Category: Assignments

Using colour and pattern to convey the joy and intensity of the bond between mother and child, focusing particularly on breastfeeding.

For this project I wanted to show the intensity of the bond between a mother and child and the immense joy that comes with that. At the point of starting the project I had just stopped breastfeeding and for me that was such a powerful thing, I wanted to try to record and convey that while it was still fresh in my mind. During pregnancy you are both part of one body and when you breastfeed it is like returning to one functioning whole and in those moments the rest of the world becomes irrelevant. In order for the drawing to be truly personal to me I wanted to use colour and pattern – both a huge part of who I am – to allow the viewer to see the joy of this relationship through my own personal lens.
I looked at various artists who had dealt with this subject before including the theme of Madonna and child in religious painting and then worked to reinterpret it in my own style. I found that while the Bloomsbury group and Harold Gilman inspired and continue to inspire me with their wonderful use of colour it was Picasso’s line drawings and Matisse’ looser work that came to mind again and again throughout this personal project and it was that loose playful drawing style that I particularly wanted to bring into my work. I started by doing as many line drawings as I could of myself and my daughter so that I would feel comfortable and confident with the subject and then I continued on that theme playing with different media and different compositions so that I was building more complex drawings and adjusting my composition until I found the medium and composition that really excited me and was able to finally combine the two to create my final piece.
My preparatory sketches were all very fast line drawings and were a very mixed bag in terms of technical ability, but while none of them would work as stand alone pieces they did really help to build my confidence and gave me a wealth of compositions and lines to use as starting points for my work. For the composition I focused on circles and circular lines to draw the viewer in to the central subject of mother and child. I ended up doing four variants of this final composition; two initial ink sketches from photographs, then one much more worked up ink drawing using solely those sketches to work from and then finally the finished assignment piece for which I drew out the composition in charcoal using the previous three sketches for reference and then built up the colour using photographs to ensure the colours and shading was just right and to give it real depth. Interestingly the third sketch was so exciting at the time that I wondered if I’d be able to better it for the final piece but looking at it now it seems so washy and so obviously a preparatory sketch whereas the final piece feels very much more polished and precise. The combination of working from preparatory sketches and photographs enabled me to maintain total freedom in composing the drawing while still getting the finer details right.

Here it is! A2 in charcoal, pastel and inks. I feel unbelievably proud of this, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever done and almost makes me want to scrap everything previous which must be a good sign – I want all of my work to be at this level. I nearly ruined it by over-working the skirt but painted over those sections with white ink and actually that added a sense of movement which it didn’t quite have before – thank goodness for white ink! what I feel I’ve achieved in this that I haven’t quite been able to before is to use that loose simplified drawing style that I admire so much in Picasso and Matisse’ work and use exaggerated shapes while still maintaining a likeness. I particularly like the hands and feet in this and while there’s a temptation (for me at least) to add more pattern and not to leave much plain space I think the cleaner simpler style really works for this and makes the patterns that are there pop even more. Of all the pictures I’ve done in this project this is the one that shows best that all-engrossing bond between mother and child which is what I set out to do.

For this Assignment we were asked to do three pieces: a reclining figure (A1) focusing on tone, a seated figure (A1) focusing on line and a portrait or self portrait using a combination. I’ve so enjoyed this part of the course and was really keen to push myself with these assignments – I’ve done studies like this numerous times so I wanted these to be different to show that my work has really grown and developed as much as I feel it has.

I started with the reclining tonal portrait. I asked my housemate to sit for this, we tried various poses and viewpoints before I settled on the final composition.

I had expected to prefer the alternatives but I just really liked the simplicity of this pose and the flow of the shapes. I wanted to use charcoal but to force myself to smudge as this is a technique that I’ve always kept a distance from in the past. It can look SO naff but I’ve realised that lots of really wonderful artists aren’t afraid of smudging and that as part a whole it can have a really brilliant effect and make for a much softer drawing. I experimented with this technique beforehand, with Egon Schiele in mind to help take me away from my usual hard-lined approach.

I still wanted to keep my lively drawing – but to add another dimension to it.
The Assignment piece itself took a couple of hours and I worked on quite smooth paper from my big roll, cut down to the right size and pegged onto a board. The smoothness lends itself to smudging – helpful for this technique although not so helpful for storage! Here it is.

I actually really like this, I decided beforehand to allow myself freedom with my lines – I didn’t want to feel restricted by worrying about making it just so and end up with a stagnant picture and I wanted to be able to exaggerate lines that I felt added structure to the drawing and draw out the soft shapes that worked so nicely in the initial sketch. It’s worked in as much as I’ve made a drawing that I love, it has the essence of Joss, it works as a portrait of him as a musician and gives some of his poise and character but the downside is the Guitar has stretched into slightly silly proportions! I liked that as I was doing it – there was intention in it but I wonder now if to anyone else it just looks like an error. Being critical his head should probably be smaller too from this perspective although again I quite like the added prominence this gives him – he looks regal. What I am really pleased with though are the hands and feet.  These sort of hands – quickly and simply drawn, paw-like with focus on positioning rather than details – I’ve always loved in other peoples charcoals but hasn’t ever worked for me so that was really pleasing. The feet too – much closer and more detailed – work really well with the new smudge technique, it gives them a real roundness and body.

Second I did the portrait – I chose to do a self portrait and I wanted to revisit colour in this one. Being a portrait I thought particularly carefully about what I was saying about myself. Thinking of “At the dressing table” I included elements of my home – books, a photo of my baby, a little pot with a handle and with Gauguin’s self portrait in mind I included some of my drawings as well as one of my baby’s. Cutter, colour and pattern are all part of who I am and I wanted that to show. Remembering Kathe Kollowitz I included my hand too – also because I’ve had a few weeks of extreme stress and drew this at the end of a long day so the pose was absolutely appropriate! I played with the Kathe Kollowitz pose and colour beforehand.

I was looking at using different coloured papers but in the end decided to keep to white for the background. Here it is (A3):

I can’t tell you how much I love this! It is by far my favourite portrait/self portrait and actually I think my favourite drawing full stop! (I know I’ve said that before – which gives me hope, I should be continually producing better!) I looked at some of Matisse’ portraits and nudes at the start of this and loved his easy simple line and use of colours and this has something of what I like about his stuff. My lines felt really confident in this which isn’t always the case, and I love the colours. I also like the distortion that my hand brings to the face too, so that it’s both recognisably me and slightly off. I used quite a different technique in this – building up layers (ink first then pastel) with charcoal between each layer so that it wasn’t only for sketching positioning but was intrinsic to the picture as a whole and gave the final details. I’ll definitely use this technique again.

For the seated figure I wanted to use a coloured background, I’ve done quite a lot of playing with inks on fluorescent paper and I love that effect so knowing I wouldn’t be able to find the colour I wanted otherwise and wanting to play with canvas shape I joined up smaller pieces of paper – it’s ended up slightly longer than A1 but the same width. I worked from life using watered down white acrylic ink with a dippen first, then full strength again with a dip pen and then after the model had left I worked the image up using a paint brush and then red marker to finish it. I wanted it to be bold and fun and to keep the proportions but also to have a naevity to it. I love picasso’s line drawings such as the portrait of Igor Stravinsky which I’d made a recent sketchbook copy of and I had that in mind as I did the final work in red liner. I kept the background much less detailed to draw focus to the figure. I love using dip-pen and am always fairly gun-ho with drops as to me it feels luike they make the image fizz with energy which I love.

Picasso copy (drawn upside down):

Self portrait practising line:

Final piece:

Assessment Criteria:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills: I think these are my strongest assignment pieces yet, particularly the self portrait which is exactly as I would want it to be. I think My strength is in drawing people and I think these show it well  -the proportions are all good though there are small changes that could be made in the reclining figure to show better perspective. That is my mind the weakest of the three and least interesting composition (partly that’s personal taste though – it’s not busy enough for me!) but I’m pleased with my technique in all three.
Quality of outcome: The portrait is really strong, I think the reclining figure seems less interesting when put next to the other two but I was very pleased with it initially – I change my mind! All three came out as I had intended and feel quite striking when seen in person.
Demonstration of Creativity: I think I should score highly in this one – I really pushed myself to do something different and particularly the line drawing and portrait are in quite an unusual format more specific to me.
Context reflection: I thought more about specific art works and artists as I was working in this section – probably because I am more familiar with portraits and so lots came to mind and assisted my process, hopefully that will have shown although I would have loved to do more gallery visits during this bit.

For this assignment I spent an afternoon drawing my current favourite view from my parents’ outbuilding looking out across  Bishops Castle to the hills beyond, and then worked on the assignment piece itself back in my flat in London. Here are three of the preliminary sketches I did:

Charcoal, A3

Dip-pen and wash, A3

Dip-pen and wash, A5

I did a few other sketches but these were the ones I liked, I then played around with the composition in my sketch book before settling on a variant that used a little artistic licence to build height on one side of the page while keeping the church in the middle ground as a focal point.

I put the shapes in with charcoal and built up from there with wash upon wash of ink and finally details with dip-pen. I wanted to try to produce a softer more sensitive work than my other dip-pen drawings and was much more considered in my mark-making.

I liked what I’d done in the composition exercise where I’d repeated a rolling movement across the drawing and so I wanted to continue with that and make another soft stylised landscape. I really enjoyed building up the brush strokes and the way the ink reacted to that method, I came out of it feeling really good about how it had turned out but now that the picture is condensed on a screen in front of me I feel like the dip-pen isn’t a thick enough line to balance the brush work and perhaps a very fine paintbrush or a thicker nib would have finished the picture much more successfully. The lines are so thin as to be almost invisible here. The picture itself is around A1. Other than that I do really like ths, though I wonder if I could have kept more of my liveliness of drawing while still creating the soft rolling landscape.

Assessment criteria:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills – I feel like this is a competent drawing, I set out what I achieved to do with the marks I was making and was sensitive to the type of media I was using and how it is best used.

Quality of outcome – I still feel like I’m deciding how I feel about this one, overall I think it’s a lovely drawing but as I said looking at it on this scale I feel it would have benefited from stronger lines to finish it. I do really love the continuing rolls echoed across the drawing though and it does have a sensitivity that my quicker sketches don’t have.

Demonstration of creativity – I think this does show my progression in developing my personal voice – I’m certainly learning more and more what it is I like and learning too to manipulate what’s in front of me to give it my own style.

Context reflection – I didn’t do as many visits to galleries as I would have like to during this part, I did do a fair amount of research and that really helped me in my work but I don’t know if I wrote up enough about it – I’ve been all over the place these last couple of months with Summer taken up with the endless paperwork that comes with this period of massive change in my personal life and I’ve found it much more difficult to find the time to fit everything in – I think the paperwork side of this course has suffered because of that! hopefully come autumn that chapter will be over and I’ll be able to focus fully on the course.