West Dean 5th course - Intuitive drawing

So, it has been a while since I did a course at West Dean and in late August I attended the 5th course in my series of 10. Half way through, and having looked back at soem of my work for the OCA I have to say I think the work is improving, and going to West Dean somehow gives you permission to think in a focussed way about what is happening with the work.

The tutor was Christopher Gilvan-Cartwright. A thoughtful and inspiring teacher who brought us many techniques to try out to give us a tool box of ways of creating surfaces, textures and mark on paper with charcoal, graphite, acrylic paint and ink. There were flattish marks and heavy textures, there were analyses of line and working over te paper in blocks of colour or mass of substance in charcoal or ink.

We each got a table and an easel and he pointed out that we could think about how we want to work - at three levels: on the table, on an easel or on the floor. I tried all three and they each gave something different to how the work developed: in the table  or floor your pour ink, on the easel you can sit back and really look at the work as it progresses.

Here is my table and bit of the floor with work in progress in sketchbooks and on paper (drying where ink or oil bar was applied):

Surprisingly I tried to keep tidy, as the space on the table was quite limited. We were mostly working on A1 or A2/A3 depending on whether finished work was being made, or test pieces to try out techniques were being made.

The 'intuitive' bit in the title suggested we were going to work with Dada automatic drawing, which we did do on the first day, but after that we simply worked very freely with the new techniques being taught. He did mention the idea of the exquisite corpse drawing and I read in the course description that we would be sharing work, but in the end we didn't do much of that, and just got on with our indendent work.

I used up paints in mt sketchbook, used collage and added to some books I had brought that needed to be thought about in a drawing sort of way. The tutor gave some very valuable feedback for the FDAD side of things, so overall it was a helpful and valuable course.

Here are some works I made over the weekend:

A lot of the work was done in black and white, but I did use some of my XL graphite as it leant itslef well to the large scale of the work and sits well with the charcoal and ink,

These long coloured things are the concertina books I had brought from home to add to - I have also started stitching on them, so this brief piece of work was just to add a bit of texture in paper or paint.

A drawing based on the moon's light that looks better in reality - the black sugar paper is already greyish, but looks even more so here.

Drawing course and drawing day

Part of the FDAD (Foundation Diploma in Art and Design) course is the understanding that we will do at least three drawing courses. The College also offer drawing days for FDAD students and they can be very good. This post will cover the drawing course I did recently and a drawing day that followed on very soon after that.

The drawing day I did was run by a tutor whose work has a surrealist and humouristic bent. It was aimed at intermediate to advanced drawing levels, so I guess I probably was not quite there in terms of the expected level of drawing, however I did get something out of it and so it was still useful.

The first day and a half there were a number of exercises to look at different ways of working with drawing. This included different levels of looking at a still life, self portraits and mark making based on sensory memory.

Here are some of the drawings I did based on some of these exercises:

These practices were OK - there was much to absorb and consider, but the key thing that was useful for me, was the fact that you can make your own drawing books/sketchbooks, and an exercise where a detail was drawn and then greater levels of context were added from that foundation study in second and third drawings.

On the last day we were then asked to create our own project based on the ideas of 'collections'. This concept can mean many things, but I kept it simple and chose 'winged creatures' from objects or paintings that can be found around the house, using the three step increasing context studies. Henece this was meant to be a series of images of winged beasts - there are plenty of puttis, eagles, a buttlerfly and stuffed birds to choose from.

I chose to first draw a putti from a tapestry (the lower set of drawings):

Here I was trying to capture the weave of the tapestry, then the putti's wing, and further then the wing attached to the putti. I used watersoluble pencil. The tutor suggested I should vary the marks more, ensure there was more space for the eye to rest and to create more block coloured areas. 

I agree that my drawings often only use a particular level of line, and that is probably due to the untrained nature of my skill level, but I did not feel comfortable with the idea of using ink or some other strong colour to create a block of colour in the background. I need to think about how this would work in practice, with different types of motif, for example in a still life where there may be a more natural way to place the central concern in a flat background. To me the tapestry was already quite flat and uniform - it is a faded thing with little colour variation as the contrasts have reduced over the centuries, and the woven texture of the weaving also plays its part in creating a generalised sameness across the surface. I guess what the tutor was getting at was to create a stronger focus by blocking out blandness in some areas and leaving the central motif as a stronger concern, and I think that I need to train this if I need to in the future. It depends on the topic and purpose of the image.

The next drawing was of a putti in gold on a rococo clock:

This is a stronger drawing, the putti is reasonably complete - in fact I think I have captured the twist in its body fairly reasonably, so maybe the life drawing classes I am doing are teaching me something(!) Anyway, I spent so much time on the putti I was running out of time in the morning before coffee, and this led to speedier drawings of the clock itself and the clock shown on the wall. You can just about see some legs and a skirt of a pastoral scene of a woman and a man on the top of the clock, but in any case I tried to capture the rocaille swirls that were going on around the clock overall.

I think together as a series the three drawings work well - they use the same colours and the twists and swirls of the clock's ornament are present in all three drawings making the story of three a fairly cohesive thing.

Finally, after morning coffee I was tired and was a bit bored with drawing whole figures, as it is a large effort and time was limited. I had borrowed a book on Anselm Kiefer's work which reminded me of his winged sculptures and drawings, and as I had already been working on wings the evening before it felt natural to also continue with studies of wings from a painting of a swan. 

These are the wing drawings I did in the evening - I tend towards making things painterly, but the bolder wings on the top line are more open and loose and were just about playing with the idea of wings:

 And these are the wings based on a painting of a swan's wing:

The ink blots at the top were quickly developed the evening before as there was a fair bit of ink left from the day's work which would otherwise have gone down the drain. I tried to control it a bit and then drew over them to make them into 'wings'.

Here's a detail of the wing, the first drawing of the four of the swan's wing: 

I was quite satisfied with the outcomes of the course, I liked some of the exercises and will take them with me to things I will do in the future. I still think I need to practice a lot and will need to build more drawing work into my everyday work.

The drawing days

The idea behind the drawing day is to provide FDAD students with an opportunit to use the College, its grounds and the exercises or themes provided by the tutor at the start of the day, with finishing show and tells at the end of the day. The first drawing day I attended was OK, but nothing great to report on, and I have already written about the tutorial I had on the day which was very good.

Recently though, I attended a second drawing day and that was very good. We started with a mindfulness exercise, a nature study and then set out to do our work work. I first wandered outside to do some drawing at the back of the house looking at flowers and trees - which really is an obvious thing to do at West Dean when you walk about the garden:

Top: the nature study using glue to paste bits from nature onto the page before drawing onto it looking at details  - here grasses and weedy flowers.

Bottom: some of the studies of buttercups and other weeds, on the left a tree trunk drawn using the coloured jouices from plants:

Then during the day I made a series of small books mainly using 'mark making' - stamping, painting, scribbling using watercolour, graphite, ink pen - this felt good, I didn't think much about it, but it had a similar feel to the book I made on Cas Homes' course, and some of them came out quite successfully as whole, complete singular things in themselves, not bad for books made by other people's waste paper pulled out of the bin:

The top one was really a collection of small natural stuff glued in a painted over, using the weed/plant itself as a paintbrush and a frottage of a couple of grass types, the middle one is a practice in placements of different types of material in a collagey type set-up and the bottom one was a quick and dirty practice, trying to work more simply by limiting the colour used to two - blue and red.

Here a detail of these books:

I made another small study in containing colour use: I tend to always use a lot of colour, and am not good at simplifying things, so with the paper already slightly marked with charcoal smudges and marks, I used only red, a tiny little bit of blue, and an organge strip of tissue paper. I stuck on fallen petals from flowers in the dining room:

The book at the bottom is another study of texture, which is a bit of ripped piece of a woven materials bag and glued-on petals from potted plants in the quadrangle. This was to contrast the organic and the man made, the soft whites on coffee-stained paper, with the hard black of the plastic weave, that had been softened in its ripped state. I am pretty satisfied with this piece and may try to use it for a textile piece in some way.

Here's a detail of the 'pink' book showing how brush marks are themselves enough to fill space - at least I feel I can do simplicity, but I always do wonder what the purpose is - should this be to create beauty or to indicate something else?

First tutorial on the FDAD at West Dean

I thought I would share a couple of things that was said during my first tutorial. On the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at West Dean you get two tutorials. I had planned to have done four courses before my frst tutorial but having swapped a course I have only done three and a drawing day, which coincided with the tutorial day. In the end I decided that it might be good to have a tutorial at the start and maybe have the other at the end, and if need be I could pay a bit and get a third somewhere in the middle of the course.

You get one hour with one of the art tutors and are asked to bring some work for discussion. I saw a tutor who is a print maker. He is interested in a variety of things and was keen to discuss anything that I showed him. I brought my computer to show him the things I had done at West Dean so far, and I brought a couple of sketchbooks from OCA to discuss approaches. This included the box of bits that I had done as part of the sketchbook which I had been quite satified with, but which my OCA tutor had not commented on. So, in short, a variety of things that might trigger conversation.

Anyway, I found the tutor positive and interested, and he had several suggestions for my continuing work and artists to study. 

His first impressions were interesting:

Although purposefully placing herself within the sphere of constructed textiles, Lorna is    operating akin to a sculptor that has a painters’ feel too. This is very healthy and can only benefit her approach to making in general. She has very eclectic research material and is open to possibilities offered by materials, techniques and outside influences. This, again, is an excellent creative habit to continue with and I suggest keeping this intensity of research/sketchbook going.

Michael Brennand-Wood had said I used 'gestural marks', and here was a perspective that suggested some of my work is sculptural. This is encouraging as I have been thinking about free-hanging and voluminous making, and it also fits in well with my process approach. I asked him about 'voice' and he said I had this already.

On my sketchbook box of different elements he said:
 

You display a great sensitivity to materials; some of your ‘samples’ (although I see them as finished pieces) use minimal colours and texture to great effect - many textile artists fall into the habit of overworking pieces so that the viewer becomes overwhelmed by a mass of conflicting information.

.........

Consider working in a vein similar to the sequences made for your OCA course - A4 pieces (hundreds of them!) that can have small gestures applied in small yet significant moments. Over time these will build into a concrete body of work. Whilst working towards an open studio next year is a positive goal, don't pre-empt what it is you could be showing. Consider hanging different/ important work (made on Cas Holmes’ course) in studio to show how differently you can work when pushed.

This last bit refers to a goal I have for this year to make some works that can be shown at next year's Open Studions in my area. Overall there were useful pointers as to how I could build up some coherent works in a smaller format - and it might be useful to just keep making and then decide whether to show things in series.

He concluded by saying

We discussed 'design' which you felt to be difficult - however making small thumbnail sketches to adjust positioning/placement of elements will hone and improve this skill.

You are visually astute, embedding different media well; continue to question, make and enjoy.

I had showed him my themebook, which he looked through and suggested I continue making books like this as they are concentrated ways of working.

So, overall a good session with plenty to think about. I have a couple of studio days coming up so will carry on working on felting and weaving, and will try to work out how this will sit with these suggestions. Definitely a worthwhile exercise to get a bit of feedback occasionally.