Coloured Drawings

A few months after framing some of these coloured pencil drawings I was dismayed to find they were beginning to fade. Realising they would only have a limited life on the wall, I decided to stop doing them. You see them here however as they looked in their pristine state.

Colour was essential to the Formentera landscapes and enabled me to tap into memories of a magical place: a pink sky at dusk, a wave breaking on the shore, small boats slicing through an aquamarine sea. The figure drawings had an altogether different function. These set out to capture the moment-to-moment shapes made by bodies in movement and present them as elements in a design. Since colour was not strictly necessary for this I turned to graphite pencil for what eventually became a long series of drawings (the Tonal Nudes). Many of these went on to serve as compositional studies for paintings.

I occasionally used coloured pencils when working as an Illustrator but since the original drawings were destined for reproduction, their permanence or otherwise was never really an issue.