TIM BAKER

Following the lead of 2020’s Zebra Abstracts I did some large A1 garden abstracts last year using some (then new) FW Acrylic Inks – called the X-Series or X-Men series due to the prominent X in a circle but I don’t want to get sued by Marvel (and I really am not a fanboy of comic book movies). The intention was to ask the (again then new) student gallery in Kingston to show them but I bottled out. X’s appear a lot in my work, but here it seemed a key feature.

I do think they are some of the best abstracts I have done (abstracts are usually a winter thing, but the large ones are definitely a summer event due to lack of space). Yet posting other things too priority and never got round to it – so here I am, with some newer-yet-related coloured pencil pieces around a marine/boat theme. I thought there was another ‘marine’ abstract but I can’t find it. Sails and boats quite often pop up as forms my figurative and abstract pieces.

These pieces were created with a variety of media – intial strokes with hake brushes with Jackson’s indian ink, dripped ink the FW ink dripped and brushed with sash brushes, wash, even sticks. I think my favourite is 1 or 3, I love the loose chaos of the 3rd one, and the more direct nature of the first one. Yes even white hourglass represent! That shape goes back to 2018 with the first abstracts.

One of the problems was drying even though it was a fairly warm yet damp night. I left one of the pieces outside attached to a board to dry – not only got a slug trail (hence the same) but that piece got a bit wrecked as it welded it self to the board, so this photo is the only real full version.

And yes, another final? piece in the Zebra series, but I think this was from this same session and not 2020. Dating these is hard cos I didn’t always document them, although the photos like the board above were from 30th of May 2021, so that unusually gives a definite date of the 29th. I really need to date my work!

Related to these in my head really is the ‘Marine’ abstracts, which is less a series and just a common theme also with a prominent ‘X’ shape, and the sail/boat forms that pop up a lot although that realisation is usually after the fact, whereas ‘Boat 2’ I realised this during the sketch. They are all coloured water pencil abstracts – the first one trying out my old 80’s Caran D’ache Prismalo I and II pencils I used as a teenager.

If you’ve read my previous post, you know the verdict – too hard, and too hard to get washes from, you have to add so much water the paper starts to disintegrate! Lovely colours though, but tbh I prefer the cheap Simply Daler ones, soft and intense, even though I know the one I’d trust to be lightfast.

The others are using these Simply pencils, and the marine/boat shapes crept in and I ran with it. They were an experiment in working into wet paper and seeing if they work for this in the same session. They do! Again, more green/blue. Obsessed with that colour still, even though I love the gentle pinks and blues of the Caran D’ache, just did not love the hard work getting there, they felt hard like stone.

That said, I was amazed they had not shattered since the 80’s, given I’d left them in a box for three decades. They do survive, they are quality. I just prefer softer pencils now and not have to pretty much dip them in water to get any intense colour and scrub them across the page for centuries.

We have Inktense and Woody pencils now you know?

And finally my favourite of the X-Series, the second one (well there was a disaster in blue that we don’t mention and that’s deleted from history! First pieces can be sometimes like that). It’s really chaotic, yet the wash/lighter ink washes give it a depth. It’s hard to measure chaos vs order in pieces like this, it’s a balancing act between going really crazy and creating a mess, and bringing order to that mess so it doesn’t look like a fight in a paint factory.

The S-curve swooshes go back to the earliest ink brush abstract pieces – Laococoon is from late 2019 or early 2020 I think. I like the interlocking nature of these, like it swirls around and around, like it’s in a washing machine. Motion is a big thing in my brush work on these, bold strokes with visible lines. When the chaos gets too much and you lose those swoops, I think it loses something.