I watched the video a few times – at first I didn’t quite “get” her, having not come across her work before – she reminded me the first time of Bridget Riley and her meticulous line drawings – but actually the more I watched, the more I thought that this was completely wrong, and Vija is more someone who looks at something for a long time and then takes great care to record what she sees; even though the viewer may take her image in “in a flash”, she hopes that they will then consider it at length and think about what it means. She interestingly makes a contrast between “drawing” and “using pencil and paper as my medium”, which chimed with a biography of JMW Turner I had been reading (Moyle, Franny, 2016: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of JMW Turner. Penguin) in which the old definition of works classified as “drawings” included watercolour paintings – so I guess that Vija is saying that she is creating works with pencil and paper which might be considered as paintings? – anyway, obviously a fine line (pun!) and not something to get bogged down with, I think.

She describes the point of her detailed drawing/painting of an object as “…not to mimic it but to show an attention span and thoroughness…”, going on to say that she presents images (which she calls “little areas”) for people to pass by or stop and look at. I’m not quite sure why, but this resonated with me today when I had done a drawing of a rose my husband had brought in from the garden; it was quite a detailed pencil drawing, I was pleased with it, but even more pleased today (two days later) when I moved the vase and all the petals fell off – I felt as if I had shown that rose the same attention span and thoroughness as Vija does, and that was somehow a good thing as it was preserved in a different way.

I also found another video and a lot of information about Vija’s life and work on the Tate website (www.tate.org.uk) where she talks more about the time she takes to create a careful image; she says, “I’d like you to be able to scrutinise it and relive the making of it” – and one very much does with the Ocean Surface pictures in particular, I think. 

It all seems quite a meditative process for her. I tried to get into this same zone with my cloud drawings – it seemed a bit of a dichotomy at first as I felt pressured to work quickly because the cloud either wasn’t there for long, or it was changing, or I was moving….but I have found myself now staring at clouds quite a bit, not necessarily when drawing them (just as well the neighbours think I’m a bit eccentric anyway…..) and am coming to understand that they follow their own rules and patterns which can be studied, learned and then applied at will to create new clouds from the imagination. This is quite a big thing for me – I have never been any good at drawing from my imagination, probably because I have only recently got into the mindset of looking as an artist – so to find something I might be able to make a real fist of drawing realistically out of my head gives one quite a kick.

This week, at this term’s opening meeting of the Tavistock Group of Artists, one of our members (Ian Pethers RMS, SBA) gave a quick talk and demonstration on the basics of perspective. Key things for me to remember from this:

• “Art does not follow rules, rules follow art” (although it is good to know the rules, so you know what you are disregarding!)
• The horizon moves with the viewer – if two people are looking at a view, their horizons will be different (unless they are of identical height)
• He demonstrated using pen on a board which had a pin through the middle to which a string was attached – the pin was the vanishing point, around which he constructed an entire street scene using the string as a guide to the angle of the lines – brilliantly simple, works for my brain! He pointed out how things change as they become more distant, eg it’s not far before you can’t see the actual window glass, only the facing edge of the window recess.
• Drawing e.g. tiles on a floor using guide lines – these will be fractionally curved as they near the viewer, due to the movement of the head/eyes

Patrick Caulfield – Fruit Display

1996

Acrylic on canvas

Waddington Galleries, London and The Saatchi Gallery, London

Not sure I’m reading this one right, but it was one that I liked because his use of the fruit shadow twice makes me think that someone is going to walk through the yellow door, thinking it’s all OK because they can see the shadow of the fruit and yes, there it is – but then suddenly the second darker shadow jumps out behind them, as if it’s been lying in wait. 

Yes, I know I should take more water with it…..

Gary Hume – Four feet in the Garden

1995

Glass paint on aluminium

Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, London

This one appealed to me as it reminds me of one of those “optical illusion” pictures – is it a picture of feet, or is it a picture of two old crones with long noses and warty chins facing each other?

Not sure it’s something I’d immediately be tempted to have a go at myself, although admittedly the image does draw you in and make you take a good look at it and ponder.

Gary Hume – The Flowered Hat

2002

Gloss paint on aluminium

The artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London

This one, however, is something which did appeal to me as a style which I might think about trying to develop. It’s called “The Flowered Hat”, but to me it also looks like a flower arrangement on a white tablecloth with long lacy curtains behind.

At this point I thought I ought to try and get my head around negative space. As always, I went in at the deep end and thought I would try a negative space version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, thinking to do something a bit Flowered Hat-y. Needless to say, I found it really difficult to look at the spaces rather than the flowers, but actually the complex subject broke the negative spaces down into small manageable bits so that, although the proportion is out in places, the overall effect is recognisable, I think, although I was so traumatised by the concentration needed that I didn’t get anywhere near adapting it to be Hume-like. Instead, I tried something a whole lot easier – a chair and table – more within my capabilities. Quit while you’re ahead.

Negative space is something I’m struggling to get to grips with example-wise; a lot of the things I have found have been in old printed posters (e.g. those by William Nicholson and James Pryde, who signed themselves J&W Beggarstaff after the name they had seen on an old sack – see article in my cuttings folder about the recent exhibition of their work at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, May-August 2019), or in work like linocuts (see e.g. article by Rosemary Waugh on the work of Paul Catherall as seen in Artists & Illustrators magazine, November 2018, pg. 56-9).

I thought this image (by Kinska from My Opera House exhibition, 4th July-22nd September 2019 at Now Gallery, taken from Aesthetica Magazine, June/July 2019, issue 89, www.aestheticamagazine.com) showed how clever our brains are at interpreting minimal images (the black on the right clearly being intended as her hair, whereas the black on the right is just space);  but then I looked at a similar (but different) image by her from the pages about her exhibition on www.nowgallery.co.uk, where this wasn’t the case and the space on both sides of her face look like hair just by being a slightly different shape…..clearly our brains are very nuanced and bring a lot of extraneous knowledge to their interpretation of images!

But there is hope for me yet on my understanding and use of negative space – it’s gradually seeping into my psyche. The other day I was down by the River Tavy with the granddaughter – she was busy skimming stones, falling in the water, etc while I thought I’d do a really quick scribbled sketch of the view down the river. It was late afternoon/early evening and the sun was shining down through the leaves, making some really bright, almost gleaming, whilst other bits of the view were in dark shadow. I was struggling to depict this when I had my eureka moment – just scribble in the dark shadowy negative spaces! And it worked (see above)…even if very scribbly…but at least I can see what I meant….

• The Anthony Green image to which I was directed in the text is lovely, hugely detailed and would be a brilliant, highly-personal birthday gift. It captures the room perfectly – you feel that you are being parachuted in through the opening ceiling, a bit like Thunderbird 2. It reminds me of the Hockney and the Picasso images which I looked at in the research into the history of still life at the start of this Part, except that, despite the bright colours which initially give you the impression of something almost child-like, this has been carefully thought through – if all the flaps and folds were pushed back into place correctly, you feel you would have a perfectly assembled room with the correct proportion and perspective. Impressive. Way beyond me at the moment, but…….
• In my sketchbook I have scrapbooked some images of pictures, including some photographs, (see flagged pages in A3 scrapbook for annotations) which have made me look towards my Assignment in two respects:
  • Overall composition and importance of viewpoint…..hitherto I have thought a bit about composition and very little about viewpoint, which is part of the reason why I haven’t really grappled very well with perspective, as I’ve tended to draw things which are right there on the table in front of me. I am beginning to appreciate the differences which a high and low viewpoint can bring (quite apart from anything, they are often exaggerating the perspective and making it easier for me to see and draw).I have gone off-message slightly in my research into and collection of images as I find that, as I have gone through Exercise 1, I have been drawn to windows and, particularly, open doors; this started as a bit of an exercise in getting the perspective correct (which is still frankly a bit hit and miss), but has led me on to an interest in the “possibilities” offered by doors and windows, both composition-wise (diagonals etc) and also asking-a-question/telling-a-story-wise. Hence my image collection became increasingly skewed in this direction, and I should like to explore it more as I go through this project and final Assignment.

Dutch still life

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!