Offerings

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This is between A2 and A3 size, painted in oils on board primed with gesso and later a ground of oil paint leftovers.

Edgar Calel‘s Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge) consists of a collection of objects and a ritual. The ritual, performed live by the artist or a member of his Mayan Kaqchikel community in Chi Xot/San Juan Comalapa in the Guatemalan Highlands, is a blessing for the Ancestors. It expresses gratitude to them and to the land for their wisdom, experience and guidance. The artwork is a conduit for Indigenous knowledge, under the custodianship of the Tate Modern gallery for 13 years (gallery notes). It is displayed overlooking the Thames across to St Paul’s Cathedral.

When sketching this, I reimagined these left and placed objects, these offerings, on huge rocks extending into the river, essentially removing the window and extending the satiny exhibition floor out to merge into the Thames.

Left behind?

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I have been thinking for a while how to show the St George cross and Union Jack flags that were put up across the borough during one hot weekend last summer, coinciding with far right violence. Though these may be flags of our nation, their hanging a third the way up lampposts everywhere was clearly intended to exclude anyone not conforming to a narrow clique. In other words, these are intended to convey the hideous message of White Supremacy, a gateway to fascism Not removing them was sensible, avoiding firing up people further in a tit for tat battle, and maybe they have become perceived as a general kind of shame. Still, I find them nauseating wherever I go. I’m not sure I have been able to show my emotional response clearly enough in this image.

Preliminary sketch on cartridge paper in pencil.

This quick painting was done with mixed paint left over from a previous exercise, applied roughly with a knife. I was aiming for muted colours using the mixes, and allowed a degree of undirectedness in building the hues in the composition.

Self portrait study

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This self portrait took its shape from the textured ground. I like it a lot. Interestingly, my son interpreted the distortions as relating to my treatment for lymphoma last year. But this is how I feel, and it’s not a bad thing.

This was oil paper, primed with gesso and painted some time ago with palette dregs diluted I think with solvent free medium and applied with a plastic card to give a textures surface. Oil paint was then applied neat. I’m not sure how well it will adhere once dry. The palette was limited, mainly ultramarine, burnt umber, burnt sienna in mixes or tints with zinc white with some permanent rose and Indian yellow in places. I took the shapes from those formed by the dried ground.

selfie

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The ground was A4 paper coated with gesso and painted some months ago with surplus oil paint. The sketch as made in oxide of chromium tints, the background made of ultramarine, Indian yellow and zinc white, the face shaped in tints of Indian yellow and permanent rose, using the underlying green sketch to mute these colours.

one year …

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One year ago today I left hospital in a wheel chair after a three and a half weeks stay having high dose chemotherapy and an autograft, followed by the inevitable toxicity, sepsis and deconditioning. I find it amazing to remember how ill I was, and how good it feels to have recovered. I was reminded of this when, doing my own ward round today, I stood outside the door of the very side room where I had been isolated.

In the weeks that followed I kept my skills alive through Draw Brighton’s portrait club. I’ve already posted my own sketches as I did them but here are a series of others’ drawings of me, accidentally showing my hair growing back.

it’s sometimes hard to get the names right of your fellow artists in these sessions.

By Lianne Usselmann 28/8/25

By Cindi Bringsr 28/8/25

House of Music

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Peter Doig’s exhibition at the Serpentine, House of Music.

My brief notes read “Chalky paint quality – more like gouache than oil. Strong simple perspectives, figures and shapes imposed upon geometric constructions. Not photorealistic. Stylised. Lots of lions (symbolic). High contrast, light and dark. Dark figures do not denote so-called race … but maybe. One figure like a radiograph.

I also stayed for the fabulous playlist played on giant analogue speakers rescued from derelict cinemas, with the audience sitting on the floor in front of Doig’s painting Rain in the Port of Spain 2015 (third sketch down).

while we look away

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Genocide continues while we look away.

Even before this recent attack on Iran by Israel and the United States, lacking military objectives, serving primarily to distract from domestic political challenges, even before the current terrible events, the world had looked away from Gaza and the West Bank and the lethal oppression continued. These sketches were from the march against genocide in London five weeks ago.

Wall

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These two studies were made in memory of the two hundred communists machine gunned in the firing range 1st May 1944 as revenge for a partisan attack in Nazi occupied Greece. Last week, it was reported that rare photographs had surfaced and been retained by the state for posterity.

Mass state killing is an intrinsic part of fascism (or authoritarian governments ruling through fear and violence). As in the 1930s. we are now being given choices whether to vote fascists into power, or to resist elected fascists while there are still constitutional mechanisms to do so.

The collage materials were watercolour sketches sliced into thin strips and glued to thin paper, and tissue paper previously used to mop up surplus oil paint and allowed to dry.

Leporello

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This leporello was made in collaboration with Open College of the Arts photography student Louise Alderman and Creative Arts student Baiba Hermanns, tasked to generate a piece of work with the starting point “light and dark” over three weeks. We developed the theme into a structuralist visual narrative that shuttled between opposing concepts, generated by taking turns to give a visual prompt or response. The running commentary came from a fast word game, again taking turns, to offer thesis, antithesis, synthesis for each image pair. We each spoke for two minutes on the collaborative process while the others took short notes: I combined those summaries into what became a poem.