Two awkward nuns and two bouncing dogs

= two recent bits and bobs.

The nun painting, the sketchbook idea of which I posted earlier, is finished.

 

They are two of a group who all looked really seriously out of place among the desporting semi-naked bodies on the beach at the Witterings on a bank holiday a few summers ago.

The bouncing dogs emerged from something rather more problematic.

It's a fragment of a painting I sat up late into the night doing. My only excuse for this aberration is that I must have been hallucinating. The next day, thinking better of the rubbishy result I chopped it up in disgust and cut out the only bit I was even vaguely happy with. That'll teach me. Too much detail. So I've stripped what was a complicated image of the local port back to a couple of bouncing dogs on the sea wall. And will put it behind my ear for reference for a future minimalist painting.

Work in future progress

More figures are starting to quietly creep into my sketchbooks and the scruffy doodle book (which is just a cheapo spiral bound school exercise book with blank pages, remarkably hard to find in these days when children seem to need to do everything on lines or a grid) that travels around with me in the house.


It is a fairly indecipherable object and full of jotted thumbnail pictures, quick cat poses, food smudges, crossings-out, photos cut from newspapers, book titles, phone numbers and striking sentences from whatever book I'm reading.


A faithful stream-of-consciousness reflection of my bemuddled mind, in fact.

For some reason (which may or may not go back to my convent-school nun-dominated days) the figures that are pushing themselves centre stage, as it were, are all somewhat shrouded.

Or it might be the juxtaposition of the bizarre with the well-known and understood.
Like the two burkha clad women in Hyde Park which I posted earlier, and these two spotted outside a typical Victorian house in Cavendish Road in the depth of winter

Or these Mother Theresa nuns who were incongruously gathered outside a beach hut and picknicking on Wittering beach a couple of years back and who seem to be surfacing to the page at last.

Anyway, they're all very rough at the moment and I'll have to see where they go.

If anywhere.