www.ruthrosengarten.com




Drawing and photography are central to my practice. Both make pressing - if sometimes fictitious - claims to the capture of lost moments.




24/04/2010

Some thoughts on drawing and on keeping a sketchbook

It's not surprising that so much has been written and said - and drawn - about drawing. In part, that's because drawing is a form of thinking with the hand, or seeing with the hand. In that sense, our drawings styles seem to us like our handwriting: inevitable. Whether practiced or rusty, we experience our way of making drawn marks as automatic, stemming from some uncontrolled instinctual resource. Yet our drawings change all the time, and we often sustain several drawing styles simultaneously. Even with observational drawing, the materials we have to hand, the ambient light, whether the object of our gaze is stationery or in motion, even the temperature and our mood can affect the way we make drawn marks...  to continue, follow the link:
Some thoughts on drawing and keeping a sketchbook

More shoes around the house

Ink pen and watercolours in Windsor and Newton sketchbook.
I meant to jot down sketches during the pre-election debate two nights ago, meant to draw this or that, but I get fixated on the trivial stuff of the everyday. 

23/04/2010

Still spring


Pencil, graphite pencil and pencil crayon in big sketchbook.
It's Shakespeare's birthday and Turner's birthday today and St George's day and I wanted to make a theme drawing, perhaps remembering Jez Butterworth's play about England, "Jerusalem." But the gentle outdoors beckoned this morning. Any day now, I'm going to start complaining about the warm weather, but for the moment, there's a crispness in the air and a fine breeze and it's breathtakingly exquisite, and everything - everything - out there is in bloom, and Possum is adoring our walks. 

21/04/2010

Happy birthday mama!

Pencil and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook.

London yesterday






Brush markers and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook.

All of these are drawings on the hoof, quick sketches made bu the country bumkin in the big city. I spent one and a half sweaty hours on the dentist's chair too - no record of that! I bought some lovely soft-leaded pencil crayons (I love them secondary or tertiary, what one might call mixed colours - an olivey brown, a fleshy pink, a pumpkinny yellow, yet another grey - yum).





20/04/2010

More shoes around the house



Ink pen and watercolour in Windsor and Newton sketchbook.


Men's shoes tend to be very brown!

18/04/2010

Feline for a change

Pencil and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook.
The cat on the right side page was drawn separately from the one on the left page, that's about to nestle in the cushions. That's why the cushion looks wrong in relation to the cat on the right, ie it's a separate drawing. But I like straddling the ditch of the open sketcbook, so I let the cushion overlap anyhow, whereas in the next drawing I've kept the two drawings separate.

Pencil and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook
I don't often draw cats as I don't have many models to hand, as opposed to dogs that have always been in my world. 
One of the problems with posting drawings from a rather quiet life in the countryside - especially at this time of year when everything is burgeoning and beautiful - is that it makes one's life look a bit twee, very cosy and content, perhaps a bit smug. So in case anyone is imagining me in Laura Ashley prints eating muesli... ha! perish the thought. My uniform is all black, and I'm as ill-humoured and irate as the next person (actually, probably more so! :)