Overall comments: I was very pleased with this – the first time I felt I had constructed a proper body of work rather than an assemblage of exercises.
I do intend to try and complete the final assignment piece once either my right hand is sufficiently back in action to tackle bigger drawings, or my developing left-handed drawing becomes more confident in tackling straight lines.
Feedback on assignment: my Tutor’s comments have directed me to think more carefully about the final layout and presentation of my drawings; I have sketched out a plan of how the four drawings will fit together, assembling them around an ornate compass needle showing the compass points from my house – serendipitously, they are pretty well North, South, East and West. They possibly won’t be complete rectangles – I have an idea of cropping the pieces of paper before mounting them onto the background piece.
Sketchbooks: I was pleased that my Tutor liked my use of a home-made sketchbook and I am hoping to do more of this – this was a simple home-made example in concertina format, and I cannot believe now that I missed out on the possibilities this offered for a continuous drawing or set of drawings. I have investigated Canaletto’s drawings on the Royal Collection Trust website, www.rct.uk; it was interesting to read that, as well as doing sketches in situ as preparatory work for paintings, he also did many pen drawings intended to stand alone as finished pieces. I was also tickled to read that some pin holes are found in his drawings, indicating that he had used the pin-and-string method to work out perspective – what’s good enough for Canaletto is good enough for me! In his Grand Canal drawings from the 1720s, he created his compositions from 25 successive pages of a sketchbook (I seem to remember that John Virtue did something similar), and my action point here therefore would be to think about using this sort of continuity in the future.
I am really enjoying now using my sketchbook as a resource in which I can try things out and use the successes for reference in the future (and maybe even the things which initially seem like failures – one drawing’s “failure” might work really well in a different context).
My remark about whether a picture needs a foreground made sense to me at the time, particularly in relation to a drawing of the end of the garden where there was nothing much except grass in the foreground. However, I have thought about my Tutor’s comments and I now totally get what she means about having something in the foreground to establish depth and perspective – the result of a bit of a lightbulb moment when I happened to see this image in a magazine: John Everett Millais, Dew-Drenched Furze, 1889-90, oil on canvas, Tate Britain.The extraordinary depth of the painting is established by those few wisps of grass right in the foreground. Thank you, Rachel and Millais!
Research: I am beginning to enjoy research and to look forward to this aspect of the course as a way of finding out what I might try next (or, what I really don’t like the look of). I probably still don’t do enough work on comparing artists’ work (rather looking at each as a stand-alone) – I can see how this might be valuable, and will try to do it more often.
Learning log: It is tempting sometimes to gallop through the practical work and exercises without stopping to think – they feel like the “fun” bits – but taking time out to stop and reflect in the blog is helping to embed what I’m learning and to structure my next steps.
Sue J's blog 