Category: Art
In 1963, one of the first ‘public’ pieces of art I did was a pencil portrait of one of my Grandads. It was realistic, recognisable and admired. It went back up to Barrow with him, was framed and lived on the mantelpiece. It was drawn side on, which is easier, and I have always had a delicate touch with pencil shading. I was just beginning to understand art, what I could do and what I was less successful at.
Since then life has been one long session of ‘if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try and try again’. I’ve always had the shakes, I’ve always had my brain suddenly lose concentration. If I pick up a ruler and start measuring my inability to hold numbers in my head soon makes me lose control. I’ve always tended towards the ‘real’ and away from the romantic, picturesque or theoretical (pointillism, cubism etc.). There is good art everywhere but I sometimes think too much theory loses some of the power that exists in early cave paintings. When I first saw the ‘Arnolfini Couple’ I was entranced by it but I soon became fonder of Bruegel the elder and then onwards into the whole of human and animal expressions of creativity.
Slowly I’ve got a better grasp of what I can and can’t achieve and used that to push the boundaries and increase what I can say with my work. This is the story of one of those explorations.
At our art group exhibition earlier this year, my young friend Georgina put up a work she had done for A level art, based on L.S.Lowry.
I’m not a great fan of Lowry but I also have no time for people who are snobby about his work and if I started listing the artists who I’m not fond of, it would be a long list. Georgina’s painting made me think about how things have changed. I wondered if I could do a version that started in the past and moved forward to the present, where every other person seems to be walking about with a throw away coffee cup in their hand.
I did a quick mock-up and asked Georgina if it was OK for me to use her work as a basis.
When she said yes, I went and looked at Lowry images. This one is called ‘Coming Home from the Mill’ from 1928.
The first thing that hit me was how much movement and expression there is in the work and how colourful it is. The next was how well-off the scene looks despite the background. It crosses class boundaries. If you’ve ever been near one of those mills, or factories or a big engineering works when everyone clocks off their shift then you will not recognise it in this scene. Next impression was how technically competent it is. Most people would be horrified at the task of detailing so much. Although the perspective is simplified, it is still basically accurate. In true Lowry style, there are no shadows to complicate things and the light and shade is simplified. The surface on which the figures walk has no subtleties of depth and texture, but the figures are placed on that surface and not floating in air. It is not a naive painting. While a Vermeer, for instance, is always masterfully painted, it is nearly always a staged moment in time with little hint of movement. I think the Lowry captures elements of life much better.
I realised that, as with other artists, we often get an idea about someone and fail to look more carefully or ask what their intended meanings and motivations were.
So now we come to my effort. Because of a workshop we did, I decided to do it in watercolour. While I am used to the medium, I do not normally use it for these complicated group scenes. This is the first choice on which the jury is still out.
I sketched the background in and left the street much like Lowry’s and light coloured so that I could paint the figures on with less problem.
As you can see, at this point I realised that my perspective was inconsistent and that I needed to paint out the area where I wanted two foreground characters. Art doesn’t have to be a slave to perspective but is helps if your decisions about it look intentional. I decided I might be able to make the perspective thing work. The trouble with something complicated like this, when you are an unreliable and inconsistent painter like me, is that the more you add on the greater the fear of suddenly ruining it. An earlier me would have torn it up and thrown it across the room by now and probably sworn never to paint again. I’m a bit more at ease with my imperfections now.
Here is the current state of things:
Call me pretentious if you like, but the idea is that the area near the big mill is the past and time moves forward through the picture. The two wall adverts on the terrace rows are probably more about the time when Lowry died, when instant coffee was in charge and almost no adverts showed men cooking. In the front there are coffees being carried, they have different names, more people have dogs that they can name the breed of, usually somehow related to a poodle cross, and they often expect them to be able to go into cafes with them.
Does it work though? It is certainly not photographic and in my world view that is good. My figures are cartoonish, as they have often been. That is perhaps consistent with the Lowry and I often admire cartoonists. The perspective is not fully convincing but you do feel like you could walk into the picture, especially if you were being distracted by holding on to your dog and coffee at the same time, perhaps while trying to stop your messenger back sliding off you shoulder.
One of the problems with work that has messages is that they potentially fail if the message is not clear. Could you get the messages without me explaining them? Have I tried to put too many little messages in and lost focus?
As always I can see all the problems in this picture, but I can also see positives in it. It will probably sit around and after I’ve had a rest from it I may spot a way, within my competence levels, to improve it in my eyes. I’ve even managed to improve things years later. I’ll move back to something that I feel uses my abilities better, or that other people will smile at quicker but I’ll keep trying things that stretch me because I’m still learning.
I hope you’ll keep experimenting too.
This week I installed a sculpture paying homage to birds and butterflies at Stirley Farm, a charity project showcasing organic gardening and protection and encouragement of wildlife. The same week a friend asked if she could have one of my Paths of Desire series that depicts the effect of immoral and selfish overuse of cars on everything from the soil to wildlife and us. I’ve donated the sculpture and, as usual, the full sale cost of the other artwork goes straight to a charity, bypassing me. A week with smiles in it.
Between Ruth and I we’ve accidentally ended up with a theme.
Shelley are visiting The Hepworth Gallery Gardens in Wakefield on a sketching outing. I thought I’d give you a bit of (hopefully) entertaining background on one fascinating aspect of the place.
The Gallery is actually built on an Island. On one Side is the River Calder, which of course meanders there all the way from the hills above Hebden Bridge. Alongside the route of the Calder are various bits of canal that are sometimes pure canal and at others join the river. From the Hepworth onwards, the canals start getting much bigger. If you are sat in a narrow boat in one of the locks you suddenly feel small and vulnerable.
Just by the Hepworth a canal cut runs away from the river and the Hepworth is on the island made by that bit of the canal and the river. On the other side of the bridge from the car park there is a boat yard servicing the canal. I once watched a canal boat being lifted from a lorry, over the boat yard and into the water by the footbridge. You are now in the flat and marshy land east of the Pennines.
Shelley Village Hall is in a different sort of place. It is on a hill that is part of a river catchment area. On one side of the watershed a river runs down the valley towards Huddersfield and on the other the water runs down into the valley through Denby Dale. The river running to Huddersfield joins the Colne and Holme rivers and heads north east joining the Calder at Cooper Bridge. Meanwhile the River Dearne on the other side heads off to the Sculpture Park before shooting off south east to join the Rother going through Rotherham. Rivers seem to do odd things.
All the rivers mentioned so far are eventually headed towards the Humber and Hull. They are part of a much bigger catchment area. One part starts in the Hills above Settle, where rivers head across to Lancashire, up to Cumbria, over to Tyneside and, of course, down through Yorkshire. All those Dales and places like York that we like to visit have rivers that eventually end up in the same place.
Perhaps more astonishingly is all the rivers, like the Dearne that eventually reach the Humber from a southerly direction. The Dearne joins others coming down from the south Pennines, including the Don before joining the Ouse on its way to the Humber. That wasn’t always true though. Until some amazing river engineering by a Dutch engineer the Don joined the most astonishing tributary of the Humber. This one originally flows through another place associated with the Arts – Stoke on Trent. Yes, a whole set of rivers on the other side of the Pennines meander around as the Trent heading southwards, then turning east and finally north, before joining up with the water from Shelley and heading to the sea.
So, as you sit sketching on your engineered island, think about the amazing geography of rivers and human attempts to control and use them. Your Shelley water flows down below our house in Ossett in both a canal and a river. Coal from pits under Thornhill was originally transported on the canal, before the railways were built in the same valley. Incidentally, the flood defenses built near the Hepworth lost a traditional foot route and Ruth is part of a group working with the Council, the Canal and Rivers Trust and Sustrans to get routes restored for pedestrians and wheelchairs and cyclists. Another set of connections in my fascination with what I’ve called Paths of Desire.
Categories
Digital Assistance
I’ve avoided painting from photographs most of my life, especially other people’s but I am softening with age. Whatever keeps you going.
At the moment I want to do a painting based on a sketch of Lindisfarne Priory I did a few years ago. Oddly I find it harder to transcribe shapes from a sketch than I do from a scene in front of me.
I suddenly had a brain wave and I took a photo of the sketch that I had taken for the web and edited it into two photos, one for each half. While I was at it I reversed each of the halves.
I printed each half out on a4 scrap paper and then I had a reversed A3 version of my tiny sketch. I then used conte pencil to draw round the main lines of the sketch on each sheet, turned it over on the painting surface and rubbed. Hey Presto an A3 version of the original, the right way round. I’ll use photos to help me add more texture and detail.
If only I’d thought of that when I was copying an old abstract etching of mine onto a plastic sheet for our printing session last year.
Hubris, vanity, ego, whatever you want to call it we are full of it. I certainly have it but try to keep it under control. Weirdly, I came up with the idea for this bit of writing after being irritated by an TV program on cave art. What art is and its role in life is little side interest of mine, and early art is part of that.
The program was about the wonderful and varied cave art at Chauvet. As usual I couldn’t help noticing when the admirable experts and program makers put across messages that were slightly more open to question. We all do that too, making sweeping statements to convey our message more impressively. I went researching and a series of things I came across gelled into something I thought worth saying.
Let’s start with the art. Art is built into all of us. If you make clothing, personal decoration or decor choices that is a form of art. Current research suggest that people have been making art for around 70,000 years. That is not just us, the badly named Homo Sapiens, but also Denisovans and Neanderthals
Art is a form of communication. It is also about display, attraction, entertainment and showing off. Animals of all sorts select objects to show off, make structures to attract, do dances and carry out mimicry to attract interest, sing to draw attention and to ward it off and a whole range of other things of the sorts that underpin all art.
You can discuss forever what makes good art, what conveys more meaning, what is more moral, what is prettier and so on, but it is all art. Likes and dislikes are personal. I really dislike Faberge eggs. I admire skill but there is much in the world that I think of as fashionable rather than admirable and I don’t like fashions and fads in general. Give me a good cave painting any day.
In the Chauvet caves there are a full range of marks and techniques. These seem to start at the front end to the cave, with simpler marks, generally in red ochre pigment and range to further back, generally in charcoal and with more sophisticated representational elements, such as lions and bison.
I have to be careful here of that word ‘representational’. It is a word that people load with hidden meanings of superiority in one way or another. People can dismiss abstract art because they ‘can’t see what it is’ or others can equally dismiss art because they (or more often others) can see what it is and therefore ‘it lacks sophistication’.
In Chauvet the work at the front consists mainly of patterns of marks and sprayed hand prints. These are almost certainly earlier and perhaps show less sophistication of technique. The important word here is ‘technique’. Some can be born with a more natural grasp of technique but all can use practice to develop technique. In addition we can also learn technique from others. Human species are not alone in possessing this range of technique development skills.
Finally we come to the question of who did the cave art. I’m not going to speculate on Chauvet because I don’t know. Looking around statements that people make about cave art and relating it to evidence we have about our own development, highlights the hubris contained in those statements, as mentioned in the title here.
There is suggestive evidence that we lived in the same timescales as Neanderthals and Denisovans for a very long time and that we almost certainly shared locales with them at the same time. Ancient DNA evidence is hard to find but what there is indicates that we share DNA with Neanderthals. How much sexual activity there was we can only speculate on. It is not impossible that the same is true of other hominids. Their development is not completely clear and classification of them is based on the usual, often tenuous, observation of characteristics that we think can be useful in grouping things together or separating them. Taking those classifications and using them to speculate about behaviours, meanings and who did what can sometimes lead to a narrowing of views and options.
What I’ve written so far hides the thorny question of spirituality, which is often attached to discussions of art, archeology and many other things. Elsewhere I have speculated about dogs sometimes going round in circles before lying down. How do they decide when it feels right to stop the circling? ‘Feeling right’ is not really defined by argued logic. That doesn’t make it superior to argued logic. It can’t be explained in a rational way. Sprituality is just one shade of that internal feeling of right or wrong. We need to recognise that what feels right or wrong is fundamental to our existence and therefore needs respect alongside logic and reasoning. As far I can tell philosophical attempts to define right and wrong have always failed to come up with a consistent way of explaining it.
So we are complicated and we are all different mixes of complicated. There is no foolproof way of defining or describing what we do. I suspect the best art contains elements of every aspect of our personalities. It is personal but we can also discuss aspects like the number of layers of meaning in a particular set of work and how well it communicates both layers of meaning and feeling accurately to the rest of us.
Neanderthals definitely made art as I have defined it here. Over time our ancestors developed and passed on all sorts of new ways to make art. I don’t think attempts to judge the sophistication of what our predecessors produced have much value. Trying to use such judgements to artificially categorise and separate us from some predecessor is not very useful. It is the equivalent of colonial assumptions about superiority.
Whether layers of meaning and spirituality have increased alongside the development of technique is another matter. Though I don’t believe in vague ideas of spirituality as something outside of us, I think there is often more value in the work in Chauvet and similar examples, on nearly all levels, than there is the Arnolfini Portrait, which was in one of my first art love affairs. I also think that the questions behind what I’ve set out are a good way of thinking about art: Does it make me smile, Does it uplift or move me, does it give me a message, have I learned something from it?
I hope some of the things I do make some people answer yes to some of those questions and I hope I have helped you in both enjoyment and understanding.
In 2015 I made an arch from pollarded Sycamore branches, to mark the begining of the main steps down the garden. I didn’t expect it to last long. A bit later I added a carved sycamore owl to it. The insects were boring holes in to it already.
2026 and high winds have finally brought the arch down. It has done good service for wood from our own garden.
At the same time my latest sculpture project is coming along nicely. Something to smile at till the arch returns. As it is a cherry tree that had to go, carving needs to be done in stages. It is very soft and prone to split at first in parts then dries out much harder. Time to leave it for a while longer and decide how much more work to do when it has dried out more.
Update:
The logs have evolved into a stumpery with loads of holes drilled for bees (and one overheated drill bit casualty) and a slightly less pretty but pretty practical arch has risen up. The roses that collapsed with the old arch will come back and soften its lines. The old wood turned from nuisance sycamore tree to insect friendly arch and will now be reduced to shorter lengths and continue as a wildlife friendly zone. The two wood pigeons in the tree behind the arch fooled me into thinking they were pheasants. Masters of disguise.
Categories
Drawing Natural Forms
Yesterday evening Stacey Shaw gave us a session at Shelley Art Group. This is my attempt to summarise the messages she gave us and to add my own angles on it. Stacey reminded us that it always worth remembering the basics and used some good teaching methods to get across the messages clearly.
We started out with an arrangement of white cube, sphere, cone and cylinder. Stacy asked us to think how we could start to establish the shape on paper.
A quick word on pencils. For years I used 5b and 6b most of the time. nowadays I tend to start with 9b. These soft pencils encourage a freer touch and you can also make them very light as well with practice. A textured paper works well for some subjects but smooth is often better for pencils. Pencils are naturally textured.
The cube has defined lines that give us its shape. It makes sense to sketch those lines in, if only to establish the perspective (if you want to stick to that perspective).
The sphere looks like a circle but we can usually see straight away that it is a sphere. Drawing the outline can help you to make it circular rather than some other shape but you run the risk of giving the sphere an edge. If you don’t trust your shape drawing (who does?) then draw the outline but make it as light and sketchy as you can. The sphere optical edges are defined by where it goes out of our line of sight and where the background objects disappear behind it. You could begin to detail the shape by putting in the background objects.
Both the cone and the cylinder are versions of the sphere but with edges. If you chopped the sphere in two, you would have a sphere with a tricky perspective circle, in effect making it a figure with two faces. To indicate the shape better you could make lines that follow or indicate the shape and that would allow our brains to pick up those hints. To get a more nuanced shape definition we use the light which gives us shading and shadow. Tracey put a light on the objects to emphasise both of these. She also told us to make sure that we were constantly looking at what was actually happening with the shade and shadow and not making assumptions about what was happening. When I came to draw the grouping of objects I soon realised that the light source was slightly rounded, exaggerating the way the light radiates out and both the shading and shadows went in different directions for each object. When the close, directed, light was turned off there were multiple shades and shadows from the many lights in the room. Also the object themselves reflect some light onto other things around them.
That of course is the simple bit. Tracey quite rightly had a moan about denigrating art in education, when it is actually a very complex subject with multiple technical and social aspects to it. I’ll now try to set out, briefly, some of the other lessons from the session.
Without getting tied up by it, always try to remember that every object that you draw is a shape like these ones. It will have actual edges, points where it disappears from our view and surfaces which have a shape of their own (concave or convex, facing us, angled to us etc.). Even texture is a set of mini shapes on the surfaces of the object. There will also be perspective.
Try to resist getting too caught up with drawing edges on things.
Using the shape information, try to separate the effects of light and shade from the competing shades given by the colours of the object. Tracey gave us a strip of squares to shade from dark to light. If part of the object is light yellow and part dark blue, the shading differences given by the lighting and shape on each colour are likely to be mostly consistent across the colours.
Where objects have colour, the reflected light from them has some colour also. This can affect adjacent objects.
When you are drawing or painting try to make sure that your body, arm and wrist positions allow you as much free, smooth and controllable movement as possible when you are making your marks. I have had shakes and jerks all my life, so have to get the position right and wait for the right moment.
Keep comparing your version with what is in front of you and remembering the basics set out above. Look at what you are producing from further away, as this gives you a better sense of the overall shape. There is a famous experiment where people were given a drawing to copy. If the were made to keep the original drawing upside down they generally made a better job of it because they had less tendency to draw what they thought they saw.
Of course these guidelines are mainly of value if you want to produce a persuasive facsimile. That isn’t the only aim of most pieces of work. It does help to have learned how to imitate things even if your aim is to do something else with them.
Last night I was at a workshop given by Sarah Moss, on watercolour landscapes including people. The group included those who mostly paint with watercolour and those who rarely do, people who paint in completely different ways and some who have little experience of the more technical aspects of this medium. This is an attempt to explain and simplify things a bit. I’m not going into detail about different sorts of watercolour paint, more the way of application and the papers.
This is what Sarah was getting us to paint (though I managed to miss that and made up my own).
Those of you with experience may realise straight away that this may be better on a slightly smoother paper. It is also painted using a wet on wet technique, which means putting lots of water on the paper and letting the paint flow on the surface.
Sarah said that 200lb paper would be best. Immediately we are into issues that can be confusing, with jargon in the advert or on the pad of paper can be somewhat off-putting. The good news is that Turner and his contemporaries mostly used writing paper to paint on with watercolours. That is because the writing paper of the day was reasonably heavy and had absorbency that took the ink but didn’t spread it around. The other good news is that, once you find a paper that works with your style, you can just buy it on repeat until you want to try a different way of doing things.
One jargon area is weight of the paper. Sarah specified that in lb (lbs), which relates to the, well past retirement date (unless you are American or old like some of us), Pounds and Ounces system. So we already have lb, lbs and pounds for one measure.
Another, more universal, measure is GSM, which is grams per square metre. The trouble is that there is no easy conversion between the two. That is because they measure slightly different things. Both are slightly odd in measuring on a flat scale (e.g. square metres) something that can have a whole range of thicknesses. Then, for a particular thickness there can different densities. Oh dear. So 200lb watercolour paper is usually 425gsm. That is a heavy paper. Because I have it, I used some old hand-made paper that is like card for the workshop. For most uses I would buy the heaviest that you feel you can afford both to buy and to waste. If it is lighter weight you can stretch your paper (wetting it till it expands and taping it down while it dries to make it tighter and less prone to wrinkling) but that is not without its problems, or you can put up with the wrinkling but that just makes the painting harder to control.
Let’s go back to the texture of the paper. This is indicated in various ways. It might be a reference to a particular way paper was made once e.g Bockingford or a manufacturing technique (NOT which has been Cold Pressed or Hot or even Rough). Papers move from smooth through to those that have a quite pronounced 3d texture. Some famous watercolourists use the texture of the paper to give visual texture to the paint. Sarah talked about adding texture with the paint by bleeding (having adjacent areas both wet or removing colour (blotting) from particular areas. She also introduced the idea of denting the paper (with the end of the brush handle) to make the paint pool in those areas. That way you get the effect of different paper textures where you want them, not all over the paper. Textured papers are like the wrinkled paper, there are peaks and troughs and pigment runs into the troughs. There is also more surface area, because of the little bumps, so that can make the paper appear relatively more absorbent. Apart from the little tricks that you pick up, I would get a small amount of each and play with it to see what happens. Then, alongside the weight you can afford, pick the paper that feels like the ones you were most satisfied with.
The final topic here, at least for the moment, is absorbency. Paper is lots of fibres squashed together. The paper often has glue(size) spread over the surface to fill in the ends of fibres that are facing upwards and to make a paper with a more controlled surface texture and absorbency. Some papers have size internally as well. I wouldn’t bother thinking about this too much. Just try experimenting over time, ask people who do it a lot or perhaps you could read up a bit. Just remember that people love to repeat the little they know as, often inappropriate, wise advice (including me of course).
I hope the message has come across to keep trying different things. If it helps, make notes, so you can recreate the successful efforts. I know I had enormous fun playing last night, painting in a way that was different to much that I do normally. I was happy with what I produced and will add it all to my stock of different options when I set out to paint something.
Of course, I had the right paper for the occasion, watercolours in tubes put into a palette that I use all the time, brushes that were of reasonable quality and that I am used to (the main flat brush I used is nearly sixty years old). So keep it simple, try different things in a reasonably organised way and be prepared to ask questions. Mainly have fun.