Kerfe (method two madness) says “I like that you create a world that exists outside of humanity here. Serene. Enough just to be itself”.
I had not thought before that was what I was doing, but, this time, I cycled out to the woods in the nature reserve with that thought in mind.
Night was falling as I drew.
There is poetry in the rhythm of the trees. The poetry I am reading treasures the moments of warmth against the oncoming darkness.
An afternoon in the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden geared my brain for observing the landscape in Cornwall, where she spent much of her life. Apparently Hepworth pioneered the idea of the pierced object in abstract sculpture, an idea developed famously by Henry Moore. The Tate’s notes on this piece “Sphere with inner form” describe the “smooth thin shell, punctured by circular and oval openings, covers the crusty inner form, which is also pierced. The warm brown patina of the outer surfaces contrasts with the green of the interior faces and the inner form”. I reflected on these comments “she drew attention to the relationship between ‘an inside and an outside of every form … a nut in its shell or of a child in the womb, or in the structure of shells or of crystals, or when one senses the architecture of bones in the human figure'”. Is this a particularly female perspective or simply a mark of a great artist, who can express the vitality beneath the surface?
I began my sketch drawing freehand with the brushpen and then with fountain pen loaded with india ink. It was later that I worked colour back in, using watercolour, and conte crayon both as a resist and as an opaque layer on top.
The Tate’s notes on Hepworth’s 1966 piece “Spring” draw attention to its ovoid shape, in short, it is an egg. This relates to ideas of nature’s cycles and rebirth (and therefore also death or dormancy too? The notes don’t say this). As with “Conversation with Magic Stones“, this idea had been developed through multiple versions, with previous iterations carved in wood, the painted smooth shell contrasting with the coarse grain of the interior. I loved that the pierced interior is strung through and through with threads. I wanted this to make music – a stone lyre.
I walked round this piece “Bronze Form (Patmos)“, holding open the shutter of the iphone camera, distorting it so I could see three sides together. The critical feature of this sculpture is the enclosed space, within the bronze shape that folds over it like a wave. It was inspired by her time on the Greek island of that name.
My immediate response to Bronze Form was to see, not the space within as Hepworth intended, but the outer shell as the twin-arched saurian skull, that heavy block of bone evolved to develop piercings and pillars, lightening the load and providing a framework for powerful muscles.
I wrote on the page “Sculptures built of space and pillars, like huge distorted saurian skulls. Others solid but holes strung with strings like a stone lyre”. I reflected that these shapes seemed natural “set against the more unnatural forms of the the cultured plants” in the garden.
Pen and conte crayon on brown paper, with layered crayon and brushpen.
Pencil on brown paper does not show up well without digital enhancement, even with crayon scraped across it leaving the lines visible beneath.
Posted listening to a piano selection, starting with Philip Glass “Etude no. 2”, then Poppy Ackroyd “Birdwoman” then A Winged Victory for the Sullen “We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced For The Earth Had Circled The Sun Yet Another Year”.
Realisation of Ipad sketch in ink and pastel, on balcony in shade, listening to Spotify classical guitar daily mix.
The single road crossing the mountains on the north west side of Mallorca winds steeply uphill. Just as it reaches the plateau there is a gate signed Vinyes Mortitx. That path twists through groves where roots of limestone grow into olive trees and holm oak. The route climbs to the top of the ridge and looks down onto the sea. Here, patches have been cleared and ploughed, fields ringed by rocks. A square of pink stone within posts and lintel of grey looked like a door, or a shrine.
My most recent post linked conte crayon drawings on brown paper to water colours done three years before in the same location. The drawing above used all these tools: limestone blocked in heavy crayon strokes, watercolour layered over this resist, more crayon to build texture into the trees and vegetation in the foreground, white crayon to lose the demarcation between painted sea and sky.
That previous post brought its own harvest of comments and discussion on the challenges of drawing, and of abstraction versus representation. The most interesting drawing turned out to be the one I had liked least, the first attempt on that day abandoned as a failure. Now I look at it (shown again below) with others’ eyes and see its abstraction, a strong blue against a shape made largely of unadorned paper, a patch of white and strong black lines on the foreground. If I could have seen the power of those elements at that time, I would have been more purposive, drawn just those and stopped.
Let me say, thank you for your insights.
My eldest son.
Now back home studying law.
Brown ink, fountain pen, water, black, blue and flesh conte crayon on small Moleskine watercolour pad.
This is an idea I took from Rosie Scribblah, an artist in South Wales whom I know from her blog and whose work I greatly admire. A while back she posted many sketches on prepared grounds, made of brown paper fragments pasted into the sketchbook. I tore up my lunch bag and stuck it onto some pages. On others I applied acrylic paint. This was done weeks before my using the pages to draw. The idea was to fragment and distort my thinking while translating observation into drawing.
Here are a mixture of drawings. The prototype Mars exploration suit, giant deer skeleton and trolley bus were done this weekend in the Think Tank, Birmingham on an Urban Sketchers session. The first was built on an area of yellow paint, heavily textured. The skeleton was drawn on a page covered with a mix of green and rose paint, greying where they met. The drawings were done in fountain pen and conte crayon. Mixed in with these are my first attempts to use prepared grounds, birds drawn from life onto brown paper and paint, one from 2014 and the others from a week or so ago.
As an aside, I have watched Rosie’s fascinating artistic journey across her recent blog posts as she abstracts from the landscape to produce stunning images of ancestral stone monuments in the South Wales hills.
Trees by the Aston expressway
Last Saturday I joined, for the first time, the Birmingham Urban Sketchers Group. The location was Aston, following a road past a Seventh Day Adventist chapel and low-rise residences against which autumn leaves piled high in drifts, under the expressway to the park and Aston Hall museum. Arriving late, on the coldest day of the year so far, I found other sketchers dotted about, hunched against the wind holding down their drawings. The expressway rises to sweep over the residential streets. The Aston Tavern proved a surprising haven in this urban environment, with log fires and good beers and classical music playing on the background. Behind this is the parish church, with tumbling memorials leaning against one another in the graveyard. I walked round the outside of Aston Hall (a large Jacobean manor that had been besieged by Parliamentarians in the Civil War) and looked down stone steps through trees to the Aston Villa stadium dwarfing the surrounding dwellings. We finished in the Eritrea Café, a late Victorian building, surmounted by a statue with helmet and trident, formerly the Britannia pub and for while used as a cannabis factory before its latest incarnation. I drew using my current field kit: conte crayon as initial layer and resist for subsequent watercolour. The drawings of the other sketchers can be seen on the group’s Facebook page.
Aston Villa stadium behind trees
Waiting for the train home
The Aston Tavern
Trees against the wall surrounding Aston Hall
Thanks for the comments on the previous version.
In response I abandoned any attempt to reference the photograph I shot on the same day as this painting was first sketched out. I kept changes to a minimum: dropping the skyline to give more explanation to the background coastal hills, smoothing out some texture in the bottom left corner to link better the two halves of the image, scouring back some of the intense white of the nearest sea to reveal colours beneath and selectively glazing the foreground in acrylic to give more shape to the overgrown rock surface and reduce the brightness of the whites.
I now call this a finished piece.
kestrelart 