Today was the first session of a 6 week online course on drawing portraits, run by the Victoria and Albert museum and led by artist Jake Spicer.
The focus of this first session was on mark-making.
I am an untaught artist. I should reflect more, when drawing, on the quality of my marks, and be more purposeful.
Jake led me to think about marks as a toolbox, a vocabulary, and a structure of symbolism. I liked his framework of thinking about marks from the building blocks of (1) extension (length) that comes in part from the grip on the pencil; (2) weight, relating to the pressure on the implement, that affects width of the mark and the deformation of the surface; (3) the direction, and change of direction, of the strokes; (4) the rhythm of the marks that is analogous to the beat or syncopation of music; (5) the speed of the stroke and (6) repetition or isolation of marks. Looking at a drawing we can almost read the artist’s process and thought from these qualities of the marks laid down.
While he was talking I scribbled an impression of Jake from the thumbnail in the corner of my screen.
Here we looked at the mark-making in three drawings in the V&A collection. The first is what was likely a quick sketch by Welsh artist Gwen John (1876 – 1939). I didn’t note the names of the other two artists, from earlier times, whose drawings we looked at.
We then went through art school-favourite exercises – the unseen and the semi-seen contour drawing before an 8 minute sketch using a reference photo of Jake’s colleague.
In my anxiety to get the whole picture onto the paper lest I be judged badly, I neglected the point of the exercise which was to focus on how to make each mark.
kestrelart 