Coursework – Page 6 – Flora OCA drawing 1

Part 3 | Project 1 | Exercise 1 & 2 : sketching individual trees & observational study

Around the time of this exercise I went to Epping forest camping with friends which was pretty great timing! In Ottilie’s naps me and my brother went out sketching, this first image was my first attempt – the difficulty with sketching in a forest is that it’s very difficult to get a view of the entire tree! I also found the quick sketch much more difficult and it turned out more like an observational study. It was brilliant however for awakening my enthusiasm – I’d really had very little interest in drawing trees before this but drawing this one I suddenly saw how like it is to drawing a body with all the bulges and peculiarities, something I’ve always loved.

Another really brilliant thing about sketching with my brother was being able to see how he drew – he’s a brilliant draftsman and he uses the pencil in a completely different way to me – often using it’s side which I hadn’t done before. The next day we went out again this time sketching a big tree on the edge of our campsite and I tried a different approach and was so pleased with the results.

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I then had a go at the larger observational study and went for pen and ink, _MG_1754

I loved this, again I couldn’t get the whole tree but I built on the previous sketches and felt like I got it’s personality well with all it’s crags and crevices.

A couple of weeks later I found an isolated tree in a park and revisited the skethces exercise as I didn’t feel I’d followed it to the letter and wanted another go where I could see the shape of the whole tree. I don’t like these drawings half as much but I did find them really useful for building confidence, understanding the structure and seeing my own development. Unfortunately I had to cut the last sketch short but the difference between that and the first of these four sketches is so vast I think it’s still useful to include.

Coursework, Notes, Part 3, Research & Reflection, Uncategorized

Part 3 | Research: Artists dealing with landscape

As with still life landscape never used to inspire me particularly, or rather I would enjoy other peoples work but it never really excited me in the same way that portraiture of life drawings would and certainly I never felt much temptation to do any myself. All of my previous attempts at landscape have left me incredibly frustrated at my complete inability to translate something so lovely on to paper, but I’ve looked forward to being forced to address that! It’s good to have an opportunity to research other peoples work to see what it is that does inspire me.

I looked first as suggested at the work of Albrecht Durer – I found his watercolours oddly emotive. Something of their simplicity coupled with the age of them makes you feel that you are getting a true view in to another time that is otherwise completely lost. Often older paintings feel heavy with the hang-ups of their time – they need to be to a certain level or showing a particular kind of image and I don’t fee; that at all with these, it’s more like a snapshot image of how it looked. (See View of Nuremberg for reference.)

I looked next at Claude Lorrain’s designed landscapes – the polar opposite! These are incredibly beautiful and so full of drama, just the trees themselves seem regal and lifted out of the ordinary into something quite different. However the image I loved most was one of his sketches Landscape with Bridge which doesn’t have anything of that precision and premeditation to it – it’s just a beautifully done quick work more reminiscent of Edward Ardizonne.

I don’t think you can research Landscape without mentioning John Constable. His paintings have been so overused that it can be hard to see them for what they are but he was an extremely competent painter. Again these have that idealised rather too perfect look that does very little for me but his sketches (Such as Sketch of a Lane at East Bergholt) show how easily he captured light and colour.

L.S. Lowry as a rule I really do not like. There are aspects of his work that are interesting but I find the cartoonish people completely off putting. I can see he did something interesting by showing landscapes that up until then had been uncelebrated but it isn’t enough for me to be able to see past the people, I find them slightly grotesque – although perhaps they are meat to be.

Stanley Spencer in contrast really does do it for me! His garden and local landscape paintings are much more detailed and realistic than my usual taste I think but he does it beautifully and there is so much to look at! He often gives a lot more focus on the foreground than some landscape artists too which could be interesting to have a go at. My parents recently moved out of the old farm house that I grew up in – that would have been a perfect subject for this type of work, I might have a go from photographs – not at all the same but still useful practice.

Rickett’s farm, Cookham Dene – Tate.

Paul Nash is another artist that’s really exciting for me. Regretfully I missed his recent exhibition at the Tate and I heard such brilliant things about it, but I’ve done a fair bit of looking at his work since. His more surreal approach involving unlikely objects in the landscapes could be really interesting to play around with. Often he places something right at the foreground – whether it’s an object or selected plants – it is very obviously staged but in a really pleasing way. One of his most famous pieces Landscape of the Summer Solstice is a good example, it shows too his lovely use of very toned down colour which again I’d like to have a go at.

I came across Charles Mahoney’s Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden recently and really loved it, again bringing fiction in but in a really fantastic and beautiful way. Adding figures to the landscape changes it completely too – I’m not sure I’m confident enough for that yet but I think that mix is something I’d really enjoy. As well as complete fantasy such as this he did a lot of really wonderful landscapes of daily life – brick fields or a school house – again that’s something I could look at.

Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Charles Mahoney – Tate

From a drawing point of view his study for Adam and Eve is interesting too – lovely use of ink and wash which is my current favourite media.

Study for Adam and Eve, Charles Mahoney – Tate

One of my absolute favourite contemporary artists is Paul Jackson, he does beautiful landscapes oil that are both intricate and very simple and he exhibits regularly in Sussex but he also does a lot of collage which he doesn’t generally sell but that I also love. I find these particularly inspiring as a different approach and way of almost painting with paper. This unnamed collage is from his Shipping Forecast collection on his Flickr account and is particularly impressive as a way of capturing clouds.

Shipping forecast, Paul Jackson – Flickr

I hadn’t come across George Shaw before and found his work really interesting. I can’t work out if I like it or not. There’s something I find a bit gross about photorealistic painting but I do like his choice of subjects – he has a real photographer’s eye for beauty in unlikely places, I’d like to see his photographs! I’ll never be a photorealistic painter but I would like to try more subjects of this type and living in Tottenham there’s no shortage of them!

Sarah Woodfine is another new artist for me and although I really like her approach I don’t generally like her work, it’s a little cartoonish for me though I think too that it would probably have more impact seen in the flesh. It has made me want to try using paper for a 3D landscape though – perhaps just cut paper or collage, or possibly trying to create layers of different texture with fineliner. Something to come back to.

Assignment 2, Assignments, Part 2, Uncategorized

Assignment 2

For this assignment I chose to do the interior of my bedroom as seen through the doorway. It’s such an emotive subject for me – I love my bedroom, the colours and the light and all of Ottilie’s stuff amongst mine – it always gives me pleasure as I pass the doorway. I had a fair idea of how I wanted it to be so did some experimenting with mixed media to see if I could get the effects I wanted and did a few drawings of my room in preparation trying different view points.

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I tried a bit of very simple collage in this marker drawing to see what impact that would have and really liked the effect – I considered doing something similar in the assignment piece but decided against it in the end which I think it was the right decision for the media I’d chosen. It’s great with marker though and I like the drawing both with and without colour in different ways. A3 (2 x A4 pages)

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This one were it to have a name would be called “The marital bed” and was drawn on the first page of the first draft of our separation agreement! It seemed apt. Markers again and oil pastel, A4.

This is my final piece! It’s around A1 on very nice drawing paper I was given a little stack of – much better for mixed media than the paper I’d been using previously. I am SO pleased with how this has turned out, it has so much of the feeling of my room and is by far my most successful use of pastels – the loose style that I really love works really well here, it felt much more natural after the previous few exercises. I used mixed media – pastel with a wash and watercolour as a base, then pastel over the top with some working in with paintbrush and water and then ink and brush and marker pens to finish.

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Assessment criteria:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills – I hope I would score well on this criteria, I feel like this is a very accurate depiction of my room right now but has maintained the liveliness of my style of work. I think I chose an interesting and challenging composition and the right mix of media to draw the attention in to the room and pay homage to the colours there. I think being critical I might look at the door frame and door again – I wanted them to be be more simply done and less sharp so that they’re almost out of focus to the eye and I liked the slight wonkiness to all of the lines but I think looking at it scaled down on the computer that a little less wonkiness on the lines of the door frame and a sharper line on the door edge itself would only improve it.

Quality of outcome – I really love how this has turned out so I would hope to score well here. On this point I often try to think “would I buy this” and in this case I definitely would, which certainly isn’t always the case!

Demonstration of creativity – I hope I would score well here – I It feels like my style is very present here and I really like the way it’s come through. I tried to experiment and to use media that before this course I had little-to-no experience of and I feel it’s worked really well.

Context reflection – I think this shows influence from the artists I’ve been researching, particularly in the still life research and also from the recent Van Gogh exhibition I went to. I’ve found that a lot of the art I’m most interested in made me really want to paint and probably as a result this has come out with the feeling of a painting!

Looking back at Part 2 as a whole I think could have experimented a lot more in the exercises themselves. I found that I got so into pastels in the last bit and so focused on getting the exercises done in time that I just forgot to try other media and other paper a lot of the time, remembering towards the end and suddenly re-discovering ink but a little too late! I would have liked to do some proper collage work too but can take that into part 3 which I think it will suit very well anyway. My head has been all over the place for much of this section as I’m also in the middle of buying my ex out of our flat which will be ongoing throughout the summer. I’m finding the art incredibly therapeutic which is great but I think that also means that I am doing it all unthinkingly and that probably has its downsides as well as upsides.. time will tell!

EDIT: Realised the stupidity of submitting an assignment piece where I could see areas of improvement so have neatened the doorway and it’s looking much better for it – here’s the improved version. It’s all going in the post today so no more edits!

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Coursework, Part 2, Research & Reflection, Uncategorized

Research point | negative space

I’ve started reading drawing with the left hand side of the brain – of only to give little exercises to do on days when I haven’t got time for a coursework exercise but still need a bit of inspiration to get my daily drawing dose! One of the first exercises was to draw the vase/faces illusion made famous by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin – very topical for negative space! This made me immediately think of Escher and his negative space illusions – not an artist working today but certainly interesting as a different approach.

The other artist that immediately came to mind was David Hockney and particularly his oh so famous work A Bigger Splash (Below, Tate). What he does so well here is to cut up the canvas into big chunks of colour making the relationships between those spaces a focus of the work. It works especially well with the finer detail of the splash itself for contrast.

A Bigger Splash 1967 by David Hockney born 1937

I did a bit of screen-printing not so long ago and that was really useful for looking at positive and negative space because by the very nature of printing you have to give negative space equal consideration and really see the shapes it creates. A contemporary artist I looked at recently David Ainley uses broad shapes in his work in a similar way so that the lines between positive and negative space are blurred and you’re invited to view the picture as a whole rather than as objects and backgrounds or positive and negative. You can see this clearly in Two Spires, Limestone Quarry. (Below, Axisweb)

DAVID AINLEY two spires limestone quarry

An image that uses negative space in a particularly interesting way is Barbara Walker’s Exotic Detail in The Margin #2 (Below, Jerwood Arts) where there is such emphasis on the negative space left like missing jigsaw pieces to tell a story to the viewer. This could be an interesting idea particularly for me right now having had so much change in my life recently and with one piece of my previous life now very much absent!

BARBARA WALKER Exotic-Detail-In-Margin

Coursework, Part 2, Uncategorized

Part 2 | Project 4: Exercises 2 & 3 – composition – an interior

For this exercise we were asked to try out variations of composition to find which view point we would work up into a finished piece. I went back to the sideboard and worked in conte mapping out the areas of light and shade and playing with slightly altered viewpoints. Here are three of my sketches – I actually liked the first a lot more than I though I would – I think it could make for quite a dramatic image of what is a very mundane view because of the blocks of tone and negative space, I’d like to try that in charcoal at some point. However because this was to be doe in colour I was more drawn this time to the objects on the sideboard and so settled on the last sketch. You can see that in reality the cup was lower but I wanted to make it a more prominent part of the composition so moved it up into the image. I also like the echoing uprights of the bin and the plant in this composition.

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For the second exercise – taking this through to resolution – I chose to work with pastels. Although it’s a material I had almost no experience of prior to this course I’ve really enjoyed getting to grips with it and particularly liked the tonal still life in the previous exercise so hoped I could bring the vivid colours of my sitting room to life in a similar way. I worked it up in A2:

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This was a real pleasure to work on. I feel like each time I use pastels I get more of the effect that I want to achieve – it’s feeling more like painting but with my drawing style coming through too. I’d found previously that I liked pastels best with a base colour so you avoided the white underneath and so with this picture I blocked out athe base colours in pastel, washed over them with a brush and water and then worked into that again with pastel. I was trying to be fairly true to life with the colours in this and I think I’ve achieved that, although in retrospect I think the colours are so bold that it might have been better to use a little artistic licence and tone them down a bit to make a more cohesive picture.

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Part 2| Project 4: Exercise 1 – quick sketches around the home

I LOVED this exercise! Partly just to come to the end of it with such a stack of drawings but also because I know that it’s drawings like this rather than the more finished or carefully composed images that I will come to value in later years. It’s the sort of exercise you should do once a year just to keep a record!

The first one I did in conte but wasn’t feeling it so moved on to pen and stuck with that.

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The drawings themselves aren’t all that but they do give a real feeling for my home as it is now. My favourites are the mirror view in my bedroom and the view directly into Joss’ room with his instruments. Up until then I’d been looking into corners as suggested but it was such a lovely chaotic set up – crying out to be drawn! I cocked up with the window which should have been much taller but in some ways I think the off perspective allows the chaos to rise up on either side even more and adds something to the feeling, worth remembering that perspectives can be stretched for effect although also I need to keep a close eye to make sure it doesn’t happen unintentionally again. The mirror view I like precisely because of the mirror – it always gives so much to a composition with the added depth and repetition – and also because it’s my bedroom which feels to me like the heart of my home right now as both me and my baby Ottilie sleep there.. sleep being a loose term in this context! I will definitely work more on this room.

Looking again at these together I can’t quite see what brought me to choose the sideboard to continue with on the next exercises – it seems the least interesting choice, it’s an area of the flat that I am particularly fond of because of the clutter and it being the spot for a cup of tea so perhaps it was that, but in hindsight I think I ought to have tried something based solely on how interesting the viewpoint was.

Part 2, Research & Reflection, Uncategorized

Research suggestions

I’ve been looking at various artists as I work including the four that were suggested by my tutor which I just wanted to note down here:

Alberto Giacometti – I’ve been to two of his exhibitions in the past and always find him fascinating, even now his work is so distinctive and recognisable. He’s a great one to remember for the people/portrait section particularly but his movement and block backgrounds could help with any of the sections.

Kathe Kollowitz – I’d just been looking at some of her self portraits when I looked at the list of suggested artists and found her name among them! She more so than Giacometti will be especially wonderful to come back to when looking at portraiture, her self portraits are so heavy with emotion, I’d love to be able to convey that in my work.

Tony Cragg (drawings) – I hadn’t heard of Tony Cragg so it’s been nice to be introduced to someone new. I particularly liked his more pattern based (no surprise there!) drawings in ink – some really lovely abstract stuff.

Henry Moore sheep drawings – this was an interesting one for me, I love Henry Moore’s sculptures but his drawings I’m less keen on and particularly his sheep drawings. I like the frenetic playful way he draws but I don’t like how cartoony they are. Maybe partly because I’ve grown up with sheep and think of them as so weatherworn and doleful – I’d really enjoy trying to capture that and I don’t think Henry Moore puts any of that across in his drawings.

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Part 2 | Project 3: Exercise 4 – Monochrome

I wanted to try to find a subject that was already pretty much monochrome and take that as a starting point, I did that but although I captured the objects themselves quite well I really don’t like this as an image. Partly I think it’s my colour bias and especially in relation to the subject – I just don’t really like these colours alone, I would have liked to give them a yellow or green background and the blue surface in particular really jars for me. Whereas in my previous tonal pastel still life the blue surface really added something against the other bright colours here it looks naff to me against the old enamel tin and wonky hand thrown mug both of which would look at home on an old scrubbed kitchen table not an unnatural blue surface. Had I made the surface look like a tablecloth that might have worked better, I could (and may) try that – perhaps with some spots to mirror the pattern on the mug and see if I feel better about it.

I’m also not sure if it strictly counts as monochrome – it’s blue and cream rather than blue and white but perhaps that doesn’t matter so much. I’m also I’m not really keen on the amount of space around the objects; I like busy images where your eyes are drawn to lots of areas at once and in trying to be a little more minimal I think I’ve lost sight of what works and what doesn’t. I’m not sure how possible it would be to totally rework a pastel picture but I might see if it’s possible, it will be an education even if it becomes a total hash. Anyway I am at least pleased with the objects themselves, that’s quite a nice representation of how they look.. if you can look past the background!!

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..so I came back to this and tried changing the table surface to a cloth and it’s much less jarring to me now but I still don’t like it. The tablecloth wasn’t all that successful and I still don’t like the colours.

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Part 2 | Project3: Exercise 3 – experiment with mixed media

I wonder rereading this if I should have used more ‘non-art’ media but I just used whatever I had around the house – I might try it again if I come across anything else I can try but this was what I had available at the time. I used pastel, brush and water, oil pastel, craft enamel paint (really horrible stuff as it turns out – nothing like humbrol enamel which is such fun to use) dip pen and ink and fine liner. I still have no idea if I like this or not, generally I might enjoy it or not while I’m doing it but I’ll only be able to see it objectively (or as objectively as possible) when I come back to it to look again later but I just can’t see this one. I think there are bits that have worked really well – certainly as an exercise in mixed media, the old Mrs Beeton book for example was a test in how to get that effect of an old book and I think that was surprisingly effective – particularly in contrast to the new Anna Jones which is half the reason I’d included both. For the sweetcorn jug I’d envisaged beatiful gleaming droplets of the enamel paint to make the corn effect but actually the paint dried wrinkled and slightly translucent and I had to work over it a lot with pastel and oil pastel to get something of what I was going for, I think the jug did eventually work and I really like the surface of the table with the orange-red highlights but something about it definitely doesn’t work, looking at it again now I think it could just be the background which seems too messy and too busy – I might try painting over it to give it a plain opaque colour background without tonal variation and see what effect that has on the rest of the image ..To be continued!

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Coursework, Part 2, Uncategorized

Part 2 | Project 3: Exercise 2 – still life in tone using colour

I tried a few arrangements of composition for this and eventually went for quite a symmetrical set up which I think worked really well with the subject and colours and my style of drawing – all together it has for me a flavour of the 1920s which I really like. This was my first real test using pastels and actually I was really pleased with the outcome, I still felt a bit like it might have been better painted but saying that I don’t think I would have automatically gone about it in the same way so perhaps it did need to be pastel to get this effect.. either way I wasn’t expecting this to be a work I was pleased with but I really love it.

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