Let no one doubt, that the man who does not perfectly understand what he is attempting to do when painting, will never be a good painter. It is useless to draw the bow, unless you have a target to aim the arrow at.
Alberti
Let us start with a discussion about pictorial thought, traditions and individual vision.
I think the word thought implies words, whereas we work with substances and images felt and seen and not about words. They therefore have a different process of thought, based upon… what ? If we know this then we can study and deepen understanding of our images- beyond words.
Traditions and individual vision can imply a conflict. - what did you discover in your preparation?
Your Preparation:
Look at a work - painting and study it.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
Pablo Picasso
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
Isaac Newton
Look at a work - painting and study it. Don’t copy it but steal something from it.
1.Something technical/ materials.
2. Something about process.
3. Come with your spoils! Bring the work.
There are a wide range of responses by artists to the study of painting, ranging from a slavish copy of processes to apparently ‘none’ at all. Where are you?
Quotes:
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. (Napoleon Hill)
Do not grasp the brush before the spirit and the thoughts are concentrated.
(Anonymous Chinese painter)
By way of giving air to this important development, each student will select an area of study connected to their own painting then apply to your own work.
Students will be challenged to stretch their pictorial thinking and understanding through the chosen exercises and inspiring quotes.
These are the specific themes to choose from:
• Drawing – Strategies and its relationship to painting.
• Grounds and Surfaces, Paint. – Mixing theories, techniques Beginnings, tonal grounds and techniques and processes,
• Observation – Experience of nature and its relation to pictorial thought.
• Colour – Tone with colour, colour as tone, colour as feeling.
Text
• Observation and the experience of nature
• Studio Work – Drawing to final canvas, the growth of a painting.
• Composition
Please go through the sections and choose one area.
High light pencil underline - 2 aspects - the theory/ process: TP - the driving force: DF
Day schedule
SATURDAY
Meet 3.30 Tea and course introduction and notes.
Mix of studio and outside.
6.30 Supper Out at Coco’s Brasserie at Dale Yacht Club
01646 636362
SUNDAY
Idea: Change and the study of ideas and processes.
10 minute individual tutorials -all
Meet 4.00pm tea at 4.15 crit of day’s work
MONDAY .
WEDNESDAY
Choose discussion
Meet in Coronation Hall Dale Text
Idea: Conscious thinking and unconscious action.
Group day out. St Martin’s Head
THURSDAY
Idea: Studio Work – Drawing to final canvas, the growth of a painting.
Tutorials start 10.30-1.30
Meet 4.00pm tea at 4.15 crit of day’s work.
Tutorials start 10.30-1.30 and 2-4pm
Meet 4.00pm tea at 4.15 crit of day’s work.
TUESDAY .
Idea: Grounds and Surfaces, Paint. –
Mixing theories, techniques Beginnings, tonal grounds and techniques and processes,
Tutorials start 10.30-1.30
Meet 4.00pm tea at 4.15 crit of day’s work.
FRIDAY
Tutorials Start 9.30
Photo work
Tutorials start 10.30-1.30
Meet : 4pm tea, 4.15 crit of day’s work.
7pm Supper out
SATURDAY . Presentations of your work
Meet 10.am Studio View work
Course end 12 Noon
Two things each day:
Learn a process. Do the process.
Repeating Event
Drawing Strategies and its relationship to painting.
Drawing
Strategies and its relationship to painting.
Select an exercise from below to work with during your week:
Drawing
Intro-
Draw, Draw Draw. Painting structures come out of the pictorial.
The more intensely you look at things the more intense will be the work . And after all intensity is all that matters in painting,. John Piper
Drawing as thought
About space
What is drawing- its function?
Drawing as feeling?
As symbol
As kinetic
Drawing as expression
Drawing as ….line
Tone
Marks
Pattern
Drawing as materials
Techniques methods of-hatching,
Large scale drawing.
As observation- site size
As distortion about design- for
This means - try stuff out, probing what you “see”.
Exercises
Draw the outline as a geometric shape.
*Detail the contour silhouette edge.
*Use shapes for groupings of the tones
Exercises: on site
1,CROSS CONTOUR
You can map out the landscape using contour lines-_-not the contour lines used to define the outside, silhouette edges of an object, but those used for the surface of a form. lines when they run over the surfaces of the ground plane. Look at the drawing opposite and observe a-cross contour lines in action.
Studying the ground plane may be dull in and of itself, but when you consider that everything-_-trees, water, stones- is anchored to the ground, then it becomes essential to an understanding of the landscape.
2. idea -Tonal grouping .
Draw the outline as a geometric shape. Detail the contour silhouette edge. Use shapes for groupings of the tones.
3. start with dark. Erase tone to heighten the light values.
Studio exercise:
Draw out a painting design on painting surface- use charcoal and white chalk onto a grey ground. see illustration
Quotes:
Drawing is the probity of art.- Ingres.
The more intensely you look at things the more intense will be the work . And after all intensity is all that matters in painting,. John Piper
Grounds and Surfaces, Paint. –
Mixing theories, Beginnings, tonal grounds
Grounds and Surfaces, Paint.
– Mixing theories, Beginnings, tonal grounds
Intro-
This area covers much! The physical surface the processes of paint beginings and traditions and tonal grounds
Studio exercise:
1.Make a variety of surfaces in your sketch book.
2.Make a triangle - place Raw Umber Burnt sienna .Vine Black & or Indigo in the corners. Another - add white Repeat and intensify -add primaries. No white.
Exercises: on site
1. Cover support with cool ground , cover support with warm. Keep 70% with the ground ‘colour’ hue , 30 % against. Have one area most intense cool (indigo or black), one area most intense warm (Burnt Sienna).
Quotes:
Boldness has genius, power and magic. Engage, and the mind grows heated. Begin, and the work will be completed. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)-
Actually you work with few colours. But they seem like a lot more when each one is in the right place. Picasso
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. (Napoleon Hill)
Give something to everything, then give everything to something. (Jim Crow)
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment. (Thomas Carlyle)
Tonal grounds - see illustrations
Colour –
Tone with colour, colour as tone, colour as feeling.
Exercises:
1.Earth colours: AS TONAL, AS COLOUR , AS INTENSITY
As primaries:
Raw sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umber, indigo, Ivory black, titanium white
Degraded primaries with Primary tonic
Raw sienna with – yellows -red
As dullers
Raw sienna - cobalt blue
Yellow ochre- violet blue
Burnt umber - red
Indigo- blues
As simultaneous contrast
Black - blue
Burnt Umber- red
Indigo- violet
Colour Chords
Earth with primaries: red , yellow, black y.ochre, cad red, cobalt blue 2.
indigo , red opposites
Cadmium red, rose madder, cobalt violet, Cadmium yellow, gamboge/ aureolin, cadmium green light
Ultramarine, manganese blue
Cobalt green dark.
2.Choose an artist’s work whose colour is full of meaning –copy the painting .
Make use of a similar range of colour chords as the artist of your choice in a work of your own and working
Colour is the key board, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching on key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.’
W. Kandinsky 1911 “ The Effect of Colour’’from Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
3.Through observation, deconstructing , conceptualising, and reconstructing the course aims to release colour from a solely descriptive role of form. The aim is to make colour as a unifying element of personal vision, through selective use of colours, and ultimately describe to ourselves, and others, the world as we see, think and experience it.
Quotes
Colour is the key board, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching on key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.’
W. Kandinsky 1911 “ The Effect of Colour’’from Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Composition
Space and Design
Introduction
Space In painting two extreme characterisations of reality prevailone in which the image produced is as close to sight as possible. For example, blades of grass are not painted individually but as we would see it – as a mass.
The other extreme concerns itself with sensation, and the eye should not only see the object but also feel the physical matter of what is being represented.
One is more tactile (to do with the physical senses) - tactility ; the other in seeking the reality of appearance – how things actually look.
Plastic language – The plastic arts are those that use materials that are capable of being reshaped and reformed- sculpture, an art that makes use of materials and this is the stuff through which we can experience reality and through it we can represent ideas and a sensation of reality. A plastic language is the means, and is different from plasticity.
Both composition and enveloping pictorial space have composition in common ?
“Flatness” and sensations of a virtual space both require a unifying arrangement of parts.
This proposed principle is clearly described in composition.
Composition
Is the arrangement of forms, colours, tones, line within a chosen format to communicate meaning.
Exercises
1. Take a work and work out where the key compositional elements are within the rectangle.
2. How may you use composition to express meaning.
3.Place the main divisions within the rectangle using the
Golden Mean.
4. Emphasise flatness over space ‘reality’.
5. Emphasise perspective over flatness.
Quotes
There is nothing pleasurable except what is in harmony with the utmost depths of our divine nature.
HEINRICH
SUSO (CA. 1295-1366), GERMAN MYSTIC
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
One thing arises from all things, and all things arise from one thing.
HERACLITUS, FRAGMENT 10
All the planes of existence are involved in it. It is not only that the soul is full of music: once you have hear the inner music, your mind is full of it, your heart is full of it, your body is full of it, all your layers of being are full of it. Once known, not only do you hear it inside of you, it is outside too. In the song of birds you hear it, and in the wind passing through the trees you hear it, and in the waves striking on the rocks you hear it. In sound you hear it, in silence you hear it. In fact the greatest music in the world is nothing but an echo of the inner music.
USHO (1931 -1990), INDIAN MYSTIC
The power of the golden section to create harmony arises from its unique capacity to unite different parts of a whole so that each preserves its own identity, and yet blends into the greater pattern of a single whole.
GYORGY DOCZI, THE POWER OF LIMITS
Observation and the experience of nature
Observation and the experience of nature
Introduction.
This absolutely key I believeAn identifying with your subject. If there is no engagement then the work will lack an essential ingredient. How artists have expressed that experience and with what is part your creative endeavour. But can you learn to appropriate pictorial thought of such an intensely personal nature?
What do you need from nature?
What do you need from art For the word Art I mean the value content.
Nature is of course linked to Art, to it’s forces and meanings. And therefore gives value and content to the work.
We look to landscapes that trigger these states of our being, and we work for the painterly means which will fundamentally engage and reveal Nature’s forces and meanings.
So what do we need from Nature?
And what do we need from Art?
From Nature we need to relate and connect with what is true. Through Art we need to distill truth and value as we see it, feel it and experience it. This will mean a constant appraisal of the material means and approaches to our work so as to meet that truth. I still like James Joyce’s words which links Nature to Art : ‘The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.’
In painting landscape there are two truths: your experience, and the existence of nature.
Exercises
Start with observation of the facts
Do a work which focuses entirely on nature. Remain open to the possibilities that come as a result of this focus- ie a different physical approach that will allow art habits to come second and make available the imagination and value of feeling seeing. Ie use an implement to deliver the marks that will surprise – or your ‘wrong’ hand or shut your eyes…work in the dark. Play music etc. think only of the valued feeling connection.
In John Wolseley’s work he pretty much works with the actual soil, mud, water. He wishes for his work to collaborate with the actual plants, birds, trees, rocks and earth of a particular place. He tries to relate the minutiae of the natural world - leaf, feather and beetle wing - to the abstract dimensions of the earth's dynamic systems. As for the art of landscape, he wishes to remove that magisterial gaze that is so often the curse of landscape painters and become a part of what he is seeing. That is the way he does it – how do you do it?
Quotes Carr
Oh God what have ~I seen?..
It is surging through my whole being, the wonder of it all, like a great river rushing on, dark and turbulent, and rushing and irresistible, carrying me away on its wild swirl like a helpless little bundle of wreckage. Where, where? Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created? —
a world stripped of earthiness, shorn of fretting details, purged, purified;
a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity.
I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.
GEORGIA O'KEEFE
Studio Work
final canvas, the growth of a painting.
Drawing to
Intro
Part of a painting is physical. Another part is intellectual. The most practical action is important. Work in the studio is a further creative act.
It requires substantial amount of work to keep the momentum and work that has a strong pull for you. You are not copying studies but mining deeper. Make a programme on ways to proceed. Plan.
We can look at our work and see a multitude of elements which we hope connect into one nucleus of energy - towards an expression of a vision. sometimes this expression is pulling in different directions and needs to be intensified and distilled.
Exercises.
Work out your plan - write it down. The core idea.
And the uses of pictorial language you will employ. Work out the materials needed. Name the processes.
Exercises:
Process 1.
Draw out a painting design on painting surface- use charcoal and white chalk onto a grey ground. see illustration
Process 2.
Take a module or fragment sec2on of your work that is pleasing to you. This will be the genesis and then seek to repeat its basic elements, expanding them throughout the work in both predictable and unpredictable ways. I this way the whole is connected to the smaller.- through colour , tone , line , shape, .....and means.
Process 3.
Emphasise the way the work is carried out -its material - the means of paint , brush and surface.
Quotes:
‘The first stage of a painting is to decide exactly what to include in it and what size or shape it will be . Olwyn Bowey RA is never sure when she starts whether a few centimetres extra will be required and so begins with a guess attaching the canvas loosely larger than her stretchers and takes this to the painting location. She starts by drawing in charcoal. When she is more sure of the size the painting will be she attaches the canvas roughly with a staple gun to an approximately sized stretcher. She continues drawing and working out the painting , perhaps adding a bit to one side or the other until it begins to take shape. Even then may take a few centimetres off one side . She carries on drawing and making these, finally applying then washes of colour so she gets an idea of how the finished painting might look, ~The composition of the painting is now established. At this point she takes the canvas home and stretches it properly…’.
Sutherland:
I have a fairly clear idea of what has to be done , though it is never clear how to do it. Consequently it may be necessary to make several versions of the same subject. When there is only the desire to paint , the urge has to take form while working .
From the moment when the painting surface is chosen, the work should grow with its own personality to meet the painter’s creative thought , else the result will be devoid of life. Sutherland
Rothko
The progression of a painters work as it travels in time from point to point will be towards clarity, toward the elimination of obstacles between painter and the idea, and between idea and the observer.
“Everything is on its way to somewhere - everything.“
