Painting 1; Part 2; More work on formative feedback from Assignment 1

WHAT?

I wanted to:

• look at some drawings by Maggi Hambling
• make some drawings in her style
• Make a painting from one of the drawings

I had a good browse through Andrew Lambirth’s 2006 book “Maggi Hambling The Works and conversations with Andrew Lambirth”, Unicorn Press, London. Maggi has a very free drawing style, as can be seen in:

“Large Head of Stephen”

1993

Ink on paper

152.4 x 101.6 cm

And…

“Amanda Barrie”

1991

Four studies from life

Charcoal on paper

Each 60.7 x 48.3 cm

I was particularly interested in the way she seems to drag a partially dried brush in her ink drawing of Stephen Fry to get her wider-yet-lighter lines. She made this drawing (among others) in preparation for painting a portrait of Fry.

SO WHAT?

I decided to work in Chinese black ink and a long-handled size 4 short bright throughout a life drawing class, trying to replicate Maggi’s free style of mark making, hoping that one would be clear enough to paint from. I also tried to use my left (non-dominant hand) throughout to try and improve my facility with a brush with that hand.

Some results as follows:

I feel my brush strokes have mainly been decisive (and Maggi is, if nothing else, a great role model for decisive mark making), and I soon got the hang of her dry-brush drag for lighter marks. 

I fell into the trap of being uneconomic at first – so hard in a life drawing group when someone says “10 minutes left for this pose” – so you think you have to add something to your drawing in that time) – so decided to use some extra time from the second long pose to try a drawing of the model’s face, which I knew I hadn’t got right in the main figure drawing. The face was quite shadowed but with key areas lit up by a lamp.

I decided to use this drawing of just the head to take forward to a painting.

I had two things to try out in this painting: a tube of Jackson’s “Scorched Earth” black acrylic (supposed to be made from the ash of Iraqi fields burned by the militia), and a long handled sword liner brush.

I laid down a quick background on a piece of gessoed board, using loose strokes with  flat brush and the black Scorched Earth acrylic mixed roughly with some titanium white Cryla acrylic. This dried in minutes, and I did the whole of the rest of the painting using the sword liner (and my left hand).

I worked quickly, marking in the lightest areas with plain white and the darkest with undiluted black. Then it was a question of filling in the mid tones. The sword liner was great for the wavy, expressive lines (as per Maggi), although I did struggle a bit with accuracy of detail. 

I think the outcome is dramatic, although I think I lost some definition of marks in my mid tone areas as a result of just the fun of playing with the sword liner, and also have lost some of the character of the original – this feels more like a generic person than a particular woman.

On the plus side, I have managed to retain some of Maggi’s freedom of mark making.

NOW WHAT?

I have found that:

• Mindful of some tonal inaccuracies/omissions in my earlier Frank Auerbach drawing which translated into corresponding inaccuracies in tone in the painting, I have learned to think more about this issue – which I did find easier here when drawing with ink.
• If I want to do much more work with acrylic I need a whole lot more practice at dealing with the speed at which it dries, which took me aback a little. I could cover up my errors when they were “within” the image easily enough, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do about errors I had made right on the edges, which seemed to dry in seconds before I could wipe them off.