Workshop for QAGOMA at the "Portrait of Spain" Exhibition

Recently I had the privilege of being asked to conduct a couple of still life painting workshops for QAGOMA Members, as one of the events organised around the "Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado" exhibition.  About ten enthusiastic people, with a range of artistic experience took part in each workshop.  For our subject we used the beautiful vegetable, fruit and bread still life centrepiece in the Spanish-themed La Sala del Prado within the ‘Portrait of Spain’ exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery.

In order to keep the workshops suitable to a range of experience levels, and also in order to relate the workshop to the methods used by many of the old masters in the exhibition itself, I suggested we take the groups through the "wipe-out" painting method, sometimes called the Bistre method.  If you have done any painting classes with us at Atelier Art Classes, you will be familiar with this method.    The method uses just one colour paint - usually a dark neutral, in this case raw umber.   The canvas is covered with this paint, such that an approximately mid tone is produced, with lights made by wiping back into it to the required degree and the darks produced by painting more heavily.  

Using oil paint, the surface remains active for at least several hours, even with a relatively fast drying colour like raw umber.  This allows the process to be very plastic - changes can be made easily.  This plasticity and the fact that the complexities of colour are left for a later time make it easier to take a broad approach to laying in areas of the composition, steering the painter away from a process that has them work on just one object or area at a time without establishing the tonal and colour context first.  It also allows the strategic softening of edges that we see in great artists such as Velazquez and Goya.  

The power that tonal composition and sense of light has to move us is exemplified by many of the works in this exhibition (The room of prints by Goya are a case in point).  The relationship between choice of painting method and the expressive intent of the painter is vitally important to understanding painting in general. 

Here is the demo piece I made for the workshops using this method.

I often employ this method or variations of it heavily in my own work.  Some time ago, I uploaded some step by step examples of this method to the Atelier Art Classes blog which can be seen at: 

 

 

Life Drawings 1.5 - 2hrs

 

 

 


Life Drawings 5 - 15 minutes

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

Quick Gesture Drawings 1-3 minutes

 

 

 

 

 


 

 


 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New life drawing studies

Tessa, Graphite on Bristol, 4 hrs

Maeva, Leeton Agency, Graphite pencil on Mi Teintes pastel paper, 13 hrs

Analytical form drawings for Maeva

Compostional sketches from life for Maeva, conte pencil on toned pastel paper

Help "Deliverance" get to Berlin!

See the earlier post about Stella Electrika's "This Trick" that I drew from in rehearsal.

Now they are taking a new piece, shown recently at the Adelaide fringe Festival to enthusiastic reviews to Berlin.  Help them make it - only 6 days to go!

http://www.pozible.com/index.php/archive/index/7255/description/0/0

Tuesday evening at Absoe with Brett

With Dr Manny's Tuesday sesh being displaced from Tuesday, Brett Ryan has started one at the Absoe studios, opposite 3 monkeys in West end.  Poses range through 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 minute poses.

Bertie - www.lifemodel.com.au

Graphite on cartridge

 

 

 

Monday evening life studies

Kat - Leeton Agency

Graphite pencil on A2 drawing cartridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 and 25min Life studies

Felicity    - Leeton agency

I liked how the figures interacted spatially on this page.

Graphite pencil on A2 drawing cartridge

 

Jeremy Mann - Brilliant compositions

Some wonderful compositions from Jeremy Mann, particularly his city scapes.  I love the wide angle view points and the shapes that he connects through the lighting.  The brush work is brilliant - it serves the light rather than interfering with it.  I love the monochrome compositional sketches too (under the "compositions" heading)

http://www.redrabbit7.com/index.html

 

Mae Jemison on the Arts and Sciences - TED.com talk

Mae Jemison, former astronaut, doctor, art collector and nearly a professional dancer, talks about why the culture of seeing art and science as being only suited to one type of person or the other is ridiculous and counter productive.  In fact, she makes the point that if you tell an intellectually talented person "well either you can have the intuitive thinking and be an artist, or the logical, focussed thinking of science" they will probably not be interested in either, and choose something else entirely that promises some of both.  As educators and contributors to culture, it is necessary, she argues, to convince students that it aint so.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html

As a professional artist who happens to have a science degree, this was obvious to me, but still it seems that many people don't get the connection.  Both the arts and sciences use linear, analytical thinking as well as non linear, intuitive thinking to solve problems.  The combination of types of thinking could be sumarised as "creative thinking".  

Jemison makes the interesting point that the Arts and Sciences are not just two sides of the same coin, but exist along a continuum of human knowledge.  But even if both fields use creative thinking, they are clearly different in purpose and outcome.  She describes the real essential difference like this: Whereas the Sciences seek to understand universal facts about the external world, independent of personal experiences, the Arts seek to understand universals facts about the external world through relating personal experiences.  How's that for a rebuttal of relativism?

I believe the connection is even deeper than that: the artist, in order to gain mastery over their craft, needs to be analytical to understand how the craft works, to develop the principles and understanding that universally create particular effects in their viewer.  The artist progressees through experiments - and the results of the experiments are read from the response of their own eye and that of their viewers.  The idea was developed further in an essay i read recently about neuroscientists investigating aesthetics, who were convinced that great artists have shown great insight about the way the brain processes visual information. 

 

 

 

Link to Interview with Mary Tonkin

A terrific, well illustrated interview with a wonderful young artist, Mary Tonkin.

I particularly liked the emphasis on the sensual and also the following description about composition:

 "Through undergraduate at Uni I painted a lot of portraits and still life images. I was intent on making the image look like the thing I was painting, now I am concerned with making it feel like a relationship between the thing I am seeing and my internal state. I think I have much more control of what I’m doing now, I can at least make better guesses about how controlling the tonal values, narrowing the colour range, shifting scale of some parts or combining multiple points of view might effect how the image reads. Very simply, it is possible to make poems naively, but they’re far more likely to have the desired impact if one has a greater grasp of the language. I’m still learning."

http://stevegray.com.au/blog/mary-tonkin-artist/

 

 

Drawings from Stella Electrika rehearsal of "This Trick"

On Wednesday and Thursday last week I had the privilege of being invited to sit in on and draw from a rehearsal of “This Trick”, a play written and directed by Kat Henry that was under development by her company Stella Electrika at Metro Arts.


 

 

I have been considering working from performance artists in rehearsal for some time, and had spoken to Kat about this idea before.  I was blown away by the experience - the visual material I was exposed to was more than I hoped for, and the whole vibe of the cast and crew under Kat’s direction was a simply wonderful to be around.

 

 

 

 

 It was interesting to see how the sense of creative plasticity (the sense of being open to unexpected directions and ideas during the process) applied in this field, and the trust involved between the team in this intensely collaborative process.

 


          


The play is a variation on the greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I have previously sketched compositions for this myth because I found it one of the most compelling.  Kat’s play is not a literal treatment but unpacks the mysteriously compelling psychology of this story in a modern setting.  It has only two actors, a male and a female, with the set an elegantly abstracted bedroom.  The acting oscillated from more natural scenes to more abstract, poetic ones - in both cases the result was full of visual stimulus, but in very different ways. This was ideal for me.  The actors were both a pleasure to watch, with that presence you hope for in theatrical actors.  The idiosyncrasies of body type and body language, and the huge variation in emotional content provide combinations that I could not have come up with, or asked a model to pose into - which convinces me further that it is better to seek inspiration from this type of subject rather than try to make it up, or be too prescriptive.



 

 

Dozens of frantic drawings later, I redrew some of the more compelling images I managed to get down in pen and wash, and discovered some very interesting compositional ideas as I worked into them.

 

 

 

 

After an intense week of rehearsal, the play ran on Friday and Saturday nights at Metro Arts, with very positive reactions from the audience both times.  



 

 

Thanks to: Kat, Penny, Kevin, Hannah and Scott (the other Scott).

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

Practise Heads

Some practise heads, thinking about the lessons from copying some Fechin drawings.

Main points: I am using a conte pastel pencil "Pierre Noire", with one side shaved about 3 cm down the side, and rounded off with sandpaper, so I can get a nice broad mark when I want it, or a sharp line with the point.  I am enjoying the pencil because it allows you to get your hand back out of the way more than with a normal square piece that is necessarily short. 

The main points that I feel I have found out about Fechin's process and the emphasis of what he did with drawings are:

1. start with the broad, soft marks to establish the large form lightly, building towards sharp lines in specific points.  

2. these sharp marks can be used where there is a cast shadow or an edge (an horizon of the form)

3. the emphasis of his drawings, at least what I am getting from them, is distributed between solidity of form, gesture and character

(these studies are based on images of a pose from www.posespace.com which provides images of poses seen through 24 points of view at 15 degree intervals.)

 

Nicolai Fechin on Technique

I think the quotes below from Fechin relate to the idea of excellence of execution being a meaningful element in its own right...

 

Quoted on:

http://underpaintings.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/color-palettes-nicolai-ivanovich-fechin.html

(it's very well illustrated too)

 

In his "Notes on Art, " Nicolai Fechin states:

... a high degree of expertise in technique has always had, and always will have, a predominant place in art. The subject, in itself, has value only according to the mode of the day. Tomorrow it will be superseded by a new fashion or fad. With the passing of time, the subject loses much of its meaning. But the fine execution of that subject retains its value...

 

The more consummate his technique, the easier the artist will find it to free himself from all dependence upon a subject. What he uses to fill his canvas with is not so vital. What is vital is how he does it. It is sad if an artist becomes a slave to the object he seeks to portray. The portrayed object must serve as nothing more than an excuse to fill a canvas. Only when the subject passes through the filter of his creative faculty does his work acquire value for an artist...

 

The artist must never forget that he is dealing with the entire canvas, and not with any one section of it. Regardless of what he sets out to paint , the problem remains one and the same. With his own creative originality, he must fill in his canvas and make of it an organic whole. There must not be any particularly favored spot in the painting...

 

My way of drawing and painting can be taught only through direct visual perception and it is almost impossible to describe it. An attitude toward painting and a few technical fundamentals can be discussed, however- but always with a warning not to take my observations in an overly literal or rigidly set manner...

 

To me, technique should be unlimited... (in) constant growth in ability and understanding. It must never be mere virtuosity but an endless accumulation of qualities and wisdom... First comes the initial idea for a work- what the artist desires to portray, to bring into concrete manifestation. In order to fulfill this task, he must begin to build, to organize."

 

 Peggy Samuels, Harold Samuels, Joan Samuels, and Daniel Fabian, Techniques of the Artists of the American West (New Jersey: The Wellfleet Press, 1990), p. 94.