| Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence - Henri Matisse |
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This time we were just aiming to work BIG. Looking at either a group of chairs or a collection of household objects, we started by drawing with charcoal or a brush taped to a long stick to encourage large, bold drawing and prevent too much control - and then worked right to the edge to make use of the scale of the paper. click a thumbnail to enlarge... This was not literal botanical drawing or even identifiable flowers, but more shapes, lines, and patterns etc to suggest a group of flowers. Some experimented with non-local, reversed colours. Abstract design/ composition ideas were remembered all along. click a thumbnail to enlarge... Observational drawings of man-made, metal, functional, mechanical objects from a rock drill and Seagull outboard engine to a scaffolding bracket. We looked at Futurism and Vorticism, with the emphasis on technology, modern life and speed - also English Romantic Surrealists who gave machinery a different sort of existence. click an image to enlarge... We were looking at different surface qualities and made lots of experimental rubbings from a huge variety of surfaces - having seen examples by Max Ernst particularly. It was not so much direct drawing but more making decisions about what was underneath the paper, and we found very rich qualities that could never have been drawn deliberately. We then composed these into either abstract images or suggestions of animals, birds etc. click a thumbnail to enlarge image... We were using a variety of tools to make different marks with ink (sticks, card, rolled-up paper etc.) Each tool made a unique mark. A group of bicycles was the subject, the texture and energy of the marks was more important that strict accuracy. click a thumbnail to see the whole drawing... As a variation from last week with features, this time we were ignoring the identifiable features and just looking at patches of tone. We worked from high contrast self portrait photos, but upside down so that the features weren't obvious - drawing what we could see rather than what we knew (for example, most had only one eye visible!) click a thumbnail to enlarge... We looked at Cubist portraits. Individual features were drawn separately, from different angles, on different coloured paper and in various media, and then collaged together in a fragmentary way. Drawings were then made from the collages. Click on the thumbnails to see the whole drawings... We looked at Mondrian's deliberate progression from landscapes and trees, through various processes of distillation to his late black grids with primary coloured rectangles. Everyone then chose one of two complicated collections of objects, first trying to suggest the complexity of the whole and then moving on through simplifications to very simple monochrome collages. Click a thumbnail to see the whole drawing... The idea here was to look at very different vegetables - their sculptural form, structure and texture - and draw them several times larger than life. They then seem to take on a different identity, sometimes with surreal undertones, sometimes appearing like foliage or having abstract qualities that we want to develop. These were all very quick (max 10 minutes each!) with lots of different poses, approaches, media etc: wrong hand continuous line (bound to be 'inaccurate'), straight lines only, using a mammoth piece of uncontrollable charcoal and a 1" house painting brush with ink. We also recorded four steps of walking movement which were collaged together after. click a thumbnail to enlarge...                                      This was all about perception - how the eye reads what we see.
work in progress... results of our 'Op Art' experimentation.... These gloves, boots, skulls etc took on a dramatic, dynamic, sculptural and larger-then-life quality by using various ways of modelling and exploring the textures... We discussed pattern as a repetition of shapes, so looked for these in this group of materials and kitchen objects. As with Matisse particularly, the objects almost disappeared amongst the patterns, perspective was almost ignored by tipping up the surface, the solidity of the objects was not emphasised and in some cases a Cubist multi-viewpoint was used... This time everyone was asked to compose their own subject, rather than having one provided - a bit like music. Inventive, experimental...... and lateral thinking, drawing with shapes, patterns and lines.
                   work in progress... Irregular shaped paper was the order of the day here. We picked odd shapes and aimed to somehow fit in our composition, from a complex pile of objects. Should the objects fit the shape of the paper or contradict it....? It was maybe the opposite of cropping - or doing the cropping before doing the drawing! Click thumbnails to enlarge...               Today we used only charcoal, no other materials (except a bit of water and candle wax here and there.) The idea was to explore how many different sorts of charcoal marks could be made, including using stencils, scraping and scratching, making charcoal dust with sandpaper and creating 'charcoal drypoint' on scratched paper... Two contrasting approaches to a bamboo subject. First, we were drawing with scissors, cutting freehand shapes of positive, negative and linear shapes relating to the bamboo. Some then added drawn marks with charcoal etc. Secondly, gestural charcoal marks of the same subject. We started off by looking at how glass really just distorts the background. Then developed this into distortion of text and the fascinating abstract images that can be found by zooming in on small parts. |
