It feels amazing to be blogging again. But I don't know where other bloggers who might connect to my blog might be. The crowd in the old days are gone, or the connections have withered.
If you read this, and have a blog, leave a comment and I'll follow you back.
Beyond tired of Facebook, Instagram, X and even Bluesky has become a re-posting site.
Fairly happy with this drawing, except I didn't have long enough to put the right dashes and dots to get a semblance of her toes! It was a choice - after drawing her body on the page, use the remaining few minutes on her feet or her face? I quickly sketched in her features. A 15 min pose. And absolutely no time for the cushions she sat against!
I would turn this one into a painting if they had allowed photographs of the poses. Eight minutes per pose just wasn't long enough. The poses were complex - that foreshortening! (You say I should try to paint this anyway? I dunno. I suppose half-abstract is ok. Maybe is all I'll say.)
I am much happier with this, my 2nd life-drawing session in how many years?
As is normal in a life-drawing session, there are many 'warm up' poses of 1, 3, 5 min, which isn't long enough for me to do much more than scribble.
I need at least an hour on one pose to do a drawing that I feel is getting there.
Christian, the gallery owner, an artist himself, is going to run these sessions twice a month. If we draw more frequently, we'll get faster and better he says. I'm sure he's right.
It is nerve-wracking, drawing to timers, mapping the model sitting or standing in three real dimensions onto your little paper. For the first time, I worked with the shadows. It's always nice to see new things emerging in your style. The same old, same old gets so tedious.
Because I never know what is going to work with that evening's quirks, I have to take a range of supplies, Art Graf, in case I want to use a brush, coloured pencils, pastels, charcoal, conte and my favourite, plain graphite.
This was a 2B woodless graphite pencil. I didn't have a sharpener, darn. They are on Moleskine sketchbook paper, A3 (11.75" x 16.5"). It looks like Moleskine no longer sells the soft cover version, but I found I liked it a lot, even if I had to throw out some sheets of the too-too-short sketches.
The Super Naughty Show - 2025 is this weekend! February 14th & 15th! An erotic art show atSuper Wonder Gallery, a Valentine’s celebration! I have two paintings in the show, both Tantric paintings - The Buddha and Her Consort, 18”x24”, oil on canvas, and Neon Nights, 12”x18”, acrylic on canvas. Neon Nights is a transforming painting in blacklight!
There are over 60+ artists and some VERY wildly erotic art that makes my work look tame.
If you’re free either night, I will be in the gallery from about 8:30pm-midnight-ish. You can purchasea ticket online here, or pay at the door. There is a bar. Hope to see lots of friends there!
Shall I wear a red leather dress that I’ve never worn before… what is age anyhow?
A scan
The Buddha and Her Consort, 18" x 24", Brenda Clews, oil on canvas
A photo to show the gleam of the gold paint
Neon Nights, 12" x 18", Brenda Clews, acrylic on canvas
Painting Neon Nights was quite the journey. The reference photo came from a book on Tantric Sex but I wanted them red and glowing - an animality, that we are animals and angels, hungering, lustful and sublime, corporeal and incorporeal. But always a loving act, nothing else would do for me.
The first version was painted in fluorescent colours, but, as I discovered to my dismay, day-glo acrylics do not blend. So I gessoed out the canvas and began again.
This time I painted the figures using regular acrylic paints. It was still a challenge to paint their skin tones as orange-reds with yellow highlights with the right shade of deep-blue-indigo in the shadows.
But, after the show at Foy House last summer with my Near Death Experience painting and its use of some fluorescent paint and how visionary it became under some of their black lights, I wanted to further explore how one could deliberately create a transforming painting.
After finishing the base layer in regular Golden and Liquitex acrylics, I began glazes of the fluorescent colours. There is a very limited palette of these night glowing paints. They don't work smoothly and you need larger soft brushes if you hope to avoid streaks. I had to make the patchy quality of applying thin layers of these glow-in-the-dark shades work. There are no dark colours for shadows in the day-glo range so that was the biggest challenge, really. Getting those shadows in and getting them to glow in a shadow way under a black light was hard.
I purchased a black light flashlight from Amazon to use as I painted and to keep checking that the 'normal' version wasn't getting wrecked and that the 'black light' version was shining. That is what I used to show the day-glo colours for the short video clip above.
Am I please with the result? H*ll yeah.
Also, since the sexual is the spiritual, has been for me all my life, I needed a sense of intimacy, of enjoyment, of something of the loss of the ego self in the act of making love.
A friend on Facebook, Bogos (he changed his name on Facebook and I can't remember his real surname), a terrific artist, really amazing, where these paintings were posted for a very short time, wrote, and I appreciate him for this support:
There is a beautiful soft erotic sensuality to them that I love. Kudos to you, Brenda!!!
