Contemporary art sketchbook walk - week 3

The theme for the week was colour; as it turned out, the shows were mostly black and white, but we gamely drew with coloured pencils and added accents with pastels... 

First stop, Iniva on Rivington Street, where a delightful primary school class was enjoying the "forgotten portraits", including the Black African Choir that toured Britain, coming from South Africa and dressing in "native costume" for publicity purposes - photographs "deeply buried" in the Hulton archive for 120 years. "The Black Chronicles II" runs till 29 November.

London Stereoscopic Photographic Society, 1891-3 (via)

Record books of the London Stereoscopic Society

Then to Calvert 22, a gallery that deals in contemporary Russian art; the current show is Beyond Zero, and includes an intriguing 1965 film, by  visual-effects pioneer Pavel Klushantsev, about the space race, from the Russian point of view ... all those American rockets that simply missed their moon target...

The show includes "a full set of hand-painted colour plates from Mikhail Matyushin’s Reference Book on Colour for the first time in the UK. Matyushin was an avant-garde artist, a musician and a close associate of Kazimir Malevich. Together with his students, Matyushin staged practical experiments to test his idea of ‘expanded vision’. In studying how a primary colour interacted with a surrounding colour, he observed how the neutral space between the two became tinged with a secondary tint. The results, recorded in these hand-painted tables in 1932, have helped generations of architects and designers find harmonious colour schemes for their work."

At Kate MacGarry is Ben Rivers' show "Things" (till 25 October); rather than watching the video I drew "Bedroom" -

Digital print, 102.5cm square, on the gallery's red wall

Next door, Johnathan Viner is showing "Goliad" by Will Boone (till 8 November) - " a new series of paintings which evolved from previous works which superimposed the letters of a word (also the paintings title) on the canvases' surface, thereby treading a fine line between legibility and abstraction" -

Hot seats, monoprinted canvases, and large works of layered stencilling by Will Boone

Lovely old bit of window-opening machinery; the gallery was a printing shop

Sharing sketchbooks over a delicious mocha

 Final stop: on Redchurch Street (artist )

Love the red double doors, very business-like

At the end of the day, sometimes a photo is all you need

Seeing how other people had augmented their sketchbooks from previous weeks by sticking in information and photos, and working on painted pages, I carried on working on my pages at home, sticking in photos, adding more colour (note to self: try oil pastels and chalks sometime soon), and writing a few notes about the works seen.

Blind drawings and overlaid images

Leaving well enough alone (rather than colouring-in)

The drawing made in the gallery (right) translated into cloth and collage; it includes
a transparent layer, as did the original