Friday 15 January 2009




Course work: I think the oil pastel drawing is complete now: I’ll look at it again in a day or so. Made a start on the negative space drawing of a plant.

Reading:



Daniel M. Mendelowitz and Duane Wakeham A Guide to Drawing (Fifth Edition)

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, Orlando, Florida, USA, 1995

Pp 3-41



Research point: “Find out about Ben Nicholson. Why does he simplify still life forms and negative space and superimpose them on the Cornish landscape?”



Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was the son of a well-known painter. He abandoned training at the Slade after one term and traveled in Europe and later in the United States. He saw his first Picasso either in Paris or Pasadena, California (sources differ), and was strongly influenced thereby. Beginning in the 1920’s his work evolved from landscapes that appear to my eye to have been strongly influenced by Cezanne toward pure abstraction, culminating in his white abstract reliefs (denounced by his father as “awful lavatory seats”). Later he returned to a less-abstract style that often featured representations of still-life objects placed on a windowsill in his studio in St. Ives, Cornwall, and toward the end of his career he worked freely between abstraction and abstract realism. His wives appear to have influenced his work strongly over the years. Winifred Nicholson, a painter, contributed to his ideas about color, Barbara Hepworth, a sculptor, influenced his thinking about form. Perhaps we can assume that third wife Felicitas Vogler, a photographer, further contributed to his ideas concerning light. Another strong influence was primitive painter Alfred Wallis. Nicholson is now considered by many the leading exponent of British Modernism.



The second part of the question is factually unanswerable. Why does any artist choose to do what he does? For many, the answer is “To make a living.” For many others, the answer is “This is what I am moved to do at this particular moment.” For some, the answer would be “What would happen if I did this?” Quite often even the artist does not know why he or she chooses to follow a particular path, on paint a specific painting. I find the efforts of critics and art historians to retrospectively find motivations for or deep meanings in an artist’s work often humorous, and sometimes ludicrous; nearly always such investigations tell me more about the mind of the person writing than about the mind of the artist (imagine what Rembrandt would have thought had he known of the generations of art scholars his works would engender!). The best answer I can give to the question posed is my uneducated opinion: Ben Nicholson painted the way he did because that is what he wanted to do.



Drawing fruits and vegetables: check and log

I would guesstimate that my negative space in the oil pastel drawing is about 1/3, in the two marker drawings about half, and in the colored pencil drawing about ¼. In the process of attempting to draw the details of fruits and vegetables I have learned that one’s success is very strongly medium-dependent, and also strongly related to one’s attitude toward a specific medium. I found working with markers the most challenging and frustrating part of the exercise from the viewpoint of my inability to get them to do what I wanted to do. Colored pencils were challenging, because accuracy in form or color can be obtained only at the expense of a great deal of time. Oil pastels are a very imprecise medium, difficult to correct and almost impossible to apply in a uniform manner using hatching. Perhaps my greatest challenge about this section was in doing work that I thought was adequate: the final colored pencil drawing was about the only one I really felt I had done reasonably well. My dissatisfaction with my work in this section is best reflected in the fact that it took me about 38 hours of effort for this nominally eight-hour exercise.



Total time: 1 hour 57 minutes