It’s been rainy so I started out working up some of my existing sketches. I have been interested in the work of John Virtue which I found in my research (see blog noteson artists working in series in the landscape), so I had a go at working in black and white. I used two different media, charcoal with a putty rubber, and Chinese ink and brush, but I have tried to use expressive strokes with both.
I re-worked two of my Dartmoor 360-degree views using the ink – tried to be very loose, working quickly using wide gestural strokes, suggesting rather than describing in detail. Both efforts look fairly awful close-up, but not bad from a distance, much more recognisable features.
I made the first effort too wet so it was a bit uncontrollable and I haven’t quite got the darks in the right place (e.g. the darks on the hill don’t match up with the darks under the clouds) so I tried to strike a bit of a balance in the second attempt – but looking back at it I think the drier foreground is the weakest feature. More practice needed! Once you start with this medium it seems to need to go very quickly, but I believe that is a consequence of my inexperience, and I need to think through each part of the painting before committing the ink.
The composition of the first picture is Ok but not gripping – Pew Tor, my main focus, is bang in the middle, although it is on the upper-third-line, but I think it might have been better a bit lower and moved slightly off centre, with some better-planned dramatic clouds as a counterpoint. In the second picture, Vixen Tor (lower, mid-ground) and Kings Tor (distant left) I had intended as a kind of paired focus (one very upright, the other much more rounded), but I have got a bit muddled in the contrast between mid- and fore-ground, and definitely think I needed to give more space for the sky – the whole picture feels a bit squashed.
I had a go at drawing into a charcoal background using a putty rubber to work up two of my other sketches. The first was the interior of the mediterranean biome at the Eden Project – I had done a quick scribbly sketch of a cypress which caught my eye, so I tried to render it as a kind of “photo negative” image. I wanted the tree to dominate so I put it bang in the centre. The cypress itself was great fun and I could really use expressive strokes and swirls; I did it at an art group and was quite pleased with it until a fellow group member went by and said “I really like your waterfall.”
Back to the drawing board……
So I tried out the same technique with one of the views from the “garden” series of my 360-degree sets of sketches. I narrowed this one down to focus on the large pots and the bamboo at the end of the garden. I’m pleased with the pots and the trellis, but don’t think the bamboo is quite recognisable if you hadn’t been told what it was, and the neighbouring house (apart from the chimney which I like) looks a bit child-like – possibly the whole distant background would have been better off left much more undefined. I think it’s not missing an obvious foreground, though.It’s a really enjoyable technique – somehow drawing with a rubber is very freeing because if you do something wrong, you can easily replace the charcoal and carry on.
Hadn’t come across this artist or his work before. The webpage quoted in the notes actually took me to the artist’s Amalfi series – I have to say I first opened the pictures up on my iPad in a gloomy room and was slightly taken aback as I could hardly make them out at all….happily I am now in better light and really like his range of colours. You can clearly see he uses a wide range of materials and marks, and he says that sometimes works into the paper so hard it tears, which he feels is all part of the making of the picture. I also found the Chiltern series on a different site – he says he has considerably reduced his colour range here and deliberately chosen “…organic, natural, desaturated and and ‘unpretty’ pigments….” for these – I was tempted to have a go at re-interpreting a drawing of a familiar place using his style, but really not sure where or how to start – the process seems as important to him as the outcome…he says: “Creating these landscapes is instinctive and intuitive, a direct, visceral engagement. Through a process of mark-making, sedimentation of material, textural surface layering and modulated monochromes, I seek to interpret the fundamentals of the topography, in particular revealing its underlying, elemental nature…”(www.nicholasherbert-drawings.co.uk). You can certainly feel that he gets into the zone.
John Virtue
Enormously dramatic landscapes in black ink and white paint – apparently he regards colour as a distraction, and one can quite see why when he is able to produce these hugely atmospheric pictures without it. The landscape pictures give me a much better insight into how to go about abstracting a view, which is often suggested in our notes, but was not sure how to do.
Black ink, shellac and acrylic on canvas (see on Annandale Galleries website)
But my favourites are his scenes of London, possibly because they are sufficiently on that line between abstract and representational to allow me to pick out bits I can recognise.
When reading about him I also followed up on one of the artists from whom he draws inspiration – Philips Koninck, 1619-1688, whom I hadn’t previously come across – huge dramatic skies – for example his An Extensive Landscape with a Road by a River………– now that’s a study in clouds for you.
Monet
Monet is famous for his series paintings….I have sat in the Orangery in Paris and immersed myself in his lily ponds, and stood for a good while in the Musee d’Orsay staring at one of his Rouen Cathedral series – you have to see a painting like this close up to realise just how magical it is that artists turn something which looks like a random set of blobs and strokes close up into this fantastic picture full of light and shadow – there seems to be a key point as you gradually step back from it when it all snaps into focus.
I found a great book – Ganz & Kendall (2007), The Unknown Monet, Pastels and Drawings,Yale University Press – which talked about the way Monet had “managed” his personal image, not liking to acknowledge that he drew, but that on a visit to London his canvases hadn’t arrived and so he did a series of drawings in pastels – this led the authors to seek out Monet’s other pastel drawings, many of which had gone almost unacknowledged by him and of which little is known about many. I found the book very heartening – his pastel drawings are loose and scribbly, rather like mine! – this one of several of clouds is an example.
His Waterloo Bridge, (1901), Pastel, Villa Flora, Winterthur, Switzerland, has the same misty atmosphere with recognisable features emerging from the gloom the more you look, as the drawings of John Virtue a century later.
Cezanne
I looked for information about Cezanne’s works in series in the landscape in C. Lloyds, 2015, “Paul Cezanne, Drawings and Watercolours”, Thames and Hudson Ltd.
A good example was his Mont Sainte-Victoire pictures, “which soon became a symbol of such personal significance for the artist” – he would draw a range of different subjects, e.g. a Chateau, an abandoned quarry, his studio – all in view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Gasquet wrote: “…..everywhere, at the horizon of every plain, at the end of every road, from one hill to another, the sight of Saint-Victoire entered Cezanne’s fresh eyes.”
I particularly liked this drawing: Mont Sainte-Victoire seen beyond the wall of the Jas de Bouffan, 1885-88, pencil and watercolour, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; I liked the way he has fitted his focus mountain in between the foreground tree trunks, showing minimal foliage except mid-top, effectively creating a framing arch for his focus, drawing the eye throughthe trees to the mountain in the distance.
Raymond Pettibon
I hadn’t heard of this artist and didn’t know his work at all; but I soon found a massive book about his work: Gioni & Carrion-Murayari (eds)(2017), A Pen of all Work, Raymond Pettibon, Phaidon, The new Museum. All the artist’s work is annotated by him to a greater or lesser extent (although I have to confess that the messages the annotation was meant to convey weren’t always clear to me), and his works are mostly entitled “No Title” followed by remarks in brackets. The editors seem to have selected works around a theme and the book presents them together, e.g. the “train” pictures. This one: No Title (Its steady, downward), 1966, pen and ink on paper, reminded me a bit of the JMW Turner painting, Rain, Steam & Speed(1884), oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.
I also found a series of “cathedral” pictures (which made me think of Monet and his Rouen series), e.g. No Title (If we can…), 2008, pen, ink and gouache on paper, Private collection, courtesy Houser and Wirth.
Clearly speculating here, but looks as though Pettibon was good at what we art students are urged to try – studying the works of historic painters and then developing their ideas further to suit his own style and convey his own messages.
Kurt Jackson
This contemporary painter is a great favourite of mine and has been for many years; he was based in the far West of Cornwall and has now opened his own gallery in St-Just-in-Penwith. His current exhibition (see postcards and notes in my A4 sketchbook) is a whole series of paintings on the Helford River (Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek), which have been done at different times of day and night, different states of the tide, different times of year, and different viewpoints. I particularly enjoy his pictures depicting mud and rotting trees – he has been known to incorporate bits of the physical landscape (mud, twigs, stones, feathers, etc) into his work – something which I might consider trying.
David Hockney
I saw a David Hockney exhibition a couple of years ago in Paris at the Pompidou Centre – it was a retrospective going back to his very early pictures, but I have to say the work I liked best was his most recent iPad landscapes. I found out on www.royalacademy.org.uk that his series of pictures of Yorkshire was commissioned by them in advance – as he says in a video on the website, a gamble on their part and his, with so much space to fill; but fill it he did. His work is bright, vibrant, done with zingy acidic colours that often don’t quite fit the object/place they are depicting – but the images have defined a little-known area for many art-lovers.
Peter Doig
Some of Doig’s work seems very strange and otherworldly – more than a touch of Odilon Redon about him. He often has you looking through things or around things to get to the focal point of the picture. In the book J. Nesbitt (ed) 2008, Peter Doig, Tate, I found a series of landscapes where (rather in the fashion of Cezanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire) a particular building is the focus but is seen from different angles and vantage points. Doig calls the building the “Concrete Cabin”, although it was actually l’Unite d’Habitation, the last of Le Corbusier’s buildings to be built, and intended for itinerant workers – see here, Concrete Cabin, 1991-2, oil on canvas, Leicester Arts & Museums Service.
Doig said: “instead of painting the facade of a building and then shrouding it with trees I would pick the architecture through the foliage, so that the picture would push itself up to your eye. I thought that was a much more real way of looking at things, because that is the way the eye looks: you are constantly looking through things, seeing the foreground and the background at the same time.”I can appreciate what he has done, but not sure I would want to draw or paint in his style; I find it somewhat unsettling, almost as if someone is standing right behind you whilst you’re looking at it – I think he means you to have an almost visceral reaction to his images, but to be drawn to look further into them despite yourself.
Just back from lovely St. Ives in Cornwall where we stayed for a couple of days to celebrate our anniversary.
Weather was mixed, sometimes glorious and sometimes pouring, but got some lovely photos from our hotel which I am considering for foreground-midground-background analysis at some stage.
We had a very arty time; some notes here, and see also those in myA4 and A3 sketchbooks.
Tate St. Ives was showing an exhibition of the work of Otobong Nkanga, called “From where I stand”; it’s been on since 21st Sept and will be there until 5th Jan 2020. I read the gallery’s introductory information leaflet over a cup of coffee upon arrival and decided that this was going to be the sort of rather worthy-yet-preachy sort of thing that I wasn’t going to enjoy – so I was delighted to find that I was absolutely wrong….her basic theme was on the taking of minerals from the ground and people’s consumption of those minerals and the effect thereof, but:
She works in a huge diverse range of media – performance, woven textiles, drawing, photography, video and audio, installation…..
The size and scale of her work – the new wing at Tate St. Ives is pretty big, but her work filled it
Her interest in mapping and representing complex interrelationships and connections between people and the land in map-like diagrams was something which appealed to me (being a bit of a map nerd myself) – her pictures really clearly laid out all aspects of a complicated, and global, issue, and presented them for the viewer to reflect on and draw their own conclusions, rather than attempting to impose the artist’s opinions
Her clean lines and neatness and attention to detail also appealed to my tidy nature
I loved her use of bright clear colours – it was interesting the way she had blobs of all the colours she used in the corner of a picture, almost as if recording her palette for posterity
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We mountaineered up Stennack Hill in torrential rain to the Leach Pottery– erstwhile home of the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, their work being continued today by many visiting and resident potters. Quality and style of pottery as wide as ever; was struck by a display about a local lady potter – shame on me, I was sure I would remember her correct name but can’t quite, it was something like Sarah Davidson (oh dear) – anyway, she says that all her designs are based on her drawings, and that even though sometimes it looks as if a design is coming out of her head, she finds she can invariably trace it back to an earlier drawing in one of her sketchbooks – they had a couple of examples of her sketchbooks there, which looked as if they had been constantly carried around in her pocket, they were very battered and absolutely stuffed with reference material – a role model if ever I saw one.
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The Penwith Gallery was having its 70th Anniversary Exhibition (5th October – 2nd November) – an old pilchard factory has been converted into a beautiful space, surprisingly large and well-lit. A wide range of paintings, ceramics and sculpture was there to wander amongst, but I found three contemporary artists, all of differing styles, whose work I liked, and whose styles were very clearly developed:
Sally Spens: she had a set of etchings on display relating to the Venice Biennale, where she had observed corners, gateways and so on – but she had a series of moon jar designs which I loved – the shape of moon jars has always appealed to me, and her oriental designs were very pleasing – she obviously draws carefully with clean lines. On her website,www.sallyspens.com, she says: “Drawing has always been central to my practice, both as a textile designer and as a painter/printmaker. It is important to me that the images are handmade, and originate from my drawings and experience. “
Mary Ann Green: I found a card of hers, a picture called “In the Silent Fold of the Land” – it’s a landscape with not much obviously going on, but she has made it interesting by shading some parts in detail and others not at all, and by introducing little bits of colour into what is overall a black and white drawing. I looked her up and found that she is a member of the St Ives Society of Artists; many of her other pictures include this same folded hillside motif.
John Piper, a member of the Penwith Society, also has a motif that appears many times in his work – little rows of Cornish cottages, battered by wind and weather, hunkering into the landscape, absolutely characteristic of West Penwith, the far end of Cornwall. He paints in oil and we liked one of his paintings so much that we bought it! This is “Soft Carn”, and is painted in oils on board. First time I’ve ever owned a painting with a sealed provenance before! Its tones are muted but if you look at it carefully you find little patches of bright pinks and blues – and the view is of an area very close to my heart.
In Silver & Smith, 2011, The Essential Durer, University of Pennsylvania Press, reference is made to how central drawing was to Durer’s practice, and how he would draw every day regardless of the other work in which he was currently engaged, and this must have supported the accuracy and detail of his etching and engraving work in particular. His drawing materials were wide-ranging; basically all the materials we have been encouraged to use in the course so far with the exception, interestingly, of red chalk, which he is not known to have employed. It is said that his choice of drawing medium was always suited to the subject and that for natural subjects including landscapes he would use a brush (allowing for wide sweeps) and watercolour and body colour. His breadth of choice of subject matter is very wide, and no doubt partially dictated by the religious upheavals and scientific blossoming of this day, but apart from his print work he is also known for his watercolour landscapes including weather effects such as The Willow Mill:
Albrecht Dürer, The Willow Mill, 1498 or after 1506, watercolour, bodycolour, pen and ink on paper, 25.3 x 36.7 cm. , Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
I particularly liked this one for it’s sky and it’s foreground tree, both of which I feel I am “working towards” being able to produce.
However, a lot of his landscape work in his etchings and engravings seems to be as the background to a foreground human event, either real or imagined; I watched a video on YouTube about the etching: Durer, 1518; Landscape with Cannonput up by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in which a huge amount of background landscape detail is put into a scene populated by numerous figures as well as said cannon.
I was fascinated also by the engraving: Durer, 1514; Melancolia I which, as pointed out by Hockney & Gayford in their 2016 work A History of Pictures, Thames and Hudson, contains a massive amount of hatching detail – just look, for example, at that calendar on the rear wall!
I was also attracted to Durer’s 1503 work, The Large Piece of Turf, watercolour and gouache on paper, Grafische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna – so fresh, looks as if it were painted yesterday. According to de Botton & Armstrong, Art as Therapy, Phaidon, “..Durer hoped that, having looked at his work, one would head outside and do what he had originally done: to look with great care and devotion at some significant aspect of the natural world.”
Well, it’s done it for me.
Claude Lorrain
Claude became famous for his works evoking “nostalgic beauty” (E.H. Gombrich, 1988, The Story of Art, Phaidon). He likes, as de Botton & Armstrong (see above) suggest, “…glimpsing a horizon through a cluster of trees,,,” – and his trees are certainly very lifelike. Gombrich says “It was Claude who first opened people’s eyes to the sublime beauty of nature, and for nearly a century after his death travellers used to judge a piece of real scenery against his standards. According to Franny Moyle, 2016 in The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of JMW Turner, Penguin, Turner was exposed to Claude’s print works as a child and, as an adult and already established artist he showed that he admired Claude’s work and tried to emulate something of his grand style.
Hockney and Grayling (see above) point out the beauty of Claude’s composition, saying that his paintings were very theatrical: “His placing of trees or architecture on the right and left and the deep space in the middle is very much like a set behind a proscenium arch” – an example seen here in Claude’s 1682 painting, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the stag of Sylvia, oil on canvas, Ashmolean Museum.
I think this last remark chimes with me – I can appreciate the complete virtuosity of Claude’s rendition of trees, clouds and the like, but his paintings overall don’t particularly appeal to me as they feel very posed. I also have a horrible feeling that, if I sat down to paint “a landscape”, my initial attempts at composition would be very similar – something I must bear in mind.
In an online article by Jeanette Winterson from The Guardian, 13th June 2013 it quotes Lowry as saying: ““It would be about four o’clock and perhaps there was some peculiar condition of the atmosphere or something. But as I got to the top of the steps I saw the Acme Mill; a great square red block with the cottages running in rows right up to it – and suddenly I knew what I had to paint.” She describes him as “popular, but unfashionable – a deadly combination in the art world”, but she finds the rather repetitive nature of his paintings fascinating, showing what happens to people when they have to deal day-in-day-out with repetitive machines. I found her article brought him to life a bit for me and made me see the point of his flat paintings (she urges us to look for the flash of colour in the flowers in an upstairs window as a sign that the humans are secretly fighting back against the machines) – but I’m not sure that I would want to paint in his style.
George Shaw
I hadn’t come across George Shaw before, and I can see that, in a way, he is the natural successor of Lowry. My initial reactions to his landscape paintings were, I suppose, surprise – he paints realistically, yet why does he paint the landscapes he chooses? Apparently he paints in Humbrol modelling paint, which gives his pictures a modelled sheen – almost as if he were trying to preserve the crashingly mundane scenes around him for posterity, as images to be valued because they represented his life and environment exactly as he saw it. I found an interesting review of his exhibition at the Holborne Museum in Bath written by Johnathan Jones published in the Guardian on 7th February 2019 , very much trying to set Shaw as a product of the dreadful Brexit times we are all going through. This extract caught my eye:
“Yet his meditation on what the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner called “the Englishness of English art”goes deeper than that. Shaw revisits the landscape art of Gainsboroughand Constable that is so often taken as quintessentially British, or English. He haunts the same kinds of woodlands they did and shares their eye for nature; the trees in his paintings have such vivid personalities they can stand in for the absent people. Blossoming in spring or bereft in winter with black finger-like branches twisting against the sky, they are witnesses to his state of mind.
And what a troubled state of mind it is. John Constablesaid he was inspired to paint by his “boyhood scenes”, and so is Shaw. But while Constable grew up in the Suffolk countryside that his paintings immortalise, Shaw grew up in the 1970s and 80s on Tile Hill estate on the outskirts of Coventry. This is the place he obsessively paints. He depicts the house where he lived as a child, a tree he could see out of his window, and woods close to the houses. Tile Hill was designed as a pastoral blend of nature and modern planning. As it has decayed before Shaw’s eyes, it has become a monstrous landscape of disillusion and betrayal.”
In an extract from a statement by Shaw in 2002 I found on www.tate.org.uk, when he was talking about his series of pictures called “The Passion”, he said:
“I started to make these paintings out of a kind of mourning for the person I used to be: an enthusiastic, passionate teenager who read art books and novels and poems and biographies and watched films and TV and listened to music and dreamed. They are paintings of places that were familiar to me in my childhood and adolescence, places in which I found myself alone and thoughtful. They are places in which I forgot things. … I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe.”
Many of his paintings do have that kind of “bemoaning lost youth” initial feel. However, many of his works seem to me to have a light corner or patch of sunshine somewhere or other which possibly points to a more cheerful, less morbidly fatalistic view of life….(just like Lowry with his flowers in the window)?
Sarah Woodfine
Sarah was another contemporary artist whose work I hadn’t come across before. I read a brief biography of her on the Wimbledon College of Arts website (www.arts.ac.uk). It talks about her “heavy and precise” pencil drawing, which combines with her chosen subject matter to “explore imaginary worlds that sit between the familiar and fantastical.”
A picture of hers which I was particularly drawn to (pun!!!) showed a black background with a full moon in one corner and a small caravan in front of what might be fence posts, or might be a stone circle – I can’t immediately find the name or reference for this – but it is a very striking image constructed out of a white circle, a whitish caravan and a few white lines, from which one could develop all sorts of stories.
I did like the recent work she had done using pencil on paper and a range of materials such as steel, perspex and MDF (see details of this work on the Danielle Arnaud gallery website, www.daniellearnaud.com), e.g. Untitled (Branch) II 2015 pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex, apparently incorporating the careful looking and recording advocated by Albrecht Durer and Vija Celmins.
TAKE AWAY POINTS:
The artists that I most relate to from those I have looked at here are Albrecht Durer and Sarah Woodfine; some of their work I find rather fantastical and weird, but their look-see-record ethos (which chimes in also with Vija Celmins’ approach) is to be developed
From my rather unexpectedly adverse reaction to Claude (which I did have beforereading Hockney and Gayford, honestly…), I need to think more carefully about compositions other than the traditional which first present themselves
I started off with a distinctly unexpansive landscape, but one where I could sit comfortably at a table and chair – my back walled garden. It was a lovely sunny afternoon but shadows are stronger as the sun gets that little bit lower towards the end of September and the garden really is enclosed all the way round by walls and hedges except for one path through, so I felt that a bold medium was called for; I chose Chinese brush and ink. These are the views from West, North, East and South.
I actually went so far as to put the timer on 15 min each time on my phone – this did focus the mind and banished dithering but has led to some fairly wild brush strokes – expressive, certainly, but not always very clear. What I did enjoy was trying to find characteristic quick brush strokes to suggest the leaves of the different trees – bamboo (surprise!), cherry and maple came out the best, I think.
I have noticed, looking back at these drawings now as photographs, that my focal points have been distant (the old stumpy hazel in the first picture, although this wasn’t actually very far away, it just blocks the real distant view) or middle distant (the vase, the bench and the umbrella) – I have never chosen anything in the foreground and, indeed, I’ve made a fairly sketchy job of indicating the near ground, if I’ve done it at all. Not sure if this matters, but it’s an observation…..
Yesterday looked like being a glorious day so my husband and I headed off up the road onto the edge of Dartmoor. We have a favourite place to sit about 10 min walk from the car park which offers panoramic views, so seemed perfect for this exercise – it is called Feather Tor, but we call it Bench Tor as it is a much-loved resting place before striding off deeper onto the moor. My husband duly strode whilst I set myself up to draw. Unfortunately, what was a glorious sunny day in Tavistock turned out to be the same on Feather Tor with the addition of a ferocious easterly wind so that everything had to be clutched in an iron grip – the joys of plein air.
I had prepared four pages in my sketchbook with a very loose watercolour wash of the characteristic colours of the moor – blue sky (sometimes), shades of green and brown. There is the grey of the granite as well but this is specific to the placement of the rocks and, as I didn’t want to limit myself to making the sketch fit the colours of the background, I didn’t include this. Sometimes the drawing serendipitously matched the background (e.g. the first picture), but in others it didn’t – I was pleased that this didn’t bother me too much; when I first started out on the course, it would have freaked me out slightly as not being perfect! – so some progress is being made….
I had taken a range of materials up with me but, in view of the howling gale, decided to stick with an unfussy drawing pen which I could keep hold of. I wondered if it would show up sufficiently against the background, but I think it does. I also set myself a timer and changed views every 15 min on the dot – partly to avoid hypothermia, it has to be said.
The landscape invites one to choose distant tors as a focal point, which I did in the first and third drawings; my focus in the second sketch was Vixen Tor which was more mid-ground, and in the final sketch I took Feather Tor, where I was sitting (hence very much foreground) as my focus. I had taken a viewfinder up with me intending to try it out – but because of the windy conditions I basically needed to sit on all my possessions apart from sketchbook in one hand and pen in the other.
Sheep abound on this part of the moor; they are very curious animals. When I started drawing they were some distance away; however, by the time I got to the fourth drawing they had sneaked so close as to be right in front of me – ostensibly ignoring me and cropping the turf but secretly, I think, hoping to eat anything that blew away whenever I moved.
What have I learned from this exercise? I’m not sure – I feel I already understood how a view can change just by turning a little. What would be more interesting would be to repeat a view in different weather conditions, and possibly without the bright and cheery background colouration, but just black and white – this would capture the same view but in different moods and lights (and allow me to work more on my developing library of clouds structures!)
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 was not so much a walk as a Friday afternoon session at Whitchurch art group. The hall we use is set on the edge of the village and has windows on four sides – I thought this would be perfect for trying to get all four pictures done in one 2-hour afternoon session (allowing time for tea, chats and looking at each others’ work).
I started off with this view through the fence (foreground), over someone’s garden with greenhouse (midground) and away to the distant hills. I decided to work throughout this exercise in a fat Pitt drawing pen, the idea being that I wouldn’t get too bogged down with fiddly details. The pen was good for expressive sweeping marks, lovely scribbly hedges and dark patches for the “negative space” part of the trees; less good for the detail of the fence – but I think I’ve got enough of that in to convey the fact that it’s a fence casting shadows, so OK. Notice that I’m also trying to work my clouds in!
My next view was from the opposite direction, which was basically one half of a slate-hung cottage with an older stone building behind and a hedge in front. I have tried to note here the shadows (e.g. of the drainpipe on the wall) and the various textures, as well as get to grips with the perspective (i.e. lines leaning the right way).
The next view was effectively between both of the earlier views – I wanted to get the “procession” of roofs in. Again, I looked to notice tone (shadows) and make quick notes about the surface texture.
I went to the windows on the far side of the building; these have shrubs/trees growing right outside them, and I had hoped to be able to see the view behind through the foliage – but not to be, I’m afraid. So I turned to a photo on my phone of a recent stay at a rather crumbling but characterful old stately home near Penzance just which had started offering B&B as a means of paying its way – we stayed there recently, and I took a photo of my husband in the gardens in front of the house in late afternoon light – strong, dark shadows. The brush pen was great for the really dark darks, but a bit clumpy for mid- and light shadows so I think some of the bits of detail I did put in have become slightly unclear.
TAKE AWAY POINTS:
I enjoyed the fast sketching – need to do lots more to get better at going “big picture” and getting down the main details
I need to remember to step away part-way through a drawing and look at perspective – I am getting better, and slightly more confident, at seeing which way the lines lean when near to the horizontal (something I have struggled with and am still not 100% accurate), but I haven’t got that tapering into the distance, e.g. the house in the 4th drawing doesn’t taper, and I can see that clear as day now from my photo of it – need to get better at seeing it at the time!
In our Google Meet discussion on my Assignment 2, my tutor and I agreed that my original submission did not really tick the “expressive” box – very much as I had indicated in my blog reflecting thereon.
I said as part our our discussion that I wanted to take bringing more expressiveness into my work as a target for my next unit – so, in that spirit, I decided to rework the Assignment piece. I went bigger (A2 as against the previous A3), choosing Canson pastel paper in a yellow shade which served two purposes – it was almost exactly the shade of the background walls reflected in the mirror, and also it acted as a light mid-tone rather than working on stark white.
I wanted to work more loosely as well – I became quite “buttoned up” and obsessive about colour choice with my coloured pencils – so I decided to set myself a little rule to just work with whatever was on my art table – serendipitously this comprised of a rather battered inch of charcoal and a handful of Conte crayons in white, greys, blues and browns – perfect, I thought. I decided that, rather than setting up the composition again, I would work from the photograph of my original – a good test of its accuracy! – but I simplified it by taking out some of the background clutter in the mid-section and losing the lipstick, which I had struggled with before. I also moved the pear right to the front edge of the picture to make a kind of pathway in – not quite sure whether this has completely worked as the natural diagonal of the composition is the other way, led by the angle of the mirrors – but worth a try as I think it’s made a bit of a zig-zag in now.
I didn’t have a yellow or green on my art table when I got to the fruit, so I just grabbed a yellow gouache from the nearby box (I had been using the white for my Part 3 cloud studies). This proved to be a lovely vibrant colour for the lemon and, mixed in with a bit of charcoal, made an acceptable green for the pear.
I tried to work quickly and loosely, although there was a need for some control as the mirror, with each section set at a different angle, was quite a complicated structure, and I wanted to convey it with some accuracy. It was definitely a good idea to simplify the central section; this was quite cluttered in the original.
The whole thing took me about 2 hours, rather than the two days of the first effort. Am I pleased with it? – yes, I think so – I certainly enjoyed doing it much more and I hope this shows through. I think perhaps the completed assignment should comprise both pieces as fairly distant points on a continuum from “tight detail” to “loose and free” – I’m not sure I could have gone too much further toward the “loose” end without making the structure of the mirror unclear.
What have I learnt from the re-working? First of all, trust your gut – when I was slogging through the pencil drawing my gut kept saying “Stop this and try something else” but my brain kept saying “You’ve put all this time in, you need to finish it.”
Also, I’ve learnt the value of starting again – I’ve always been someone who likes to finish a task and move on – but I have enjoyed going back and think I have improved as a result.
On Monday evening this week, I went to a workshop at Tavistock Group of Artists, on the subject of Abstract Art. I should point out that this was the second, and practical, session on the subject led by Martin Bush, a local artist (www.martinbush.co.uk); he had given a talk on Abstract Art at an earlier session which I couldn’t attend as I had been in hospital.
He demonstrated his method, no doubt simplified, for us all to have a go at. He encouraged us to warm up with some mark-making, urging us to loosen up and channel our inner 6-year-old (see my A4 sketchbook), and then to transfer some of these marks we liked into paint – acrylics are his chosen medium and are what we tried out. He works large, applying the paint direct to the paper from the tube, and then dragging and swirling it with tools such as credit cards and plasterers’ scrapers.
I started off with some acrylic pens lent to me by my neighbour, but was soon accused of reverting to drawing (!) so went for it…first swirl looked a bit like a peacock so I again reverted and tried to add marks to make it look more like a peacock. Eventually a credit card was placed in my hand and a new piece of paper placed before me and I started again, getting into the swirling and streaking. It was fun, but I wasn’t sure where I was going with it.
Martin clearly enjoys doing this and is not at all precious about his work; when asked how he knows which way is up when he has finished a piece, he gave the impression that he didn’t really care which way up a client hung his work so long as they paid for it. He was very open that he specifically look for saleable areas in his canvases, and is happy to cut them up or discard them if he doesn’t think someone will buy them.
TAKE-AWAY POINT:
It is I suppose very easy to seem judgemental, art for art’s sake and all that, and one must credit Martin with being completely honest and upfront about his motivation – and he clearly really enjoys his technique. I have no understanding of Abstract Art and, whilst I didn’t gain much from this session, it was really interesting to see what other members at the session had done with the same input; I had pretty much copied his method and metaphorically shrugged as if to say, well that was quite fun but I’ve done it, what’s next – whereas others had been inspired to branch out, take bits of what he said and use it in different ways – true creatives. I am just starting to dip my toes into innovation, but too easily lapse into being led – I need to take bits that interest ME and develop them, without worrying about straying from the path.
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This morning I went to a demonstration at the West Devon Group of Artists on Dartmoor Landscapes; this was led by another local artist, Laure Bury (www.laurebury.com), who works in acrylics and oils. What follows is a transcription of my handwritten notes, then my reflections.
Important to get out on the moor before thinking about painting; use all the senses to experience it, bring back bits, take photos for use back in the studio as guidelines for shape e.g. of tors
Often uses a black gesso background, but today is putting down a blue acrylic background
Divides her canvas fairly exactly into thirds when placing main features
Thinks carefully about composition, making sure there is room for the sky to be “something”, for her tor background, and for the foreground, which is her main focus and which she likes to be vibrant
She uses mainly palette knives to paint with
She paints around the sides of the canvas (so that it isn’t essential that it’s framed) and paints the base in black gesso. Paint the sides as you go along – you might not be able to re-make exactly the same mix otherwise
Don’t try and control everything, or your painting will look laboured
Walk away if you start to get tired – come back to it another time rather than spoil it
Always spends time on the base layer, which is always acrylic
Doing a course at the Newlyn School of Art – this has supported her in changing her subject matter (to birds), and to go back to using brushes sometimes, which she hasn’t really done for ten years
Occasionally uses textured media – the sand medium is good for the granite rocks of Dartmoor
Moves from acrylics to oils for the top layers – likes the freedom to be able to walk away and come back to the painting the next day
Repeats the rough design of her base layer but in oils, although leaving some of the acrylic showing through
Uses some metallic paints – these are more expensive, but you only need a little so it goes a long way
Indanthrene blue (Winsor & Newton) – very good for Devon skies
Comes up with a real “story” for her sky – “….brooding over here…the rain back here….lighter over here…”
She sells more now online than in galleries, especially through a website called artfinder, where she has sold 38 paintings
Be true to yourself and what you like painting. Enjoy what you are doing – if you are led by what sells you get stuck in a trap
After the sky, tackles the horizon and background, sometimes blending in the wet paint from the sky so you can’t see exactly where the rain ends and the land begins. Does this bit with a brush – uses both flats and rounds
Generally uses clear varnish rather than gloss (occasionally uses matt). Need to wait 9 months before you can varnish it
Continues with the same colours from the sky and background into the foreground
Usually works on several paintings at a time – helps to keep them fresh
Foreground – leave bits of base colour showing through
Likes cadmium yellow pale hue and lemon yellow. Tends to mix her greens rather than use pre-made greens
Uses small pointed palette knife to scratch into the foreground to indicate grasses
Heather and gorse applied with old toothbrushes – puts the painting on the ground and flicks
Keep walking away and revisiting to decide exactly how much of your base layer you need to cover. Less is more – you can always add (although odd splashes you don’t want can be removed with a cotton bud)
Laure obviously loves her painting and gets this enthusiasm over to others. She was honest about feeling a bit stuck in her art and seeking help to move on, e.g. wanting to paint birds but not knowing how to make the leap and going on the Newlyn course to help her over this. Despite all this, she is obviously aware of her market and, whilst not being as overt about selling her work for ready cash as Martin was, she is very ready to talk about it and her website invites commissions.
TAKE AWAY POINTS:
Be true to yourself and what you like painting; Laure said that, when she moved to Devon from Mexico via Spain she was advised many times to tone down the vibrancy and bright colours of her work – but she has stuck with it because that is her love, and others are now seeing it too. This is very much the point that my tutor Rachel was making to me – I shouldn’t be ruled by a subject, but should make the subject fit my style.
I talked to Laure about the clouds and how easily she had created them out of her head when I have (I thought) been grafting away with little success – she laughed and told me it comes from years of practice. I think I become a bit discouraged when I can’t do something first time, whereas what I need to do is stick with something which hasn’t worked, analyse what hasn’t worked and try out different things to improve it.
This has been overall a fun if slightly frustrating exercise; fun because it was quite free, and frustrating because, whenever I thought I had a bit of time for cloud drawing, it seemed to be either unremittingly sunny or else the sky was a uniform greyish-white accompanied by rain in varying degrees. Often I would see an interesting cloud formation when I was on the way somewhere – so there has been some shameless drawing from photos, both mine and those of others.
Dramatic stormy clouds (other than the uniformly grey variety) have come from books – but I have chosen images which exemplify real dramatic scenes which I have seen to have a go at: the lowering clouds which seem to process over you into the distance (where it is still raining), but lit by a sunny moment; and the massive evening stormy cloud passing away, allowing light from a setting sun to show around.
I did both of these with a chunky 2B pencil – this was generally fine for the task, although I did struggle to get the darkest darks quite as intense as I wanted.
Wispy sunny-day clouds directly overhead have proven more of a challenge than you would have thought. These are generally darker towards the centre where the thickness is greatest. I had a go at using blue watercolour paint on a white ground to try and paint the cloud in as negative shapes, with variable success (see notes in A4 sketchbook). Then I experimented with different media over a blue watercolour wash (see here), where I found the most successful media were white and grey Conte crayons (lower left), and white gouache applied with a palette knife and my finger (right).
I was on the lookout for interesting composite cloud formations (as I had seen depicted in pictures by Alfred Munnings – see notes in A4 sketchbook and blogpost on a weekend in West Cornwall). These often seemed to appear towards late afternoon/evening – I snapped a couple of interesting skies and tried drawing them from my photos.
I was determined that oil pastels would be good for this rather dramatic sky taken from our car about to crest a hill. I tried an overlaying technique (loose darks first, then circular strokes with the white crayon – this linked with the Vila Celmins research, as this is the same stroke I used for my tree foliage – and then I repeated the circular strokes with a paper torchon). I became rather absorbed in the process rather than the outcome and the dark clouds on the right ended up a bit odd; but on the other hand I was quite pleased with the billowing quality of the lighter clouds on the left.
This was a quick 10-min sketch of a dramatic sky I saw as I walked through Tavistock to my art group meeting yesterday evening. The sketch is done with a huge chunky graphite stick which was new to me – great for big areas using the flat end, but also sharp edges for lines and emphasis. Enormously enjoyable!
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