Ancient drawing materials (and not so ancient)

Sometimes something appears before you, takes half a dozen strands of unformed, chaotic speculation from different corners of your brain and presents them to you as a moment of shining, flawless clarity.

I've been preparing a post as a broader, more philosophical follow up to my Pip Seymour review and I went to his website to see if his swatches would illustrate my point and - oooh. Oooh. That didn't used to be there.

Oooh indeed. Pip has launched a new range - solid lumps of ancient (and not so ancient) pigment to let you draw like there's an ice age receding. Seems appropriate in a period of climate change!

There are clays, chalks, slates, shales and traditional earth colours along with lumps of vivid blue cobalt. To make things more fascinating their source is identified - so one can buy chalk from London and chalk from the North Downs for instance. These two sources of theoretically the same thing are 30-40 miles apart, depending on exactly where they came from, so I must admit to being curious to see the difference. It is recommended that they are applied on a smooth surface treated with a pastel primer but to that I raise an eyebrow. I can think of much more interesting surfaces.

For a while now I've had things in development which I haven't mentioned here. The next batch of nocturnes will major on finding transformations within the landscape, alluding to myth, magic and storytelling n.b. not imposing them on the painting but actually seeing them in the landscape and recording them. I'm learning to etch to take Quercus Quercus to what I always had in mind, transforming the two trees into emotion and narrative. I have a mixed media series which has been in prototype for more than a year, picking up ancient themes of shamanism and transformation - there is just one technical issue I have been unable to overcome. This side of me was always waiting to come out but huge amounts of fuel were added to the fire last year by the Ice Age Art exhibition and it was finally unlocked in the late summer when someone told me that I see the landscape in a magical way.

As if by magic, the paint-keeper appeared. (If you're not my age or UK based don't worry about that reference). I'm in London tomorrow so I'll see if Cornellisen have the range and I'll have an exotic one, to see what selection process Pip goes through. I'm in Guildford to take my paintings down on Thursday so I'll go early, climb up the downs and find myself a little chalk. When I have spare time, I'll get clay from the hillside and some river silt from the recent floods and form them into cakes like those to the right. Preparations complete, I will scavenge for surfaces - bark from fallen trees, things thrown out of cars, stuff drifting down the river. Then I will go drawing and have fun.

It's time to go caveman!