Dalston Eastern Curve Garden

Sheltering from the rain under the Pavillion

We've been back home from Canada for a month now and since then I have largely taken a break from sketching.

Tuesday was my birthday in addition to it being the Battle of Britain Day. Usually I really enjoy my birthday but this year I didn't. I found the whole day to be emotional gruelling and a bit of a slog. This is because the next day, 16 September, was my mum's birthday and she died just over a year ago so I spent the day mourning her absence.

I decided not to spend the day moping around at home and went by bus to visit the Dalston Eastern Curve garden which I have visited before but not for a long time even though it was a rainy old day. This is a thriving community garden that has been formed from on the old Eastern Curve railway line and is a delightful spot to spend a few hours even when it's cold and wet.

I sheltered underneath the Pavillion which was designed and built by a French architectural collective called EXY2T in spring 2010 while I drank tea and ate cake. I took my usual collection of sketchbooks, water soluble pencils and ink pens with me and I chose to concentrate on the view above and I thought I was mostly concentrating on the foliage.

I realised while I was drawing the table that I had got the perspective wrong and this meant I couldn't include all of the table that I could actually see. What I didn't realise until I got home was that the table was dominating the entire composition. I would have preferred to have an equal balance of table and plants but I couldn't see that until I got away from the view. I feel quite critical of this sketch but am glad that I have restarted sketching and hope that my results are more successful when I visit Freightliner's farm in Islington with the Islington Art Society next week.

Postcards from Canada: 20 (the grand finale)

Today is our last full day in Canada so we chose to stay close to where we are staying on the University of British Columbia campus and walked over to the Museum of Anthropology. This is one of BC's most popular museums and houses many thousand artefacts from the First Nations and is built on ancestral land belonging to the First Nations.

The size of some of the totems that were on display were staggering and the weaving of the baskets and fabric were very intricate. In the grounds outside some examples of family houses have been built and they are also very impressive. It would have been nice to be able to go inside them but they were locked but you could get some sense of the interiors if you could find a knot in the wood and then squint through it.

We left when the museum was getting very busy and began walking back to our apartment. Then we saw a signpost to Wreck Beach and took off down the path to find it. We enjoyed a stunning walk through the forest and then came across the beach which is clothing-optional. We opted to keep our clothes on because it was quite chilly and there were very few people on the beach. If we'd visited yesterday when the temperature was a lot higher it might have been a different story.

Postcards from Canada: 15

It was cold and rainy yesterday so I made this sketch of the umbrella out on the deck from the safety of indoors.

Postcards from Canada: 9

Yesterday's sketch completed 

Postcards from Canada: 7

Southwood Green townhouses, Winnipeg Manitoba

Postcards from Canada: 1

This is a view of Couchiching Lake from the bottom of our host's garden and my watercolour version of it.

Geese in Clissold Park

This post was originally published as 'Time for a wash and brush-up' on my blog Drawing my way round London blog on 26 November 2014.

I've decided that I've been treating this blog (Drawing my way round London) much like the cupboard under the stairs and have been ignoring it for far too long. So I've also decided that I am going to post random sketches that I have been doing in London over the last few months.

Here are two geese in Clissold Park where I met a few other artists at the inaugural outing of the Art in the Park sketching group back in April this year. I'm not used to attempting to draw wild life so this was a bit of a departure for me and I like the comical result.

The Royal Academy: Australia

My friend Yvonne suggested meeting up and yesterday we caught up with each other at the Royal Academy to see the Australia exhibition which began a couple of weeks ago.

Like many thousands of other people I have family connections with Australia.  My grandmother sailed there from the UK in the early 20s to get married in Adelaide. My mother and her siblings were born and raised there until the 1930s when the family moved to the UK to escape the depression. I have cousins living in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and beyond and still I have never visited this great continent.

I've always had a curiosity about Australia and I can remember as a five-year -old believing that there were only two countries in the world and they were England, where I lived with my family, and Australia where the rest of the family lived. Fortunately my world view has expanded considerably since then but my curiosity remains much the same.

The only time I have experienced vast, open spaces was when I travelled with my husband by train across Canada. It took many hours just to get out of Ontario so I really have no conception of the size of Australia and the climate is so different from anything I have ever experienced.

I was unprepared for the impact these works of art would have on me and I found the gallery with large pieces of native, aboriginal art mesmerising. There were a couple of paintings that are on raised platforms on the floor so instead of the usual convention of viewing art vertically on walls you view these horizontally as you would a carpet. Once your eyes begin to range over the canvas and you become drawn into it you really get the feeling you are floating  above and exploring a vast, angular, mountainous landscape and although the canvas is flat the effect is three dimensional.

Quite a few of these works are collaborations between a number of artists but it is hard to spot this because the end result is a unified whole and some of the works are so large I don't know how they found the stamina to keep going.

The purpose of this exhibition is to show how Australia is deeply connected to its landscape and it spans more than 200 years of art since the early settlers arrived in the 1800s. As you walk through the galleries you are treated to a whistle-stop tour of Australia developing from small, rural outposts inhabited by pioneers to an urban, industrialised country with a huge presence on the world stage.

Some of the work from the early 20th century struck us as staged and mawkish but that must have been the fashion of the time and we could probably find similar examples in any other country during the same period. Fortunately there wasn't too much of that and then we were back to views of people on the beach, roads disappearing into the horizon, a family in a car.

There really was too much to see in one visit and we had to save several galleries for a second visit which we have time for because the exhibition continues until 8 December.

As someone who also feels an affinity with landscape I can't resist showing you this one which I painted in August in north Yorkshire.

View from Grinkle Park Hotel

Well rounded cabbages

Saturday saw us at the Tower of London and on Sunday we were swanning around Chichester in West Sussex. What a contrast that was. On Saturday evening my sister-in-law spotted a review in the paper of an exhibition of Edward Burra's paintings at Pallant House and on Sunday morning that is where we headed.

To my shame here is another artist I had never heard of but apparently Edward Burra (1905-1976) was one of the most individual and celebrated artists of the 20th century. Like Tracey Emin's work you find yourself drawn into his paintings even if you find them repellent or menacing.

A lot of his works are very large watercolours using several sheets of paper joined together. I don't think I've seen watercolour paintings this big before with such intensity and depth of colour. According to one of the printed notices on the wall his friends said he would begin painting at the bottom right hand corner and work his way up to the top left hand corner. He had such a fantastic sense of composition and storytelling that you find your eyes going round and round a painting while you explore it to the point of feeling travel sick.

Because of the size of these works I assumed he must have used large brushes. This assumption was crushed when we got a chance to look at some of his brushes and palettes on display in a cabinet. They were tiny! So that made me wonder just how long it took him to complete one piece of work and there was a lot of work on display.

In his youth he was fascinated with the dark side of humanity and it is present in very ordinary looking scenes, for example sailors buying coffee in a café. He uses perspective in an odd way which is disturbing. A lot of the work is sexually ambiguous and he was fascinated with soldiers, sailors and prostitutes and particularly their well rounded behinds. As I moved from one painting to another I got the feeling that these characters were following my every move.

In time Edward Burra turned to still lifes and landscapes. Apparently he had a photographic memory so could recall a view when he was back in his studio. I wish I could do that. One still life depicted well rounded cabbages that recalled the well rounded bottoms of soldiers climbing into a truck in an earlier gallery. He managed to instill menace into these cabbages and I felt they were following me around too! A still life of flowers in a vase appeared to have eyes that followed us around as well.

His depiction of the English landscape was not in the least sentimental and in one showed the pollution being belched out by lorries and motorcycles. Of all his work these were the works I most liked. There was one charming painting he probably made towards the end of his life. It is a collection of portraits of local characters including a self-portrait of him standing away from everyone else eating a Cornish pasty.