I need to preface these notes with an explanation:
Three days ago I tripped over a kerb (rushing to a local art exhibition, annoyingly) and landed on my shoulder – was taken to hospital by ambulance, and it turns out that I have a complex multiple fracture. It’s very painful, so I am on morphine for it, and I am waiting for an operation to see if it can be fixed or, if not, to replace it. It’s my right arm and, wouldn’t you know I am very strongly right-handed, am finding it very difficult to do anything with my left – it is taking hours to type this!
In view of all this, I have decided to submit my Part 3 work to my tutor (I had already completed all of it apart from the last two exercises in Project 5) along with my plan and such preliminary work as I had done prior to the injury, and hope that this might prove enough.
Preliminary work
- Thinking that I would need to spend quite a while in situ doing drawings in a cold wet November, I did a set of rapid, rough A3 sketches in pen from windows in my house, all showing buildings, tree etc, as well as allowing for the demonstration of linear, angular or aerial perspective
- Sketch 1 was looking down from the attic window of our 3-storey house at the road, a small group of houses across the way, and a hill with trees behind – all flanked by gable roofs . Sorry – my daughter took the photos of the sketches for me, not the way I usually take them and I can’t turn them – so this needs to go round a quarter left.
- Sketch 2 was the view from our first floor bay window looking down on next-door’s porch roof and driveway, across to next door’s bay window and then on down a windy road which forks then disappears into trees
Sketch 3 is looking out from a different first floor window into our garden, onto the garden wall, down a side road with a lane off, making a z-shape – again, the photo needs to turn a quarter left.
The final sketch is from the ground floor study window – the view (of the houses opposite and along and background woods) is nicely framed by the dark garden wall and shrubs, trees at the side and looping right overhead, with central focus of a much-pruned beech.
Plan
After attending the South West group meeting, listening to speakers there, reflecting on Lydia Halcrow’s work (see separate blog post), thinking about series pictures (e.g. John Virtue, David Hockney) I decided not to choose just one of these sketches to work up for the assignment, but to present them all as a tessellated group. Lydia, John Virtue and some of the photography students at the meetings were all trying to represent a journey as a series of images; I thought of mine as offering a series of potential setting-off points, depending on which image you chose to jump into – a bit like the beginning of JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit, where Bilbo Baggins was promised an adventure by just stepping onto the road outside his door, the particular adventure being determined by which way he chose to turn.
I intended to work up each image on A3 so that, when assembled, the total would be the required size. I was going to simplify each image quite considerably (as I had done in Project 5 in a set of drawings of the Church – see sketchbooks) and intended to work quite loosely on pastel paper with some pieces of gesso-coated newspaper – in the style of the church example here.
My medium would be mainly inks (applied with both brush and pen), plus some charcoal and Conte crayons – not necessarily monotone, but a limited palette of 2 or 3 colours at most.
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