Category: Research & Reflection

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.

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)

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!

I’ve been doing a little research into still life, primarily finding out what excites me about the genre. I think that along with a large proportion of those who studied art in secondary school I was slightly put off still life by endless rather dull arrangements of apples painted badly by distracted teenagers. I remember wondering what the point was when you could be painting the human form, and even Cezanne not inspiring any enthusiasm! Nowadays often it is the still lifes that make me want to rush home from an exhibition and get out my paints and so I’ve enjoyed picking a few to keep in mind as I continue my studies.

I looked first at the dutch masters for an earlier approach. Still lifes at this date (as with so much of their paintings) seem so dramatic and rich; you can almost reach out and taste the food on the tables and it all looks so wonderful! A real feast for the eyes, but not a style I would be tempted to emulate now. I think of still life now as celebrating the mundane, though perhaps that is unfair; what’s mundane has changed and many of the examples I’ve chosen are far from that anyway. Still, for me at least that celebration of the everyday and giving life to inanimate objects holds more excitement than those fantastically grand earlier works. I do love them still though, and there are plenty of elements that can be drawn from them such as colour and composition – in Still Life with the Drinking-Horn of the St. Sebastian Archers’ Guild, Lobster and Glasses, c.1653 (oil on canvas), Kalf, Willem (1619-93) the lobster is so wonderfully garish in its contrasting colour – to todays audience I think there is something comic about it sat amongst the muted tones of the rest of the painting, an absurd shiny red symbol of wealth. It’s lovely too to see how artists recycle subjects and rearrange still lifes such as in Willem Claesz Heda’s Banquet Piece with Mince Pie and Still Life with Ham. It somehow humanises the artist to picture him stood thinking about the composition and trying different arrangements over time as we all do.

I then looked at the more modern approaches to still life and picked a few artists that I find really inspiring, including Cezanne – so famed for those wonderful still lifes that I was blind to as a teenager! Two that I’ve saved to come back to for inspiration are Still Life with Open Drawer and Still life with apples and biscuits both of which have a lovely use of straight lines running through the backdrop to contrast with the spheres of the apples. I think I’m more drawn to the composition of still life with open drawer but the block colours and the depth given to the apples in still life with apples and biscuits make that my favourite of the two and especially good to keep in mind for trying to simplify my work while still retaining what I like about other peoples work.

Mary Fedden came up and I absolutely love these three: Still Life IV; On a Red Ground, Orange and Green Still Life and The Mincing Machine her. Her almost abstract still lifes take the subjects and flatten and simplify the elements painting them in a bright but restricted colour palette and with a focus on pattern which as we know I’m rather keen on! I’ve found through my research that I’m really drawn to limited colour palettes such as these – worth remembering to not feel I have to stay too close to what’s in front of me in terms of colour.

I always find myself inspired by the work of the Bloomsbury group and so looked to see Duncan Grant’s take on still life – as ever he did not dissappoint. Here are three I’d like to come back to: Lilies in a Jug, Still Life with Fruit and Coffee Pot, and Still Life with Cyclamen, two really lovely and very different floral works but it’s Still life with fruit and coffee pot that really excites me – what fantastic colour! This is exactly the sort of work that I love; for the paintwork, colours and use of pattern.

I also looked at Roger Fry’s work and saved Still Life with a Blue Bottle and Still Life of Fish to return to for inspiration. I haven’t painted fish yet and would love to give that a go – these are really lovely, though a smoother style than I would usually go for. The blue bottle I thought might be good to give me ideas for doing much simpler work that still has that playfulness and colour that I love.

Another fishy piece I loved was George Braque’s Fish; Les Poissons – much simpler than Fry’s still life of fish and in my eyes absolutely as gorgeous, it plays too with negative space which is something we’ve been asked to bear in mind. I also wanted to bookmark The Red Tablecloth; La Nappe Rouge for it’s use of shapes and pattern and again lovely playful use of colour.

The last two I wanted to save for later are by Anne Redpath: Still Life with Orange Chair and Round Table with Chinese teapot. Both interesting for their quite different use of colour but also just lovely compositions. Again the flattened perspective really appeals to me – distorting everything and creating quite a different image because of it.

Really what I’ve come out of all of this thinking is how much I want to get painting again which isn’t so much use in the drawing module! However it has also reignited my enthusiasm for still life and given me ideas of what to focus on for my upcoming projects.

I’ve just had my first tutorial and feedback from assignment one, it was so good to speak to Diana face to face (albeit over screens) and to hear her thoughts and get a little more direction. It was well timed too – I had had a busy day what with taking my daughter to the doctors and the nursery drop off and then a full day of working from home plus supper and bedtime and a minor mountain of chores and so speaking to someone and remembering that I’m not doing it entirely alone and that it is worth putting my evenings aside for was just what I needed. The summarised feedback was as follows:

You have ambition to work with different media and complex compositions.
Be careful with the qualities of line. You demonstrated the range of these in your initial exercises. Treat each media differently so there is more investigation in your
work.

When you work simply with varied lines then the work can be compared.
Sometimes you can be too heavy handed especially when using charcoal and working with patterns. Try and simplify and work the opposite so there is more investigation into how you can apply media.

Your work is gestural, and physical.
Work on different surfaces to enhance the way you draw and investigate media.

Your visual language is good for this level.
Keep reflecting and be in tune with your progress by reviewing what you have done.

The feedback all felt really useful, I think the work that I like most in others is very loose and busy and so that is what I tend towards but I’m aware that I can be too heavy-handed or even just inaccurate and it could be really helpful to strip back and focus on fine-tuning before coming back to that style of work with better foundations. I liked Diana’s idea of continuing to work in whatever style comes naturally while also trying lighter or more simplified drawings so that I can compare and look at what works and what doesn’t to move on from there. 

I think I need to work more in my sketchbooks to really play around with ideas and that was mentioned too in the feedback. I feel at the moment like I can feel some improvement with almost every exercise and if I gave each one more space for trial and error then it would only be a good thing. I’m going to root out my A3 sketchbook and start trying more sketches on a large scale as I think often the work I do in between the exercises is smaller and tighter and doesn’t build so much on my progress through the course.

I think it’s really useful to be reminded to be more sensitive to the media and think more about the different lines and different pressures that I could be using. I am quite looking forward to keeping that in focus through the next part of the course and also in experimenting with different paper as suggested by Diana.