I've always loved drawing and sketching as long as I can remember, but never did anything with it. I let myself be persuaded from taking Art as a subject at school, and in the following decades whenever I've occasionally picked up a paintbox I've never liked the results. This is probably because I was trying to use watercolours, and I'm afraid that subtlety and delicacy are not things that I do particularly well.
My middle daughter, Zara, took firstly a BTEC national in Art, and then a degree in ceramics. She graduated a couple of years ago. During the summer she was looking for an artists' group to join, and she found the Afan Nedd Artists' Group meeting in Port Talbot. On a whim I said that I'd accompany her on her first visit. I loved what I found, and although Zara never came back, I joined that same night, and I've never missed a meeting since.
I did find it a little bit intimidating at first. Not the other artists - they are all lovely, and welcoming, and encouraging. What I did find intimidating was the quality of their work. As far as I know only one of the group is a professional artist, yet it seemed to me that they were all producing wonderful work, and I was afraid that people would think mine was rubbish. So at first I stuck to what I knew with sketching.
The mental breakthrough for me came when I tried using charcoal. I took my camera out around and about Port Talbot, and used one of the photos as the basis for my first ever charcoal picture -
It's relatively simple, but it showed me that charcoal is certainly a medium that I can work with. At this time the group had hired a stall in the Aberavon Beach festival, and I was asked if I wanted to put anything on display/for sale. All I had was the picture above, but at the last minute I decided to have a go at making something a little more complicated. Going back to when I was a kid, I was always interested in steam engines, and had sketched loads in the past. So this is what I did: -
For the purist, this is a British Railways 9F steam locomotive - the last class of locomotive produced by British Railways. The great thing about this was. . . only two pictures were sold on the day, and this was one of them.
It wasn't so much that this was sold, although I won't lie to you, I didn't turn the money down. No, what was more important at this stage was that it was concrete proof that somebody, who didn't know me from Adam, actually liked what I did, and liked it enough to want to part with cash for it.
Since then I've picked up my watercolours again, with results which I still think demonstrate my weaknesses rather than my strengths, and had my first goes at acrylics. I'll go into more detail in future posts, but basically my first painting was flawed, but not quite bad enough to put me off for good. As I started to develop more confidence, I created an artist's page on Facebook - which you can find here : - https://www.facebook.com/daveclarkart
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