New website!

After a great show at Islington Contemporary Art and Design Fair, I’ve got myself a brand new fine art website and a new blog.  This blog is now archived.  Please go to http://www.helencannfineart.co.uk instead.

Recent Paintings

A recent painting using a drawing I completed from life.  I’ve adapted quite heavily so this isn’t a photographic likeness.  I’m going to exhibit this at Islington Contemporary Art Fair in October.

Portrait of an artist

Pencil drawing of a Chinese artist from a photo found in Modern Painters.

London boy drinking

Continuation of my work using biro to draw contemporary portraits and am now exploring using paint alongside.

Drawing from human dissection at Brighton medical school.

I spent some time drawing in the anatomy room at Brighton Medical School at Sussex university the other day; I thought it could be a useful and inform my life drawings.  This was organised by the Brighton Medical Student Art Society.  The experience was quite a strange one.  All bodies were treated with respect and cadaver heads were covered.  Drawings were completed in silence and we were allowed to draw and observe sections of bodies and the internal organs of one main body shown here.  I found drawing fairly difficult as I only had a rough idea about what I was looking at –   probably a full on anatomy class would have been useful!  In the end I found I was only comfortable drawing the main body rather than the body sections which seemed completely removed from being human in any way.  The chemical smell was strong and disconcerting after a few hours too.  Ultimately it was an incredibly interesting experience but I’m not sure how useful it is to my personal work right now…

Tattooed model

I completed this drawing at an afternoon session at Artists’ Residence.  Drawing tattoos on skin is incredibly difficult – basically you are drawing someone else’s 2 dimensional drawing on a moving 3 dimensional body. 

Biro portrait

 

Back to life drawing again and this is a portrait of Johanna in biro…I love how versatile the medium is.

A map of Brighton from the latest discoveries

This map was hand lettered and based on a map I’d done a couple of years ago.  I’ve adapted it slightly adding annotations – mixing local history with personal history and knowledge.  Maps are amazing, always changing and showing the times and culture of the mapmaker themselves…

Esther’s ear

A commission to draw Esther’s ear in pencil – to be part of a wedding present for her husband…

New Painting. Snow White.

This is a new acrylic painting on card continuing the theme of symbolism in traditional stories in contemporary settings.