Work-in-progress completed

Mary Adam, Flowers on Ledge, charcoal on paper 24 x 18"

A work in progress

Flower piece

This is a work in progress, charcoal on cartridge paper, 18 x 24". I'd like to take it to a good state of finish which I haven't done very often  with charcoal (and have so far resisted the urge to switch to paint). The flowers are frangipani and plumbago. Lots of measuring here, and checking in a mirror. An earlier version actually looked better, hope to be able to get beyond that as the drawing progresses. (Now I'm committed, why did I do that?)

A question in waiting

New window, graphite in A4 sketchbook

Some day soon the question will demand an answer: why not post more of my sketchbook drawings in here? On  checking it turns out I've been posting only about one per month when in fact I do about twenty times that. It could be many reasons, but reflecting on the question could turn out to be a learning experience in itself.

[Countdown: empty pages in main sketchbook = 24]

Lettuce

Nothing else to post so here's half of an iceberg lettuce.

Pencil in 8-5 x 11" sketchbook

[Countdown: Empty pages remaining in main sketchbook = 29]

I'm going to miss this sketchbook when it's full. I've been drawing in it regularly for a year and it's jam-packed with both sides of the pages filled. I'll be moving on to an A3 sketchbook by Utrecht, hardcover with recycled paper of a lovely oatmeal colour and about half-full. This has a whole mish-mash of stuff in it, some research-type stuff and some real sketches. But the real sketches are mostly stuck in. I just don't seem able to manage the A3 book outdoors, it's really unwieldy. So what I've done a few times is to cut out the pages and stick them back in afterwards. What I've learnt from this is that A3 sketchbooks are fine for working outdoors as long as they're spiral bound.

Mystery drawing

This was drawn in the dark, literally. I wonder if anyone in Trinidad can deduce what it is, or rather, what it was supposed to be. A hint would be the time of year.

Drawing with the left or non-dominant hand

Chili peppers, right hand above, left hand below.

I'd forgotten about drawing with the left (or non-dominant) hand, it's an incredibly useful thing to do. My right hand is stronger, but my left hand sees different things. The difference shows up in, say, a set of one-minute gesture drawings. My left hand will start in different places and pick out or emphasize different parts of the figure in action. I don't think it would happen as much if one was self-conscious about it, and the great thing about one-minute drawings is that they don't allow time to think. My left hand nearly always does more interesting things. It's really worth a try when one is desperate and nothing is going right.

The drawings above are ordinary drawings, not restricted to one minute. Right hand above, left hand below. Not sure they prove anything but I prefer the left-handed ones.

How Rembrandt drew Jan Six's bridge

Rembrandt, Six's Bridge, 1645, etching, 12.9 cm x 22.4 cm 

(about 5 x 8"), Rijksmuseum

This is one of my favourite Rembrandt drawings, who knows why? While looking it up today I stumbled on this account of how it came to be made:

"The love of his art caused him to be always provided with the materials for drawing and etching, so that we have these transcripts of nature fresh from the fountain head. We know this from an anecdote mentioned by Daulby. In describing the etching of "Six's Bridge," in his catalogue, he says, "This plate was produced by an incident which deserves to be related. Rembrandt lived in great intimacy with the Burgomaster Six, and was frequently at his country seat. One day, when they were there together, the servant came to acquaint them that dinner was ready, but as they were sitting down to table, they perceived that mustard was wanting. The Burgomaster immediately ordered his servant to go into the village to buy some. Rembrandt, who knew the sluggishness of the Dutch servants, and when they answer austons (a-coming) they are half an hour before they appear, offered the Burgomaster a wager that he would etch a plate before his man returned with the mustard. Six accepted the wager, and Rembrandt, who had always plates at hand ready varnished, immediately took one up, and etched upon it the landscape which appeared from the window of the parlour in which they were sitting. The plate was finished before the servant returned, and Rembrandt won his wager. The etching is slight, but it is a wonderful performance, considering the circumstance that produced it." It is not wonderful on account of the rapidity with which it was done, but the genius and science that pervade every touch, not only in the general arrangement, but in the judicious management of the smallest darks; they are all in the most effective situations. When the plate was bit in, the name was left out; it was afterwards added with the dry point; also a little shading was given to the hat of one of the figures on the bridge, which in the rare state is white."

From Rembrandt and His Works by John Burnet FRS, London, MDCCCXLIX. (1849?) -- but really from the Project Gutenberg ebook of the above book, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22690/22690-h/22690-h.htm

And to think, it was 200 years before Impressionism.

Words and pictures at the V&A

These are some sketchbook pages from an OCA sketchbook workshop that I attended in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum on October 12, 2008. In the afternoon session we had a choice of projects and most people including myself chose the "Walk around the V&A" option, drawing as we went. My aim was to do as many quick drawings as I could, of whatever caught my eye. The drawings and the notes tell their own story so here they are. The notes can be made big enough to read by clicking on the images to enlarge, though I can't say the same for the handwriting.

Some drawing criteria

Mademoiselle Lacaux, by Auguste Renoir

I've always thought that Renoir was a brilliant draftsman and that everyone else would think so too. But it's by no means a universal view, and in the end it's a matter of taste and how different people define drawing. In fact there's no universally accepted definition of drawing, and it's futile to devote too much time to thinking about it.

However, it's important to me personally to have my own understanding of what drawing is, and especially what good drawing is, because otherwise how do I know what I'm striving for, and whether or not I've achieved it?

These are the criteria I use to judge drawings, my own and others:

Unity. Everything in nature has intrinsic unity. If the unity is disrupted or broken the object ceases to have life or to be itself, or the drawing is not convincing. Unity in a drawing is easiest to see in figure drawings, especially hands, and in animal drawings; but there's unity in everything, including landscapes and man-made objects. For an example of a lack of unity, imagine a drawing of a flower pot that looks as if it's made of plasticene.

Balance. I've blogged about balance in drawing before (A sense of balance). The kind of balance I mean relates to the law of gravity and it can be sensed or felt with one's own body rather than seen. A lack of balance in a drawn or painted figure or object is to me a fatal flaw, especially if it's my own drawing, unless there's a compelling reason for it to be like that.

Three dimensional form. A drawing that gives a solid illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface is a beautiful thing to see. Dark and light tones (or "shading") can help to achieve it, but there's more to it than that because a seemingly flat silhouette, or a simple contour, can give a convincing sense of three dimensional form with no shading at all. What it means is that drawing is a more complex and mysterious skill than at first it seems.

Life. Achieving a feeling of life is tied up with unity, balance and three dimensions. There's a magical quality about a sense of life in a drawing or painting, and if the work has life, then other shortcomings might be overlooked.

Renoir's painting of Mlle. Lacaux has all these qualities -- unity, balance, three dimensions and life, satisfying all my criteria. I wish I could draw like that.

Oddly enough, Picasso's sketchbook drawings of invented "creatures" (links below*) satisfy all my criteria too. The fact that they have 'life" is especially remarkable because these particular drawings are of invented inanimate clunky objects which could be carved from wood or plaster.


Some of Picasso's invented forms from 1927:
(first link, bottom of page; second link, top of page)
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksIndex?Year=1927&ViewStyle=gallery&CurrentItem=31

http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksIndex?Year=1927&ViewStyle=gallery&CurrentItem=61

Some of Picasso's invented forms from 1933 (titled "An Anatomy")(first link, bottom of page; second link, top of page)

http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksIndex?Year=1933&ViewStyle=gallery&CurrentItem=31

http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksIndex?Year=1933&ViewStyle=gallery&CurrentItem=61


*Edited 17 June 2013: Those links were to The Online Picasso Project website which sad to say has since been closed to the public. Neither can I find those images anywhere else. It may be worth tracking down a copy of the big book by Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo Walther titled "Picasso" which has more than 700 well illustrated pages. I don't think the sketches referred to above are in it but there's a chapter in the middle called "A Juggler of Form", starting page 305, which has a variety of his other inventions.

Whatever happened to manila paper?

The Plein Air group held a well-attended still life studio last Saturday at the Art Society building. Peter Sheppard arranged it and brought props (flowers and fruit, pots and pans) for four set-ups. Tables and chairs were in plentiful supply because of the current children's art camp organized by the art society.

I took along drawing gear as well as acrylics and a canvas, which turned out to be overly optimistic. I arrived late and left early and did only two drawings in the end, on brown paper.

Which brings up the matter of brown paper. It's cheap, which encourages using it freely and doing many drawings. Apart from being cheap, I like it because it gives you a middle tone to work out of. It's ideal for quick compositional studies with charcoal or Conté, either black and white or a range of colours. On Saturday I did one of each, not very good but shown below anyway (about 16 x 20 in. each).

Brown paper takes gouache fairly well too. But for wet media it's nowhere near as good as real manila paper, which disappeared off the market about ten or fifteen years ago, maybe more. Manila paper was cheap, tough, excellent to work on with both wet and dry media, and the plant it was made from (hemp) was easy to grow in large quantities.

I tried to find out what happened to it, and the only explanation I could find is that the plant may have been banned under the international drug laws. I don't know if this is the real reason and haven't researched it recently, that was a few years ago.

Reclining foal

Another drawing from that day at Bonanza with the Plein Air Picassos. It shows one of the foals lying down for a rest.
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Bonanza Farm

I didn't produce much during the April 6th trip to Bonanza Farm, organized by the Plein-Air Picassos, a sub-group of members of the Trinidad and Tobago Art Society. But it was a good day all the same. I remembered to put on sun block, for one. The place was beautiful with loads of space for the group to spread out, a working horse farm with paddocks and wide open spaces, bounded by the Caroni River and fringed by bamboo.

In one small paddock there were two mares with foals. I spent maybe two hours drawing there, fascinated especially by the foals. They have a sort of confidence, an insouciance, a certainty of their right to be in the world as independent, individual beings. But they don't stray far from their mothers either. One of them took off all of a sudden and galloped round and round and round the perimeter of the paddock, its delicate long legs at full stretch. It made five or six rounds, maybe more. Was it just an expression of the joy of life and youth and energy? Or was it frustration at being fenced in? And then just as suddenly it swerved towards the centre and came to an abrupt stop beside the mother.

The drawing below is the best of a bad lot. I was striving for the relationship between mare and foal but didn't get enough in before they inevitably moved off somewhere else. But even so, if you look really hard, you can just about see the hindquarters of the foal and its tail and hind legs to the left of the grazing mare.

Drawing horses at Bonanza, photo courtesy Peter Sheppard.

Read Peter Sheppard's account of the day.

In conversation

Pencil in letter-size sketchbook

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Crocodile drawing

A crocodile (or alligator or caiman) at the Emperor Valley Zoo, 20th October 2007.
Pencil in 8.5 x 11" sketchbook

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Water, water

This was an effort to draw ripples on a pool. I see it as a drawing even though it's in paint and in colour, because I was trying to work out the forms and shapes of the ripples (which were in constant movement). I have yet to find a satisfactory definition for drawing that includes this kind of situation, but I most certainly felt I was drawing with the brush while doing this little piece (oil on linen, about 7" x 5").

Drawing movement

Charcoal on paper, approx 20 x 16"

Why not? No harm trying. One needs plenty of cheap paper such as newsprint, and a drawing tool such as charcoal that moves easily over the paper and leaves a good dark mark. The model performed a repetitive movement in one place, such as turning to one side and back, or sweeping (pretending to). After a while I put a sheet of tracing paper over the scribbled figure and continued to draw while the model continued to move.

It might seem daft. It’s hard to draw a thing when it’s still, let alone when it’s moving. But strangely enough, the results weren’t all that bad. Of course the drawings are only scribbles. I wasn’t looking for perfection, just an idea of what the person was doing. On the positive side, the fact that the model was moving made me freer and braver and less finicky about detail. I ended up with quite a few ideas from a series of drawings of this kind.

And it sort of broke a spell. Since this series I’ve been trying many more moving things, such as ripples on water and animals at the zoo. It doesn't matter if they turn out a mess, just one good scribble in a batch is enough to make me happy.

Pencil drawing of a gift bag

Pencil on letter-size paper

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Study of a head

Charcoal, A3 paper (approx. 16 x 12 in)

Seated Figure on Cell Phone

Hand study

Hand holding a book open. Conte crayon on brown paper