Pencil To Paint Redux

The aim of my Pencil To Paint course is to explore the essential differences between the two disciplines and shed light on why many of us find it so difficult to move between the two. I meet many skilled draughtsmen and women who shy away from colour, saying that they either don't like it or need it or (more honestly, I think) confess that they don't really understand how to use it. When I was not so very much younger, a fellow artist who was looking over my work, stung me to the core when she remarked, "You're not a colourist, are you?"

It was true. I was fearless with a pen or a pencil, but with a brush and a set of paints, I descended into panic, swirling the brush around and around on the canvas as if I was stirring porridge, in the hope that I might get lucky and a brilliant painting would appear as if by magic.

All I ever got, in fact, was mud. Colour eluded me.

So what we'll do in Pencil To Paint, is begin by looking at what we do when we draw and we'll start by putting a line around things. It's what children do, quite naturally and it's also what Pablo Picasso did.

  

Part of the problem is that we know there isn't a line around real people and real birds: it's a convention. But it's one that will give us real trouble when we try to paint, if we take it for granted.

So, here's a way of depicting things that doesn't require a line:

 

In these drawings, we're looking at the spaces that things occupy as well as the relationships between them. In Japanese brush painting, this is known as Notān, which literally translated, means 'sparse/dense' or 'light dark harmony.' It's a simple binary that will really clarify the compositional elements in your painting.

This is a piece of Notān that everyone knows. The black describes the white, which describes the black. The elements are perfectly interlocked and this must also be the case for your painting. When you fill a canvas, the spaces around things are as important as the things themselves. As with the sentences in a novel or the phrases in a piece of music, every part of the picture plane has to be considered.

 

So I map my picture out in black and white and then add grey. It's much easier to tweak the composition at this point, when you've only got a few values to deal with. Note the addition of the black strip, the introduction of a table edge and the slight dropping of the 'horizon' line to the left of the bottle.

The next step is something of a leap, but this is where constant practise and familiarity with your chosen painting medium comes in - although, it will help if just this once, you forget the extravagance and squeeze out four times as much paint as you usually do onto your palette and (now you've thrown caution to the wind) use a brush that's at least twice as big as you ever thought you'd need. 

It's no good dreaming big if all you ever do is act small. 

We will, however, be keeping things simple and in Pencil To Paint, we'll play with just a couple of colours at first.

This is Process Cyan and Burnt Umber and with them, you can run the gamut of cool and warm tones, while making colour adjustments quite quickly and easily. Your  browns, for example can only be bluish and your blues only brownish and if this feels restrictive, let's take another look at maestro Picasso again:

When I painted my demo' piece at Dillington House last week, I spent as much time on the space between the bottle and the jug as I did on either object. Using just two colours plus white enabled me to concentrate on how I was painting rather than what. And thinking about Notān (the harmonising of lights and darks in my composition),  I soon realised that I needed to place the apple where it would lighten a part of the picture that would otherwise be quite dull (half-closing your eyes and squinting at the picture will help you to see this light/dark distribution more clearly).

With the tonal values of my colours balanced in this way, I needed only to add a thin glaze of yellow to my blue apple to complete the composition.

Okay. It isn't very elegant and it's certainly isn't realistic, but at least it looks the way I meant it.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."  Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

From Pencil To Paint

Just how do we get from this...

To this?

"I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck."
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) on Matthew Smith

I remember as a child, the excitement of producing a drawing with which I was really pleased; one that was so good, I thought, that it cried out for the addition of colour. Even then, I knew that colour was the ultimate test of my artistic skills. How often had I heard adults say, "That's lovely. Are you going to colour it in?" Eagerly, I would get my crayons and begin. But before long, my art would turn from absorbing pastime to tedious labour. Far from improving my picture, I felt as if I was defacing it and all my lovely lines would disappear under an increasingly frustrating tangle of incoherent scribbling.

For most of us, our relationship with art begins in a disappointingly similar way. We begin with lines. We understand them. Lines describe things. They have definite boundaries. But colours blend and blur. Colour is exotic, complex, and psychological. With colour an artist can make magic; for most of us, all we manage is mud.

If I can draw, I remember asking myself, why can't I paint?

Thinking in blocks is the key. In the same way that we speak in sentences rather than single words and composers write phrases rather than notes, painting requires a leap into a fully integrated way of picture-making where every colour, every stroke describes every other colour and stroke. And that is why it is so difficult. Colour can exist in the mind as a formless quality of light, but when we bring it out into the world, it must possess a shape. Even Rothko, who did his best to create shapeless paintings, was restricted by the rectangular proportions of his canvases. Colour and brushstroke, therefore, are inextricably intertwined and to separate them out leads to the tyranny of the colouring book. When I paint a pot or a pear, I imagine I am loading my brush with that object which I then mould onto the canvas. I am not filling in a pre-ordained shape; instead, I invite the object to manifest itself and work hopefully towards that  magical moment when, as Francis Bacon said, "the image is the paint and vice-versa."

From Pencil To Paint

Dillington House

2 July

10am to 4pm

photo credit: Debbie Hart at Studio Paradiso painting holidays in Tuscany

Knowing Your App From Your Elbow

Besides the sweet shop shrubbery and tree trunks the colour of liquorice allsorts, the other abiding image of Hockney this year has been of the maestro himself, sitting and sketching, with a fag in one hand and an iPad in the other. It's enlightening to see an acknowledged great working in a medium that hitherto has been the province of children, geeks and fantasy artists. One imagines it's a bit like watching that other David - Beckham - playing Subbuteo; only less likely.  But there it is, hundreds of Hockney's iPad images have been appearing in respectable art galleries as well as online, so like it or not, thanks to Hockney, iPad art has achieved legitimacy with astonishing rapidity.

But what about the feel and the smell of oil paint? purists may say. How can these images be unique? Where's the skill?

Anyone who's tried to navigate the slick surface of an iPad screen, leaving a vapour trail of coloured pixels beneath their index finger, will know that the business requires a fine degree of manual dexterity and hand/eye co-ordination. The thing doesn't draw for you and if you're no good with pencil and paper, you'll be even worse with an iPad. Of course, it's a mass-produced item, but so too, is a tube of oil paint; at least since Winsor and Newton started making them in the 1830's. The nostalgists among us may lament the iPad's lack of tactility and its odourlessness but neither of these things are, in my view, prerequisites for great art. It has to look right way before I care whether or not it smells right. And as for the work's presence, its hand-made, artisan-crafted look, this has been a debate in art long before Damien Hirst started paying people to paint his dot pictures; before Warhol, too, in fact, when Pieter Breughel the Younger set up a factory to reproduce his dad's masterpieces back in the sixteenth century.

Although the iPad signals a huge change in the way we make art, it is not about to replace other paint media - yet. It is, however, an extremely valuable tool for the artist to add to his or her kitbag. Most usefully, it is paintbrush, pencil and paper combined. Most powerfully, it is both shop window and gallery, too.

So let's not spend too long worrying about whether or not the iPad signals the end of art any more than Vincent Van Gogh fretted about having his canvases shipped ready-made from Paris. Let us concentrate, instead, on the challenges that new technology offers the artist. By far the biggest for any iPad artist, has to be to give their work character, to transform that immutable little rectangle into a magic window that makes us look, with a fresh mind upon our world.

So what's new?

All images © David Chandler created on ArtRage for iPad.

David Chandler will be teaching art for iPad at Studio Paradiso (23 May - 2 June and 21 September - 5 October 2012), Chateau L'Age Baston (23 June - 21 July 2012), Exeter Phoenix (19 February 2013) and Dillington House (2 , 23 March & 4 July 2013).

What We Do When We Draw

"We should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches." Goethe 

"The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing... should be taught to every child just as writing is..." Ruskin

I've just returned from teaching a drawing course at Dillington House, so I thought I'd take a look at what acknowledged masters and art experts have to say about the subject. What I found was a wealth of quotes, stressing drawing's importance that were vehement in their praise of drawing almost to the point of dogmatism. From Berger to De Botton, Degas to Dali, all the comments I found pointed to drawing's honesty and directness; its value as a discipline and as an aid to comprehension. And the general consensus of opinion was "Won't draw? Can't paint'!

"I can see it," a student once complained to me, "so why can't I draw it?"

"Because you don't fully understand it," I replied.

But when we look at a person, a pot or a pear, exactly what is it that we don't understand?

The kind of seeing we habitually engage in is a kind of glib exercise in orientation. It's our way of reassuring ourselves that everything is just the way it normally is. Our over-loaded brains reduce everyday visual stimuli to a series of symbols that we are all too quick to discard. Like a sight-seer on a tour bus, we click the shutter and move on.
               


But this facile way of using the gift of sight is nothing new:

"Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees... and that's all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the causes of beauty, and penetrate the minutest loveliness... Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane." Ruskin

The full quote is on my post for 26 November 2009.

                The purpose of drawing, then, is not to make a pretty picture but to become more intimate with your subject than mere looking allows. Drawing requires that you slow the pace of your life to a more manageable speed. It requires that you contemplate and think about the world around you. It also requires that you think about what you want.

"Unlike painting and sculpture [drawing] is the process by which the artist makes clear to himself, and not to the spectator, what he is doing." Ayrton

And dictionary definitions of the word 'draw' are manifold. It appears that when you draw, you might also be pulling out or dragging forth.

Like it or not, when you sit down in front of that person, pot or pear, you could also be on the point of revealing yourself to yourself.

"It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well." Clark

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Grammar Of Drawing Part 2

From the Oxford English Dictionary, to draw also means to pull, to extract, to take in and to disembowel.

When I uploaded these drawings to a Facebook album, they provoked a flurry of responses, from downright indignation to outright enthusiasm. Perhaps they could spark so much in people's minds because they were of so little; a few random scribbles that hinted at forms and suggested narratives but ultimately refused to reveal their hidden message. There was no message, of course and those who require some kind of polemic from their art felt cheated, while others who are happy with mysteries and unanswerable questions, felt liberated.

The drawings were made by five students who attended my Grammar Of Drawing course at Dillington House (see the previous post). Standing in a circle at their easels, I asked them to draw me in long, flowing lines that filled the paper as I moved about the studio. After a few marks were made, they were required to pause, then move in an anti-clockwise direction to the next easel, where they picked up the drawing tool that had been left by the previous student and continue drawing.

My intention was to acquaint my students with the physicality of drawing. It is not like writing a cheque; something to be done with the fingers and wrists, alone, but with the whole body. If a singer can produce their voice from below the diaphragm, why can not an artist draw with his or her entire being? A singer may make us fully aware of the quality of their voice, without having to frame a single word. Is it necessary, then, for the artist to draw a pot, or a person or a pomegranate before we take any notice of the kind of mark they are making?

The first drawing tells you something about how well I can draw pots, but seems to stop right there. This is drawing, simply as a means of transferring data from one medium to another. The second drawing hints at something more elusive. We study the line in its quest to give form; we see ebb and flow and the traces of movement, at times hesitant, at others, sure. It may not tell you much about pots but it is quite eloquent about what it means to confront the void, to hold onto that charcoal and draw.

The Grammar of Drawing at Dillington House

This course seeks to re-establish the centrality of drawing to art practise. Using everyday objects and the landscape around us, we will learn how to measure and to accurately depict our world.

We will learn which marks to use when we wish to evoke light and shade, for example, or when we wish to create texture or movement. 

We will learn how to create spatial depth using the rules of perspective and discover what is meant by chiaroscuro and nōtan. 

We will come to understand the difference between line and tone, and study the fine difference between reality and abstraction.  

But we will also play, for in play, we may discover how drawing can help us to create a language that is uniquely our own.  No previous art experience is necessary, only an enthusiastic an open mind.

The Grammar of Drawing is a four day residential course in a superb country house setting and runs from 21 February to 25 February 2011. 

For more information visit www.dillington.com