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.
I have been using a pen and Indian ink, drawing texture from inside shapes as in the next two pictures. However, I want to simplify my field sketches.
I have approached these next drawings differently. I start by mapping the image mentally onto a square and then apply simple blocky shapes to build the sketch.
The instrument I chanced upon is an old charcoal pencil. It is an unsubtle H grade, unyielding when mark making. Even sharpened it quickly reverts to a chisel. The squared-off edge imposes jerky movements and irregular polygonal shapes.
Even so, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to try for shading tones and building textures, as in the evening fields below (I was out looking for owls and observing Jupiter and Saturn rise). But the tool is too crude for this purpose.
Below are two attempts at the same woodland, looking through the leaf-clad trunks rising from dense fern undergrowth. Light filters through from the sky and there is dense shade in a hollow made by an A of two leaning trees and a bush. The hard charcoal cannot offer the contrasts of shading I wanted.
Further along the same woodland (I was cycling the Tarka trail between Great Torrington and Bideford in Devon) I tried again. This time I licked the drawing point (and a little grossed out, dipped it in water) to deepen the tones.
In the next pair of drawings, now from a cliff top, I started with a charcoal sketch overdrawn with a soft graphite stick. I then redrew this, reverting to heavy lines and crude shapes, splodging it with watercolour from a fat squirrel hair brush. Interestingly the H grade charcoal seems pretty water-fast.
In another clifftop view, the charcoal and watercolour is overlaid with a black marker for depth of tone and conte crayon for texture.
At the estuary at Bideford, a boat drawn up onto the bank gave the foreground, with the Torridge bridge behind. On a baking afternoon, the sun behind me, there were few variations in tone. I found myself simply colouring in my shapes, making this a naive (= childish?) painting.
Further up river, from the Landcross bridge I drew a crenellated building on the river bank, set against trees. A search on the internet reveals this to be ruined lime kilns, shaped according to the landowners whim. This simple fast drawing is closer to my purpose: the paint should not simply follow the lines.
I lost the charcoal pencil from my drawing kit. So I reverted to the pen, but now keeping the lines to a minimum. I could not use the bite of this smooth paper to capture the reflected sky sparkling from the water. Instead I used a white conte crayon as a resist before dragging wet colour across. I also used crayon to adjust the intensity of tone on the distant hills and overlay the near grasses.
A shout to Outside Authority whose enigmatic drawings always influence me.
My son practices the trumpet while gazing at the ceiling. He can play three notes, C, D and E. I don’t think an interval separates them but playing the trumpet starts with breath control and rhythm.
I read to him most nights, selecting fiction and poetry aimed a few years beyond what he might read for himself. I have just completed Garth Nix’ fantasy series based in an alternative Britain in which a Wall and perimeter defences separate the technological South from the magical North. Against orders from the capital, soldiers patrolling the border use cross-bows because the machine guns fail so close to the Wall, an inconvenience when facing a necromancer’s slaves. In choosing something different to read next, it occurred to me that real boys drafted to fight real wars are pretty much the same age as the made-up characters battling in these fantasy novels.
When he was called up in 1940, Spike Milligan took his trumpet. I have started reading out to my son the first volume of Milligan’s anarchic war memoirs, recounting the daftness of war and of young men away from home for the first time. It has dawned on me that this book is way over his head (I missed most of the implications when I first read it too) but he seems keen for me to carry on. Perhaps it’s because Milligan is playing jazz while the chaos carries on around him.
I re-suspended the loose charcoal in the picture posted previously in very wet white gouache. White and Prussian blue acrylic were applied in selected areas. The white acrylic pushed the gouache wash away whereas the blue slowly bled into it. The migrating washes (below) were left to dry overnight and then the whole layer fixed (above).
The music was by Elena Kats-Chernin, the haunting Works for Piano Trio.
I am thinking how to draw back into this.
I drew this one evening using the music to drive the strokes of charcoal. I wet it and scraped back to the white highlights with a fragment of lava. While cropping the photo, I noticed the invert function that reversed black and white. The original is below.
Last week, I watched a stunning performance of the ballet “Bye” danced by Sylvie Guillem, set to this piece and choreographed by Mats Ek.
However, the image I have drawn owes more to a set of line drawings by the late painter Barbara Tate and to archival photographs of 1940s Soho. In her early 20s, Tate found employment as a maid, keeping house for a prolific and dramatic sex worker.
There is a grittiness, an edge, a rawness to this short clip of ballet. It is not what you might call pretty. This is courtship and it is about sex.
These pencil and charcoal studies are derived from this clip from the Mats Ek ballet with the haunting strings of Fläskkvartetten (Innocent from Pärlor Från Svin).
I am always excited to see a predator. On this day, I watched a peregrine recovering height following (I am told by the person who first spotted it) a failed dive onto a curlew.
In a distant tree, through the scope, I watched a roosting buzzard.
I am working on my field technique, capturing the jizz of the bird. This experiment in wash and conti pencil was from memory.
And these sketches were done quickly from photographs on the Birdguides site in an attempt to simulate direct observation, exploring the rapid use of line and wash.
I started in charcoal and with a snipe that was conveniently sheltering in reeds close to the hide. As the stiffness eased in my hand and brain, I could switch to watercolour.
Meanwhile, I have finally fixed my home computer so it connects to the internet (it involved scouring the drive for remnants of an anti-viral program that spookily had itself become malign). The first installment of our cancer vaccine trial is published and this week I am hiding to write the next manuscripts, to walk and paint.
I was in Edinburgh last month to give a talk on Merkel cell cancer. While there I wandered into the Scottish National Gallery and the exhibition of the paintings of John Bellany. The body of work is overwhelming. Huge canvases, many made of several joined panels. As a student he made ends meet gutting fish in the industrial fisheries. The imagery of working men and dismembered fish becomes a theme throughout his work. In Kinlochbervie, though we see only 10, there is a strong evocation of the Last Supper. In Allegory this link of the fishery to Christian mythology is even stronger with three haddock carcases of nailed up in the foreground and the boat masts and crowds behind like soldiers with their spears. There is nothing new in the fish-messiah metaphor dating from the acronym ICTHUS as code for a persecuted religion and the frequent use of fish in gospel stories. Here Bellany re-uses this metaphor in a gritty industrial setting. Bethel and The Obsession follow a shared structure with strange tube-like men set upon a stage against sea and sky. Something in these latter paintings was reminiscent of photographs I have seen of great sculpted people set looking out to sea on Easter Island.
This is the beginning of an idea: developing the sketches of cormorants to a full painting of the birds standing tall and lined up at the water’s margin, like icons or idols, carved monuments as much as living birds. Here then are the first sketches.
This is a collation of the field sketches (most posted before) from which I am working. Snow is limiting access to do more this weekend.
Finally, all credit to the BBC for systematically making the nation’s art available on line. That license – worth every penny.
Drawing faces has never been a strength. Now I am trying to develop this skill. My six year old daughter is interested in the whole drawing process and will sit for me for 5-10 minutes. In this image, her face became shrunken and dysmorphic within a massive head – later I smeared this and redrew into it from memory. I fixed the charcoal. My wife claims to be unable to draw. Still, it took her about 10 seconds to work out I still had the proportions all wrong. The fixed drawing took a second layer of charcoal very readily, allowing me to lose about half the head. After all this adjustment, I still cannot capture my daughter’s general air of mischief and fun.
Here are some of their experiments with drawing in chalk pastel, told to try looking at the objects not draw from their ideas alone. I also suggested not to try to get a likeness but instead to get the patterns and colours from what they were seeing. In the lower one, she was trying to get the sense of a twig laden with dried oak leaves (“leath” = “leaf”).
In case you are wondering, Missus Moo is a version of Madam Monkey, one of her many names. It’s slightly better than “King Rat” which is how my oldest son addresses his smallest brother.
kestrelart 