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

Beauty In The Eye Of The Beholder?

Pick any object. The chances are, the longer you look at it, the more interesting it will become. Drawing and painting help to focus the attention and coax the mind into seeing the beauty that is always present. Beauty, however, is not an attribute of the object in view and to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is merely to suggest that everyone's appreciation of beauty is different (I think sprouts are beautiful, but you might not). Rather say, beauty is in the mind of the beholder; the result of deep understanding, when one at last becomes intimate and fully acquainted with one's subject.

Talking To My Wall

A few days before Image Wall opened, Ciara Nolan came into the gallery to hang the show for me and we had a discussion about how she intended to arrange one hundred, very different canvases:

SEEING THINGS: my new series of programmes about the visual arts in and around Frome.

Go to Programmes > Talk > Seeing Things.

Image Wall - The Exhibition

At the beginning of the year, I was invited by Black Swan Arts in Frome to stage an exhibition in their Round Tower Gallery, a unique stone-walled, circular space, that was originally built in the eighteenth for drying fabric. I knew instantly that I did not want the show to be a predictable resumé of all the work I’d done so far. Rather, I found it more appealing to imagine how the gallery would look if it were filled with bright, shiny new paintings, in a medium I was unfamiliar with. And then I took the idea a stage further. A dozen new paintings, I could imagine that easily, but what about one hundred? If I worked solidly from May to November, painting abstracts, still-life, portraits, landscapes and everything in between, what would my one hundredth painting look like? And what kind of painter would I have become?

I chose six slow-drying acrylic colours (including black and white), I bought pots of moulding paste and pumice gel and ordered one hundred canvases. Each one was to be just 30 x 30 cm square, about the size of a vinyl album sleeve.

I painted my first picture in early May:

Thinking of carrots and sticks and Cezanne’s words:

“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”

The revolution did not come, so I painted another carrot and then I hit a snag, in the form of painting holidays and nine weeks in France and Italy.

It was quite a nice problem to have; I worked with so many wonderful people, both at l’Age Baston and Studio Paradiso, but it meant that on my return, if I was to meet my November deadline, I would have to paint at the rate of one and a half pictures per day.

I thought of Turner and the twenty-four thousand watercolours he painted in his lifetime. And I thought of Van Gogh and the eighty masterpieces he produced during the eight months he spent in Arles with Gaugin.

“Inspiration is born of hard work and not the other way around,” said Stanislavski.

If you’re curious to know what the one hundredth painting looks like:

IMAGE WALL

A personal journey in 100 canvases, painted between May and November 2010 

The Round Tower Gallery

2 Bridge Street

Frome

Somerset BA11 1BB

Tel: 01373 473 980

27 November to 24 December (please visit Black Swan Arts website for opening times).

And if Frome is simply too far away, I’ll post the image soon on http://theimagewall.blogspot.com

“This is my way of holding onto things. Friction against the slippery slope of modernity; smooth as a flat screen TV, you can touch but not feel. Painting slows us down, but makes us more alive; opens a window on a world full of possibilities and entirely free of interruptions from our sponsor. Jawlensky described art as nostalgia for God. It's taken me 100 canvases to understand what that meant.

Painting and longing are one and the same.”

Chandler 2010

A Grey And White Matter

To be creative, I'm told, our brains need a goodly amount of low integrity white matter. Grey matter is good for rational, logical thinking but it tends to hold onto concepts too rigidly to create eureka moments. Those serendipitous conjunctions of true genius are caused by the white stuff, leaking ideas all over the cerebral cortex. 


The tendency amongst my students is to approach each painting with their grey matter. They have a concept in their minds of the desired outcome and they see the act of painting as a kind of test of their ability to achieve it. I, on the other hand, am more excited about the white matter; about the possibility that something unexpected may occur; something outside my usual repertoire. The business of painting is ideal for this kind of enterprise. It begins the moment you mix one colour with another and ask the question, 'what if...?' 


Even if there is nothing intrinsically new in art (or the universe) there are still an infinite number of untried, untested combinations for us to get excited about.

Image Wall - Artist's Statement

For many years, I have been a teacher of art, not a practicing artist. My focus has been on how to encourage others to develop their ability and to throw some light on the numerous techniques and processes that may be employed in picture-making. Because I had neither the time or the resources, the question I never asked myself was, what kind of a painter am I?

Image Wall  is an attempt to find an answer to that question.

Painting one hundred pictures, was to be like going on a journey. I could take a few risks along the way and fully explore what happens when you put paint onto canvas. I could work in ways I wouldn’t normally dream of, with colour-combinations I wouldn’t normally dare to use. All judgements were to be treated with suspicion and there would be no plan. I would simply paint whatever I had the urge to and if the work had a theme, it would be an unconscious one.

From my teaching, I have come to realise that there as many ways to paint a picture as there are people on the planet. The canon of Art, moreover, is being constantly up-dated; the first abstract artists are long-dead; installations and video seem old-hat. and the art world is poised for its next big, money-making shock. Meanwhile, all over the world, it is the flat screen, not the canvas, that is king. 

Despite digital sampling, CGI and a thousand images at the click of a mouse, however, painters still hold onto their pigment, their glue and their cloth. Unlike LEDs, these things have substance. A good painting doesn’t only occupy space, it alters it. The brushstroke is an echo of the artist’s presence and his or her colours leave chemical imprints in the mind of the viewer. I was seven years old, the first time a work of art did that to me and I was so thrilled, it scared me.

Pablo Picasso, when asked which of his paintings was his favourite, said, ‘The next one.’ When I began work on Image Wall, I had ninety-nine ‘next one’s. That is a kind of luxury.

I am grateful to the Black Swan Arts for their invitation to exhibit; to Ciara Nolan for her encouragement with my initial idea; to Suzanne Cooke for studio space and to Studio Prints of Frome for their generous support.