I’ve really enjoyed this exercise – I’m moving on due to deadline constraints, but hope to keep returning to it in any odd moment – it feels very freeing to play around with different materials and papers and see what goes well with what.
First attempt was with Promarker pens on official Winsor & Newton Promarker paper. My composition was a “found” one – just a decorative glass bottle I had taken up to the art room, on a board on a green metal stool, with whatever was in the background. I used mainly the chunky chisel ends of the pens, having first laid down a bit of an outline sketch of the highlights in a clear wax crayon (I wanted to see if the wax resist thing would work). Basically, the wax resist thing doesn’t work very clearly against the solvent of the pens – so now I know – although it can be seen a little. I used loose, free strokes with the pens, not worrying about fine detail, but just aiming to convey the shapes, colours, tone and shadow of the composition. Colour mixing is not easy with these bright, clear, colours, and best achieved by overlaying. The overall effect is just that – loose and free – but I think it is overly busy, too scrappy and bitty.
Next, I set up a very simple composition, just the glass bottle and a thick bamboo pen, which I wanted to draw on some patterned paper with a mid-tone calligraphy-style background. Having placed the objects on the page with a quick HB pencil sketch just to try and establish the ellipses needed for the bottle, I used my thickest Chinese brush pen and Chinese ink to block the bottle in. Next, using a limited palette of Conte crayons (brown, cream, black, grey and blue), I drew in the bamboo pen using long, free strokes and minimal blending. Next I picked out a few light highlights in white crayon (a few on the glass bottle and just the tip of the pen), before putting in the cast shadows with a black crayon and strengthening the darks on the glass bottle just a little.
I am quite pleased with the overall effect – the background sheet of paper I had found was just crying out for a picture of pen and ink – I think it is simple, bold, with enough colour for the image to be interesting, and a little bit of “almost” complementary colour zing with the orangey-brown and the blue. The bottle is a bit wonky due to my inexperience with the thick Chinese brush, but I don’t think that’s fatal to the picture.
In my next effort, I wanted to think back to my research on the history of still life. I had liked Sarah Gillespie’s work and how in her simple still life she appeared to have harked back to the old 17th Century type of tabletop composition, with a very dark background, and a light foreground. I set up the two items I had used before, the bottle and the pen, in this way, lit from above and slightly behind and to the right (see left). The dark/light boundary is almost exactly halfway down the page, which I know is not the received wisdom, but I felt this was OK because the main bulk of the bottle is on the lower “third” horizontal and the bulk of the pen is on the vertical “third” line. I used paper intended for acrylic paint with a textured ground, and covered this with black charcoal (top half darkly, bottom half lightly, except where the bottle was going. My other “medium” in this drawing was a putty rubber, which I used to draw both parts of the image with. Finally I went back in with the charcoal, just to make a few lines clear and ensure the shadows were placed correctly. I am really pleased with the outcome (it was my husband’s favourite as well). I think, third time in, I have finally got the relative ellipses of the glass bottle correct, my shadows, highlights and areas of reflected light are clear, and the contrasting textures of the glass and the bamboo can be differentiated.
First impression: Dutch still life paintings (and I feel as if I have looked at hundreds now) are sumptuous, glorious and (if you have looked at as many as I have) simply completely over the top. The colours zing, the detail is almost photographic in quality, and the sheer quantity of riches on show is overwhelming.
Dutch trade was booming in the 16th and 17th centuries, bringing wealth and, on its heels, consumer goods, whether food (they seemed very big on hunted game and fruit), china, glass- and silver-ware, fabrics, jewellery and so on.This abundance was seemingly celebrated in painting; traders were saying “look at all this stuff I have, which you can have too (at a price)”, and consumers were saying “I can afford to buy all this amazing stuff – and what’s more, I can have a really good artist paint it for me too (at a price).” For the bulk of paintings had hitherto been “improving” in some way – telling a moral or historical tale, often religious.
Berger, H. (2011). Caterpillage; Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting. Fordham University Presswent deeper than this. The prologue sets out the main thrust of the arguments to be found in the book; that is to say, that the “vanitas”, or “main moral message”, as I understand it, of a still life painting (common with the 17th C Dutch, since they had a great deal of wealth and therefore things, which Schama (1987), The Embarrassment of Riches, University of California Press, suggested was a moral burden which had to be acknowledged and expiated in some way) is not the whole story – it might be a sideshow, or it might hold a deep dark message.
One of the early specialist exponents of the still life was Frans Snyders (1579-1657), who so excelled in painting fish and game that he was frequently sought out by other artists to work in collaboration with them – an example of this is a work by Peter Paul Rubens and Snyders, (Prometheus Bound, ca 1611-1612, completed by 1618, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art), where Rubens painted the figure of Prometheus and the background, whilst Snyders painted the eagle; his ink and wash Study for and Eaglecan be found in the British Museum, London. However, an essay I found suggests that Synders’s focus on his subject matter had a subtext, as you will see from the following quotation:
“A Profusion of Dead Animals: Autocritique in Seventeenth-Century Flemish Gamepieces
Is Part Of
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2016, Vol.16(1), pp.50-77
Description
This essay suggests a way of reading the monumental still lifes of game painted by Frans Snyders and others in the first half of the seventeenth century. Previous scholarship has shown that these works assert the owner’s status, either as a nobleman with the privilege to hunt or as a merchant aspiring to nobility with the wealth that enabled him to buy the painting. In either case, the dead animals in the paintings serve as trophies, killed and displayed not for use, but as signs of privilege. Nonetheless, Snyders’s works show that he was also aware of the arguments against hunting made by More, Erasmus, Montaigne, and others in the sixteenth century. Thus, while Snyders developed the conventions of this distinctive genre, he also distanced himself from the excessive killing it records. Such paintings represent an “autocritique”—a critique of the ideology of the form from within the form itself. In its conclusion, the article contrasts these still lifes of game, characteristic of the predominantly Catholic and aristocratic south, with smaller breakfast scenes, a form which developed later in reaction to the game still lifes and was characteristic of the largely Protestant northern Netherlands.”
One of Snyders’s more appealing pictures I found to be Fruit Still Life with Squirrel (1616), oil on copper, Boston Museum of Fine Arts – here the animal interest is alive and being quite mischievous. It is one of the many “tabletop” pictures of the time, but I think I liked it because of the off-centre layout of the objects, there is almost nothing but darkness in the very centre of the picture at all, but the objects are placed so that the eye wanders around from thing to thing without ever wanting to leave the picture – and the light on those green grapes is just fabulous.
Collaboration was quite common at that time – another still-life specialist with whom Rubens worked was Jan Brueghel the Elder; for example, in Madonna and Child Surrounded by a Flower Garland and Putti, oil on panel, ca 1617-20, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Rubens painted the central Madonna and Child, surrounded by an enormous garland painted by Brueghel, which was itself surrounded by numerous very plump putti executed by Rubens. Brueghel’s floral compositions, both opulent and more modest (see above, Flowers in a Glass Vase,oil on panel, Private Collection) show lively yet delicate use of colour, very close observational skills, great botanical knowledge, and even include little insects. I have to say I am not a huge fan of big blowsy flower paintings, but I can appreciate the skill, knowledge and observation that has gone into creating them; they just feel rather static to me – I enjoy much more something like Van Gogh’s sunflowers, where perhaps more work has to be done by the viewer to conjure up a mental picture of an actual sunflower – but perhaps this is a lesson for me not to go into too much painstaking detail, which I do know I am prone to….hmm….
Another leading figure in the first wave of Flemish still-life painters was Osias Beert (1580-1624). Sutton, Peter.C in The Age of Rubens, (1993). Museum of Fine Arts, Bostoncomments on his “..sure, powerful draughtsmanship, complemented by the use of strong chiaroscuro…” – as seen in Still Life with Oysters and Sweetmeats, ca 1610, oil on canvas, private collection.
Carrying the torch after 1640, according to Sutton, came Jan Davidsz de Heem, who “developed lavish still life on a truly grand scale” – see for example the collaborative work with David Teniers the Younger, Kitchen Interior, 1643, oil on panel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which all the still life elements are painted by de Heem.
And of course there is Jan Vermeer van Delft (1632-75), whose paintings, according to Gombrich, E.H. (1984). The Story of Art. Phaidon “…are really still lifes with human beings.” A good example of this is The Kitchen Maid, 1660. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, which I have been lucky enough to be able to see in situ. You really do feel as if you can pick that bread up and eat it; and the painting of the basketry! I found the following quote about how it is painted:
“The Milkmaid
1658-60
Oil on canvas
Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam
“Vermeer painted a marvellous still life on the table: at the back is the two-handled earthenware bowl into which the milk is being poured; next to it are several crispy rolls, a blue tablecloth hanging in folds, a glazed pitcher and a basket of bread….An x-ray analysis of the paintwork reveals that the bread was painted in three layers. The lower one is a thick coat of lead white, over which Vermeer painted a thin reddish glaze through which particles of the original white protrude. On top of this the artist added highlights of whitish-yellow paint.”
Bailey, Martin (1995). Vermeer, Phaidon Press Ltd.”
I find it interesting that, in this case, the level of detail draws me in, whereas I brushed it off as “too much” in the flower paintings. Maybe it is just down to what subject matter actually appeals to the individual? – bread obviously appeals to me (oh dear) whereas I can take or leave massed flowers (possibly due to chronic hayfever). Seriously though, perhaps it is down to the artist’s style – Vermeer’s still has that hint of “suggestion” – you have to work at it just a bit, whereas the complete perfection of Brueghel’s flowers literally left the viewer with nothing to do.
Spanish still life
I learned quite a lot from Jordan, W.B. & Cherry, P (1995). Spanish Still Life from Velazquez to Goya. National Gallery Publications, London. They say that still life, as a genre, emerged fairly simultaneously in northern Italy, Spain and the Low Countries, all areas which at the time were effectively dominated by the Spanish Crown. I found this comment really chimed: “In these pictures, we confront one of the key purposes of all painting. The objects shown are usually of little inherent value….There is no story, often not even a symbolic significance. Yet the paintings make us slow down, look carefully at a walnut, a jug or a parsnip, make us realise that we had never truly looked at one before, and acknowledge how astonishing they are.”
They go on to discuss the origins and themes of still life, which I think are useful to summarise:
The Challenge of Antiquity: still life had existed in classical antiquity, and this was a new Renaissance revival of the ancient genre. In ancient times a high premium was set on the imitation of the natural world and now (in the late sixteenth century) and onwards, artists strove to paint still lifes “with a high degree of illusionism” – an example being Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (1595), oil on canvas. Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.
Grotesque painting: ancient fresco decorations had been found in the grottoes on the site of Emperor Nero’s Golden House in Rome, which led to a modern revival of the style, known as “grotesque” paintings, and these quickly caught on and became very fashionable.
The World of Nature: the 16th century saw a minor explosion in all types of exploration and scientific observation and research, and painters who reflected this (including the example of Brueghel) were demonstrating “scientific naturalism”.
Food for Thought – The Symbolic Dimension: this depiction of the natural world in all its glory allowed people to reflect on the power of God, Maker of all things.
The Vanitas still life: some paintings included items carrying a profound message about the transience of life – for example, hour-glasses marking the passage of time, much-used quills and books signify human knowledge. A fairly clear, if grisly, example of this is seen in Antonio de Pereda’s Vanitas, 1640. Oil on canvas. Zaragoza, Museo des Belles Artes.
Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) became well-known for the accuracy of his still life elements – An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618. Oil on canvas. Edinburgh, The National Gallery of Scotland is another painting that I have been fortunate to see myself, and I can remember (oddly) being struck in particular by the accuracy of the shadow of the knife in the white dish and what careful observation that must have entailed. Will I ever be patient enough to do that?
Attempts have apparently been made to attribute this vanitas painting to Velazquez, but unsuccessfully, and it remains unattributed. It is Still Life with Books and an Hour-glass, c. 1640. Oil on canvas. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemaldegalerie.Quite apart from the obvious vanitasmessage about the vanity of learning and the passage of time, I really like it just as a picture of lovely old books – the composition is simple yet I think it is well-balanced with enough contrasts of shape and size to make it interesting. I sort of went for something like this in my first assignment piece – but can see I have some way to go!
I was really drawn also to Antonio de Pereda’s (1611-78) Still Life with Walnuts, 1634, oil on panel. Spain, private collection. The circular format brings focus to the subject matter (“almost like a magnifying glass”), and the papery texture of the inside of the walnut shell has been so cleverly observed and evoked by tiny little marks and dots. Magic.
Jordan and Cherry go on through a range of painters, ending with Fransisco de Goya, (1746-1828). Goya was not particularly known for his still lifes, in fact, he didn’t apparently paint any till he was over 60, and all but one feature dead animals: “Not the courtly game of a hunter’s trophy, nor the meat on a butcher’s stall, nor the dead beasts traditionally symbolising life’s brevity or Nature’s bounty – but animals that have been slaughtered, from whom life has been violently torn…”. Quite. Apparently in this painting: Still Life with Pieces of Rib, Loin and a Head of Mutton, 1808-12. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musee du Louvre , Goya has signed his name, “as though in blood” in tiny red letters under the sheep’s head. Nice…not a subject which would ever appeal to me.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
I have found Lloyd, Christopher (2015). Paul Cezanne – Drawings and Watercolours.Thames and Hudson very useful; particularly encouraging was the introduction, where he says “The practice of drawing was for Cezanne a vital and life-affirming aspect of his overall approach to art, revealing him as deeply committed to devising a process for comprehending and recording the world as he saw it as objectively as possible.”
Cezanne believed that the artist experienced certain “sensations” when observing a scene and it was the artist’s job to record this as accurately as he could. He devised a way of doing this using carefully placed brushstrokes of pure colour. He is of course famous for his painting of apples – “With an apple I want to astonish Paris”
Cezanne was apparently influenced by Chardin who was celebrated in France, and there was a revival of interest in Spanish painting in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century when the works of Velazquez and Goya were much studied. Cezanne however began to distance himself from his immediate predecessors and his Impressionist contemporaries, seeking to go “beyond mere representation and engage with the materiality of the objects themselves..” – it was all very personal to him. He said to Gasquet: “People don’t think of a sugar bowl as having a face, a soul. You have to know how to catch them, how to win them over….When I’m outlining the skin of a lovely peach with soft touches of paint, or a sad old apple, I catch a glimpse of the reflections they exchange…the same love of the sun, the same recollection of the dew…”
Wassily Kandinsky said (in On the Spiritual in Art, (1912)): “Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup or rather in a teacup he realised the existence of something alive.”
Cezanne liked to feature local products in his work; in The Green Jug he draws the jug simply and clearly with strong shadow to emphasise its solidity; Lloyd suggests that the puddle underneath (which doesn’t match up with the light direction indicated by the main shadow) is actually not meant to be a shadow, but an indicator of the contents of the jug.
Lloyd goes on to suggest that, when arranging a composition, Cezanne would use unlikely viewpoints, juxtapositions and angles so that the viewer is initially confused and their attention has to become more fully engaged. This is something to which I need to give more thought – my compositions are currently arranged “in relation to themselves” as it were – i.e. I think about what goes next to what – but I don’t think enough about where the whole thing is in space.
A discussion is quoted in Paris between an elderly Pissarro and the young Matisse at the end of the 1890s, when the senior painter said “Cezanne is not an impressionist because all his life he has been painting the same picture”. Lloyd suggests that this comment “does not of course refer to the subject matter since he was immensely versatile, but, rather, to the inexorability of the artist’s attempt to portray what was in his line of vision with the greatest possible accuracy.”
In effect. Cezanne’s contribution was to reduce the importance of the subject matter and “establish the autonomy of the picture itself.”
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Picasso, along with Braque, took still life into Cubism, which he did not regard in any way as abstraction, arguing that he was an uber-realist:”…plus royaliste que le roi” – it was not, he argued, realistic to portray one aspect of an object from only one point of view, but instead one should be depicting all the possible aspects of an object from every point of view.
Jars and Lemon, 1907, oil on canvas. Albertina, Vienna, Batliner Collection
This was quite an early example and was in fact bought by Clive and Vanessa Bell – apparently Duncan Grant was very taken with it and referenced it several times in his own work.
Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle, 1914, oil on canvas. Tate, lent by National Gallery.
Picasso developed his style (along with Braque – see below) to introduce several flat overlapping planes, looking to me like a range of square/rectangular papers and post-it notes piled up ready to be made into a collage But not quite there yet). Musical instruments and bottles seem to feature heavily! Many artists were influenced by this, e.g. Ben Nicholson’s first forays into abstract working, which are very rectilinear; Nicholson also adopted
Picasso’s habit of scratching line into the painted surface to reveal the ground underneath, as seen in 1933 (musical instruments), oil on board. Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge.
David Hockney, Still-Life Blue Guitar, 1982, Composite Polaroid. Collection of artist.
Hockney had been very excited by Cubism and used a Polaroid camera to be able to represent a subject from various viewpoints and also as it changed over a short period of time.
The Studio, 1955,oil on canvas. Tate.
As time went on Picasso’s still life style seemed to mellow and become a little more representative. A picture which I particularly liked is one of a series he did of his work space – still with some odd orientations and dodgy perspective – but that might be the way I’m going if I can’t sort out my own issues with perspective! Something to look back at when I get on to the section about drawing corners of my living space. Simple clear colours, including adjoining complementaries in an enlivening but not in-your-face way, evoking a light, open yet quirky place which would invite one to go and work.
In researching Picasso and his influence on other artists I’ve found the following text very helpful: Beechey & Stephens, (2012) Picasso and Modern British Art. Tate Publishing.
Georges Braque (1882-1963)
Braque and Picasso created Cubism together after they met in 1907. Cameo/Abrams, (1997), Great Modern Masters – Braque. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.credits Braque with the majority of the innovations which Cubism introduced, such as the inclusion of printed letters, the use of pigments blended with sand, and the paper sculpture, although he borrowed the papiers colles technique from Picasso. The book contrasts the styles of the two men, suggesting that Picasso was more of a close observer of the world and stark recorder of what he saw, whereas Braque took pleasure in creating elegant designs from his observed objects. I can see the point they are trying to make with this – Pitcher, Bottle and Lemon, 1909, oil on canvas. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam – it is very reminiscent still of Cezanne, but feels a slightly more “polished” finish than Picasso’s Jars and Lemon (see above).
Guitar and Program: “Statue d’Epouvante”, 1913, charcoal, gouache and pasted paper. Private collection. – an example of Braque’s papiers colles, again looks to me slightly more “arranged” and organised than Picasso’s Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle.
In his later work Braque went in a bit more for brighter colours than seen in his earlier, more restrained palettes – an example being Still Life with Red Tablecloth, 1934, oil on canvas. Private collection, Paris.
Initially these were done in a fairly playful sort of way, but the horrors of the Second World War imposed a darker side and a Vanitasseries, which included Still Life with Skull, 1941-5, oil on canvas. Private collection.
Later again, as with Picasso, Braque embarked on a series of pictures of his studio, which occupied him for several years. These are quite dark, still “arranged” but in a witches’ cave sort of way – very different to Picasso’s light airy spaces. He evokes a place I’d like to explore – it looks a bit like Hogwarts’ Room of Requirement – but not necessarily somewhere I’d like to sit and work! Again, one to revisit when I get on to drawing corners of my own house.
Moving on to contemporary still life
A big mid-twentieth century movement, originating in New York and London, was Pop Art, which was rooted in the urban environment and generally took as subjects the objects of the day. It had a quirky, often “comic strip” appearance, and it moved on from Cezanne’s idea of taking an object, such as an apple, to analyse, but instead chose things which would not hitherto have been thought of as suitable objects for such a study, e.g. Warhol’s picture of Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962,oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;Simon Wilson (in David Britt, Modern Art (1989), Bulfinch Press) suggests that Warhol’s habit of repeating his objects does not make the pictures meaningless but rather (as with Cezanne’s apples) reduces the images to the status of elements in a composition, so that the viewer’s attention is directed away from the images and moves onto thinking about what the artist has actually done with it.
Harking back to Picasso’s and Braque’s interest in later life in depicting their familiar work spaces, I was interested in David Hockney’s move in the 1980s into depicting familiar spaces empty of people – e.g. Large Interior, Los Angeles, 1988, oil, paper and ink on canvas, Collection of artist; as they did, he seems to have employed unusual perspective and multiple viewpoints (either that, or its a rather strange room!).
A perusal of TRACEY, (2007): drawing now- between the lines of contemporary art. I.B. Tauris shows 21st Century artists using quite a mixture of styles and materials; Javier Cambre uses the traditional drawing materials of graphite and paper but for cartoon-ish drawings, often with text; Angela Eames likes to come bang up-to-date by inkjet printing on canvas; Cornelia Parker seems to make a feature of her choice of material which appears almost as important as the image produced, e.g. charcoal/sulphur/saltpetre, soil excavated from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and ink made from dissolving a video tape (confiscated by HM Customs and Excise) in solvent.
The old subjects keep going though. Harking back to Velazquez’s old woman with the eggs, I was struck by this image: Eggs Underwater (2007), pastel (seen in Tyrrell K, 2015: Sketching 365.Apple), by an American artist, Sally Strand, who is in the Hall of Fame of the Pastel Society of America (see her website at http://www.sallystrand.com). It’s a simple subject, but she has looked so very carefully at the light, her choice of colours is extraordinarily evocative, the cropped composition seems to make the whole thing more intense, and it is an object lesson to me in NOT ignoring the background.
Fruit is also an ever-present motif – I enjoyed this picture of sliced citrus fruit by another American artist, Nicole Caulfield – Citrus (2012), coloured pencil. Private collection. Again, the careful observation appealed to me, as did the symmetry, which I know is not everyone’s bag, but here it seems to make the image satisfyingly balanced, perhaps because the symmetry is diagonal rather than vertical/horizontal.
Looking forward to the work in this unit on monochrome, I have been very attracted by the drawings of Sarah Gillespie, a Devon artist and Academician of the RWA. An example is Out of the Wood, a charcoal drawing on Arches watercolour paper (seen on www.sarahgillespie.co.uk). A simple subject, traditional drawing materials, basically a vase of flowers with a very dark background and contrasting lighter foreground, harking right back to the 17th Century Dutch and Spanish still lifes!
Initially I found the idea of using a colour to represent a tone (rather than itself) a little tricky to get my head around. I worked in coloured pencil.
My first attempt was tried at an art group session so was necessarily time-limited and feels unfinished, but trying to set the cloth background up again exactly as it was at home seemed a step too far – I decided to learn from it and move on. Looking back now I think my chosen objects were a bit of a mix of too intricate (the wooden statuette and the watering can) and too similar in tone – lots of green objects on a red background cloth, which is not a good combination for me as I often find it difficult to distinguish tone differences anyway between red and green. Live and learn. Anyhow, I went for it, and at least managed to get the hang of the process by the end. I did follow the instructions in the text but was a bit hamstrung by starting with the dark tones – some of these I got in slightly the wrong place early on and then it’s a bit difficult to cover them up, so in the next two drawings I went in with all three tones really from the start.
In an idle moment the same evening I decided to have another go while the idea was fresh in my mind. I decided to work both with a simpler composition and also on a smaller scale – A5 rather than A3. Because it was evening the tone differences from the room lighting were not startling, but enough for me to practise, and I feel the result is slightly more polished. Tried to keep thinking hard about my perspective and really trying to make sure the tissue box obviously tapered at the back towards my eye-line, which was actually well above the top of the drawing page, but looking at it again I still don’t think the difference between front and back is pronounced enough – if anything now, it looks as if the back is actually wider – aarrggh! – and I wonder if that is because I was drawing on my lap with the page angled away from me – clearly something to beware of in future.
The third attempt, and the one I am most pleased with, was done outside and is basically just a cruet set placed on a patio table – I was under a sunshade but the cruet was on the far side of the table with bright sunlight coming from behind it and slightly to the left, with the patio ground at the back of the table thrown into deep shade. Purple, red and flesh colours represented my three tones for a change. The lights and darks generally felt much easier to define here (although the sunlit wood of the table and the china dish were surprisingly close in tone at times) and I again went straight in with all three tones rather than going dark-medium-light.
Comparing the different experiences of Exercise 1 vs Exercise 2:
Both felt counter-intuitive to some extent – I have blatantly cheated in the line drawing by indicating some main blocks of tone (just couldn’t help myself), and similarly have lightly sketched in some lines in light tone in the Ex. 2 drawing – mainly the ellipses, which I am trying to work on getting correct. It feels as if you need little bits of both (tone and line) to make the drawing just so!
I do feel I’ve managed some depth in the tone drawing, especially as I made more of a conscious effort to include a more defined background. There is some depth in the line drawing – certainly to me, as I know what it was a drawing of! – but by trying to restrict the amount of tone I showed, I’m not 100% convinced that someone looking at it who hadn’t seen the original objects would be able to work out what they were.
Use of colour: I’ve often done black and white drawings without colour so I didn’t feel constrained by the lack of colour – although I might have put a light watercolour wash on the Ex 1 drawing if left to my own devices, just to give a clearer idea of what things were – especially the lichen. In Ex 2 I found using the “wrong” colours for the objects quite a distraction at first, but after doing a couple I felt a bit more comfortable with the idea, and I enjoyed doing the third one and felt a lot more free with it.
There has been a long gap since my last post; I’ve been very ill, hospitalised for over three weeks and now home for two recuperating. Energy has been lacking; muscle strength on coming out of hospital was poor (couldn’t even hold a pen still with left hand), focus and concentration likewise lacking – but determined to get back into the course bit by bit.
I really enjoy line drawing so this was a good place to start getting going again. Inspiration was very slow to come – I tried some artefacts from my dressing table first (thinking I would want to draw them because it was a long time since I’d actually seen them!) – but the spark wasn’t there. Then my husband and I went for a short walk up on my beloved Dartmoor for the first time since I’d become ill, and that seemed to be the perfect catalyst – I collected some bits and pieces lying around (twigs, wool, a piece of fallen bark with a lush mossy coat and some great lichen – I am fascinated by lichen) – and I was off.
Because I’d already tried some controlled pen and ink drawing with the dressing table items but didn’t feel the “oomph”, I decided to really approach this loosely and feel my way into the best layout and medium.
I started off with a blind contour drawing in drawing pen including all the items. It looks like nothing on earth but got me into all the different textures.
I’d brought a random assemblage of materials so tried some of them out to do some individual studies of the items, seeing how well they matched the textures. First up was a Graphix pen – I like drawing with these but they can be very blobby – too much so for this.
Next up I thought I’d try a fine Chinese brush and Chinese ink – I haven’t used these very much and knew they needed quite a bit of work to become proficient with – but actually as soon as I started using them they felt right for this – you can get such a fine point and yet a variety of line widths and darknesses which really seemed to lend themselves to this. The only thing I found difficult to capture was the scrap of sheep’s wool – so I decided to omit this, along with one of the sticks.
The overall drawing, once I’d started, took a couple of hours. The items really go together so well – well, they were picked up within yards of each other! – they evoke the wild nature of the moor, and the basic triangular shape of the composition echoes the shapes of the hills and tors.
The textures were very different; the moss was really thick and lush, a bit like a fur coat; the lichen was smooth, crinkly and very fragile; the stick was dried and weathered, and the gorse fragment was very prickly but again, being dried as a result of burning (they burn the gorse regularly to keep it down and encourage new growth) had to be treated with great care. I tried to fade in and out with the amount of detail on the moss, making it stronger where it abutted the lichen, as I felt that the lichen (which I drew first) looks rather otherworldly and odd on its own and needed some clear definition.
As ever, the thing I think I have dipped out on a bit is the background. Because the back of the piece of mossy bark was extraordinarily crumbly I keep the whole thing on a piece of kitchen roll – not a fascinating backdrop, and I have rather fallen back on my rather nebulous diagonal shading. Will try to do better with the still life using tone!
On my recent holiday to the far North-West of Scotland, we spent many a happy half-hour combing the beautiful white sandy beaches (often in hail, occasionally in sun and gale) for natural objects to draw, and one of the things I picked up was a crab claw. It was already disintegrating and I never thought I’d manage to get it back home…but managed it (mainly):
I thought it would be an interesting natural object to try drawing for this exercise. I used Staedtler coloured pencils with only the tiniest bit of erasing with a putty rubber.
I certainly think I have achieved detail – it turned out to be incredibly complex and intricate when I really looked (part-way through I was seriously regretting not having chosen the stick of driftwood instead!). I drew it at art group over two sessions, and so the lighting was quite flat from overhead fluorescent lights – hence there was not as much tonal contrast as in the original photo (taken in Scotland in a gloomy croft) – I feel I have had a good go with what there was. I have tried to vary my mark-making, using hatching, cross-hatching, dots and squiggles as I thought appropriate. Have I “filled the paper in an interesting and effective way”?…hmmm… think I should possibly have given that more thought – I had the claw sitting actually on the page on which I was drawing, so there wasn’t really a background to draw except white paper.
Comments from my art group varied from “looks good enough to eat” to “from this angle it looks a bit like a parrot.”
We’ve been away to the wilds of the Scottish Highlands.
Whilst in the moderate civilisation of Inverness, went to an exhibition of Victoria Crowe’s paintings and drawings at the Inverness Art Gallery. These were mainly portraits, predominantly of older people although not exclusively, and she likes to try and tell the sitter’s history by the choice of pose together with what’s in the background (through the door, out of the window, etc). However, she also had a few still life paintings – these were mainly long and thin, as if painting the contents of someone’s mantlepiece. I found these rather odd as compositions, the objects didn’t seem to relate to each other particularly, they were a bit like horizontal lists. I wondered if, again, she was telling the story of the owner of the objects by using this method. The lighting in the exhibition room was rather poor in that I often had to move to the side to be able to see the painting or drawing because of the reflections of the spotlight, so it was hard to get a decent photo…
I found it quite a static presentation of a series of objects though, it didn’t especially appeal to me, although that may have been at least in part due to frustration at the lighting.
Most of the time spent out in the wilds we spent walking, but I tried to do some still life at our cottage every day. I worked on two particular things:
Some blind contour drawing as explained in Kaupelis, R (1980) Experimental Drawing. Watson Guptill Publications. I found these difficult but fun; what they are really good for is making me draw a line rather than a fidgety set of scrappy lines for an outline, and also for little details – because I am reallylooking at how an object appears, rather than having a glance and then drawing what I think.
Some thumbnail sketches for various compositions of found sets of objects – see Still Life Sketchbook. Because I didn’t particularly like the way Victoria Crowe had composed her “long, thin” horizontal pictures, I tried to make mine different by enlarging and cropping, rather than lining things up in the way I had found too static.
I have been away from home helping with my new-born baby granddaughter and so I have been using odd bits of available time to experiment a little with some of the recommended materials for this part of the course, some of which were very familiar to me, but others of which I have used rarely, if at all. I have learned a little more about ease of use, appropriate (or sometimes, inappropriate papers), qualities of colour-mixing and overall effect generated. I have generally used “found” still life compositions -which is a nice way of saying “whatever was lying around” – so the final products vary in the interest of the outcome – but that was not my concern for these exercises, it was simply to learn the materials.
Charcoal is a medium I have definitely grown to love since I began the course – it’s particular strength to me is in the dramatic tones available – which made it seem very appropriate for this rather murderous-looking set of kitchen knives in their very solid black metal block!
Having read in the documentation that marker pens are thought too harsh and lifeless, I immediately wanted to be awkward and try them out. They are indeed bright and it’s quite tricky to moderate the colour by overlaying without ending up with sludgy mud, but I feel I have at least managed to generate differences in tone here. Definitely these are to be reserved for effect – I do feel I’ve conveyed a fairly bright, cheery mood here.
Having watched the Great Celebrity Painting Challenge one evening, I was inspired to try drawing on my iPad using the Sketchbook app. I hadn’t used it before so trying to learn it was a bit painful, but I did enjoy it and again have come up with a fairly lively image. At the moment I am constrained by having to draw either with my finger or a very blunt-ended stylus, so accuracy is a real issue.
This was done with coloured Conte crayons. A little like charcoal, I have learned to break them into pieces a cm or two long, which then makes them useful for edges but also shading large areas. I got into a bit of a smudgy mess in places, but found I could create new colours by overlaying, so this was fun.
I wasn’t especially looking forward to trying out the oil pastels – not quite sure why they persistently don’t appeal to me; perhaps because I struggle to make accurate marks with them, it feels a bit like using those awful crayons you used to be given in school and could never do anything decent with. I also picked what turned out (for me, anyway) a very difficult subject and I found it difficult for a while to moderate the colours – although after a bit of experimenting I found that the best way of obtaining both gradations in tone and colour was to use the pastels on their side – so after that, I got along a little better. The drawing still look at bit like nothing on earth viewed close up; but from a distance, it is better and I hope you can work out what it’s meant to be!
I tried doing a china jug using ink and a small palette knife. My initial idea was to have big clear sweeps of ink, created by dragging the side of the knife, to represent the darker tones – but it almost immediately became apparent that the paper in my sketchbook was MUCH too thin for this and it was all running through – so this was rapidly abandoned, and I finished off the sketch using a dip pen and hatching.
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