcoal and chalk, I do feel very much however that a digital method of producing a work of art is just as valid in 2020, as working with physical materials, every mark made on my drawing above is made manually using a Wacom art tablet with an art pen. I often use this method of working to work out just how best to construct drawings and painting, when later it comes to sitting down with a sheet of physical paper or canvas.
February evening at Beach : Duncannon Beach, Co.Wexford, Ireland
Duncannon Beach, County Wexord, Digital painting,
Nigel Borrington 2020
February evening at Duncannon Beach
The light by the last wave lingers on fronds
of seaweed fingering wave-wet rocks where
brim-filled pools overflow before they
empty when the water surges then sucks,
surges, then sucks.
glistening, sun warmed, lit by the last
light of day while slow footsteps meander
with the gentle waves rhythms, rising, falling,
so calming in my ears, that crest falling
with an almost silent swish, hearbeat’s grace.
All troubles tumbled away calmed first,
washed by light where the last wave lingers.
Images of Winter – In the storm
Digital Drawing
winter hedgerow
Nigel Borrington December 2018
Digital Drawing
Tone Brushes, MyPaint with Wacom Pro M Tablet
Winter Hedgerow
Nigel Borrington December 2018
With Storm Dennis on its way to Ireland this weekend, Winter is still very much here, oh well time for me to stay inside and draw 🙂 🙂 or paint.
I am working on some still life work, a drawing of a sheep’s skull ……
High on a hill an Acrylic, February 2020 – Poem : In hallowed hills by : CA Guilfoyle Jun 2015
High on the hill
Acrylic on canvas
Feb:2020
Nigel Borrington
In hallowed hills
CA Guilfoyle, Jun 2015
When we were far
and very young, in a place with no roads to follow
only a winding path, a branch to grasp
a place to fill the hollow
Blue the summer, with drowsy daisies came
petals, petals, we drew circles round the sun
gold spun, our halo heads of pollen
gold the bees of sleepy flowers
amid clover grass heaven
Days we lived deep in hills
we were endless green, in unmapped countries
stretching past the farms afield, in other worlds
too far to see, we lived beyond the gray of days
and we were free, in the shining silver
of our hallowed hills of ever.
New art work 2020 – February light on Tipperary Fields
Acrylic on Canvas board
Nigel Borrington
Feb : 2020
Over the last few months and for the first time in a good few years, I have been attending some art Classes at our local art school KCAT, so I wanted to share some of the work they have helped me start to produce again, here on my blog!
The course has covered the subjects of drawing and of painting, I need to get my drawings and paintings so far captured so I can post them here, something I will do this week but for now here is an acrylic landscape painting, a view of a late February afternoon about 10 miles from home. I love these late winter days when its sunny, the Sun light on our green Irish landscapes is just amazing 🙂
Hans Op de Beeck – Staging Silence
I feel in the need for some inspiration having taken a break from blogging over the last month or two in order to help with some big projects, Now I find myself a little removed from any creative ideas…
So over the next couple of weeks I am going to take a closer look at the work of some of my most loved artists.
Hans Op de Beeck (1969, Turnhout) is a Belgian visual artist who lives and works in Brussels. For over twenty years he has exhibiting internationally.
I first viewed his work at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny back in 2014 and was instantly taken by his film making, I love his view of the world and the way he reflects on the passage of time in his videos.
Here is just one such a film : Staging Silence
‘Staging Silence’ is based around abstract, archetypal settings that lingered in the memory of the artist as the common denominator of the many similar public places he has experienced. The video images themselves are both ridiculous and serious, just like the eclectic mix of pictures in our minds. The decision to film in black and white heightens this ambiguity: the amateurish quality of the video invokes the legacy of slapstick, as well as the insidious suspense and latent derailmentof film noir. The title refers to the staging of such dormant decors where, in the absence of people, the spectator can project himself as the lone protagonist.
Memory images are disproportionate mixtures of concrete information and fantasies, and in this film they materialise before the spectator’s eyes through anonymous tinkering and improvising hands. Arms appear and disappear at random, manipulating banal objects, scale representations and artificial lighting into alienating yet recognizable locations. These places are no more or less than animated decors for possible stories, evocative visual propositions to the spectator. The film is accompanied by a score which, inspired by the images themselves, has been composed and performed by composer-musician Serge Lacroix.
