Sunday, January 15, 2017

A Hot Day with Tea


 
Yesterday at 44C in Richmond was a bit on the hot side! Alan had suggested that I drop round to Price House as Sonny, a Chinese friend  who had sat for us at one of our 'painting practices'  was coming over, and with some photographers as well...  we weren't sure what for!

Sonny is from China, and she imports some special teas from a certain region of China, where tea cultivation, preparation and drinking is an artform with similarities to our western love and appreciation of wines! It turns out that her husband (who is from England) had recently participated in a tea making competition in China... against some highly prepared commercial contestants, and against all odds had won!

So there was a small photographic crew from a Chinese TV network following Him around doing a documentary of him and his teamaking in Australia. He prepared a special tea for the four of us, with tea I think from some of the ancient  (1800 year old) tea plants, which had been stored in a dried mandarin, which we drank from some of Alan's antique cups and the whole event/ceremony and chat was recorded by the film crew.

The film team was sweltering in the heat (it is winter over there) but fortunately the Historic old house feels like it has air conditioning... even though it doesn't.

I don't know if any photos will turn up from this unexpected event, but I do have a photo from the charcoal drawing I did of Sonny when she was sitting for us
 
 

Monday, January 09, 2017

A Time for recycling

I have been life drawing for over 15 years now, and apart from the instant rejects after a session, I throw a lot out every now and then when I look through them.
Even so I have huge piles of drawings... which is one of the reasons I mainly keep to about an A3 size for most of my regular life drawing sessions. This last week I decided on a more ruthless cull and was going to gesso over most of my A2 works and lots of the A3's but discovered that many of the sketches took on a new lease of life if I just trimmed them to an A3 size... they seemed to have a new impact!
Anyway after a lot of cropping I saved about 120+ drawings still have a huge pile to recycle for the coming year!

Pile of A2 and A3 drawings to recycle and some of the trimmings from the cropping

 a pile of A2 drawings to be recycled
and some of the salvaged drawings