Project: Perspective

Exercise: Parallel perspective

Initially I was unsure where exactly my eyeline was, which took a moment or two to figure out. I was amazed how difficult it was to get these parallel lines accurate. When I drew over the initial drawing with pen, it became clear just how wrong I had been in some areas. Some of my receding lines were pretty much spot on on the observational drawing in pencil, yet some of them were WAY out! (Particularly on the left side of the drawing, the radiator especially and rail.) One thing I was aware of while drawing is that this house is Victorian so though not incredibly old, it is old enough to have warped slightly over the years, or perhaps was ever so slightly wonky in the first place. This made it a little bit more difficult - I was unsure as to whether to ignore the slight wonkiness or to embrace it - deciding eventually on ignoring it otherwise I was in danger of  my drawing looking horribly inaccurate (the pipe behind the open door is in fact not straight at all). I felt that a ruler would have been really helpful at the start of the drawing, but once I'd got into it I forgot about that feeling altogether and managed without it, fairly well. Needless to say trying to draw lines ruler-less is bound to be good training. I used a ruler to draw the receding lines from the vanishing point, then continued using it to draw over where things should be, if I'd observed them correctly.

Exercise: Angular perspective

I found this drawing particularly hard in terms of establishing where my eye level was (just to clarify, is the eye level the level at which my eyes physically are on my face if I were to walk across the road in this drawing and stand with my face against the wall? Or is it where my sight lies if I look comfortably straight ahead? Sorry, this may seem like a really dumb question!) - I drew receding lines from the rooftops but they seemed to fall far below where I thought my eye level was... and all the vanishing points seem to be off the page, which didn't help. I don't think I chose a very good view but I can't figure out why... Too much blank wall space in the foreground and not enough of a receding view I presume.

Research point: Foreground, middleground and background - Lorrain and Turner

Lorrain uses purpley/browny/greys to indicate the Scottish hills in the background. As a great artist he clearly knew that to paint an image realistically you need not include much detail at all for the far distant views, because our eyes cannot naturally pick up clearly defined details of things that are that far away. His trees and people in the foreground are much more defined. Our eyes can focus on details at a short distance with ease.

Here Lorrain separates the fore, middle and backgrounds by simply lightening his marks the further into the distance he goes with his pen. The characteristics of the trees become clearer, and the light and shadow become gradually bolder and more accentuated.

In this etching above by Turner you can quite clearly see three divisions of landscape - the background is much lighter with less definition, the middleground has more definition and much darker areas of shading, and the foreground has the most contrast in tone, from almost black where areas fall into shadow, to as pale as possible where areas have been left blank to show where light falls.

Again here you can see how Turner defines the depth in his subject by focusing on the closer features that the eye can see with any clarity. The further the eye goes back into the distance, the less information you can take in, and things become blurry and less concrete. Turner uses pale yellows and greens to depict his far away hills.

Exercise: Plotting space through composition and structure

For this exercise I returned to the local cemetery, but I chose a new view instead of developing one I'd already looked at because I needed a view with more distance. It was a beautifully sunny day so lots of light falling all around, and after a while of sitting the shadows became more prominent which helped my drawing immensely. In the foreground is a grassy verge, tarmac path and gravestones. In the middle ground there are more gravestones and a variety of trees. In the far distance you can make out the horizon littered with trees and houses over on the hills on the other side of Bristol. It was important to me to get the proportions right because without any preliminary studies for a drawing it can often be tricky to dive right in, so I spent a good deal of time sketching in the main shapes of my subject. (I do wonder if some preliminary sketches would have helped in other ways, for example perhaps I could have tried being more selective about which objects to draw - would it have benefitted from less gravestones or a wider view of the distant background??)

The one large thing I did choose to omit was the fence that would appear to the bottom right of the drawing - I did this purely for aesthetic reasons, it is not a pretty fence. I certainly simplified my drawing a lot (this was only because of time - not that I wasn't enjoying sitting out in the sun, but if I'd included every detail I would have been there until nightfall at the earliest!). For example, I omitted the writing and other intricate details on the stones, and with the trees I simply hinted at the shapes of the boughs as opposed to drawing it leaf by leaf. I was more concerned with getting the proportions, shapes and tones right, as well as focusing on the distinction between the fore, middle and backgrounds. I kept the far distance very simple, I focused on the shape of the horizon and the general tone of that area of my view. I ensured that the gravestones closest to me were the most prominent and out-standing, as indeed they were. The shapes of the gravestones in the middle distance were slightly wishywashy from my distance away, I couldn't see their edges and unique details as well as those on the front line. The sunlight was coming in from my left and by looking at the stones I could see clear shadows falling from that direction, which helped to add form to them.

I initially used graphite pencil, then shaded in using watersoluble pencils to add colour, then returned to pencil to replenish any lost marks and add in additional shading where necessary.

Exercise: Drawing cloud formations

(See sketchbook) I happened to choose a day when there's barely a cloud in the sky to begin this exercise, so I will have to come back to it at a later date. (I did make a start with a couple of pages in my sketchbook but the clouds were not particularly interesting - they were typical white fluffy clouds, changing to quickly and moving too fast to capture with any real clarity.)

Update: I have been waiting and waiting for the perfect day of a cloud-filled sky and in doing so have put off sending my assignment for 2 weeks! I finally managed to draw some more clouds yesterday and this morning, but they weren't the beautiful, billowy, thick, multi-layered ones I was hoping would come out for me. It seems the best times of day for interesting clouds is the evening, but unfortunately I haven't had any free evenings for ages, so the small collection of white wispy clouds and overcast grey ones is all that I've studied up to now. I will endeavour to keep my face to the sky with my fingers crossed.

Exercise: 360degree studies

This was a really interesting exercise. I had to set an alarm every 15 minutes because I know that I am quite a slow drawer and thought I'd easily go way over time without being aware. So when the first alarm went off I was naturally surprised that it had gone so quickly and was a bit disappointed that I'd not 'finished'! But I got used to working quickly after the first one. I actually didn't find it too difficult towards the end to be selective, I focused on only the details that I considered necessary to a quick sketch. I simplified the trees hugely by just making marks to indicate the boughs, trunk or branches. I barely even bothered with adding detail to the grass or tarmac road, I just showed shapes and shadow here and there. Because i chose ballpoint pen it wasn't that easy to shade in large areas, so in hindsight perhaps I should have used another medium like charcoal or pencil. I kept the distant aspects of my views very simple, by juat shading/cross hatching areas to indicate tone and shape - this helped to indicate depth.

Research point: Cezanne

I was really interested to discover that Cezanne did not paint outside in situ according to one source http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/land/ - he compiled his settings presumably from his sketchbook work and his imagination. He chose the compositions of his subjects to fit with his own ideas of how they should be.

Cezanne was well aware that the true reality of the things we see is incredibly difficult to imitate. The problem he found was that whatever he painted and however well he mastered it, it would still never quite match up to the beauty of the scenery itself. His way around it was to more or less make his subjects up.

These images, however real they may look and feel to the viewer probably don't exist in reality, or at least if they do, they will differ certainly. He was an interpretor of the world around him, and through this talent he bridged the gap between nature and art. He proved that your depiction of reality can be just as beautiful and valuable as the reality itself.

Exercise: A sketchbook walk

I took a stroll through the cemetery just a few minutes walk away from the family home. I thought it would make quite an interesting subject for landscape drawings -it's perched on a hill so you can often see into distant Bristol between the trees. I chose a nice looking old tree as my main subject and used a viewfinder to draw 4 views around it. The hardest aspect of the exercise was getting all the angles of the gravestones correct. There was a lot of information to take in and I had to remind myself halfway through that I was supposed to be sketching quickly - so I simplified parts of the sketches, for example I didn't draw the details of the leaves on the tree, or the soil and grass on the ground. I recognised various shapes that repeated throughout the drawings - rectangles predominantly, but also triangles and a few elipses of circular objects too. I used cross hatching to create tone, and took special care to focus on where light and shadow fell because it's these things that give your subject form. I took simple notes on all 4 drawings, mainly about the light, shadow and variety of tones. The 4th drawing is probably the best due to the position of the tree being central to the view so if I were to develop any of the drawings I'd probably choose this one.

Research point: Pentimenti

I'd never heard of this expression before, I think it's interesting that there is one. It's obviously a matter that art lovers/critics find important to recognise, perhaps because pentimenti makes us feel closer to the artist in a way - they are mere mortals afterall, just like us. Everyone makes mistakes, as 'they' say.

A good example that crops up a lot when researching the subject is Jan Van Eyck's portrait of Arnolfini and his wife, an amazing painting. You can quite clearly see that the painter has moved the position of the model's left foot, amongst other things.

Another example is Velazquez's portrait of King Philip of Spain where you can very clearly see that the musket was intially a lot longer. You can also see that his left leg has been moved inwards towards the other leg.

And another I found of Matisse's where you can see the artist has moved the man's arm and leg and painted over it. I understand that the artist was quite happy to show off where he had rectified his mistakes, to show that the process of painting is not always plain sailing.

PART THREE

Project: Landscape Drawing

Research Point: Landscape artists

'Landscape with Cannon' by Durer is an etching and looking at it you get a really good idea of how great an observer the man is. In fact I'm beginning to become rather a big fan of Durer. He includes a lot of information in his work - he is very well accomplished at seeing things the way they really are, or accessing the right side of the brain as Betty Edwards might say.

The tree and the clouds in Durer's 'The Watermill' are really astonishing. He creates a lot of depth in his work and seems to know how to set apart the information in the fore, middle and backgrounds without the painting looking overworked and cluttered. The colours are also really beautiful in this particular painting.

When I first read ahead and saw that the next part of the course was about landscape drawing, I immediately thought of Turner, presumably because I've seen quite a lot of his work and it stuck in my mind because of it's clarity and Britishness perhaps. The painting above, 'Landscape near Petworth' is quite sketchy as far as Turner's paintings go but I like it because of that - it almost looks as though it's been completed in pastel because of the soft marks and perfect blending of colour. You can see areas of white canvas peeping through, and the animals are mere shapes hinting at what they might be - Turner spent time focusing on getting the essence of his scene right. But what I really like about it is the mist in the background floating around the church steeple and the hills surrounding it, reminding me of chilly mornings in the countryside.

Turner here has, like Durer, a great ability to create depth - the details of the 'Villa d'Este' in the background are only barely visible from the viewers distance away, but the trees in the left foreground are quite clear - you can see light shining off the branches and leaves where he has left areas blank, and many other tones ranging right up to black where the leaves are in shadow.

This coastal scene from Lorrain is basically a still from a classical story - he uses his ability to capture nature in its true form together with a strong imagination and passion for these stories to recreate scenes that most can only picture in their minds, if at all. I suppose he was like the 17th Century version of a modern day film director depicting their ideas of how historical events may have looked if you were lucky enough (or unlucky perhaps) to have been a witness. Lorrain has a remarkable way of taking you away to a romantic place of myth and legend.

I've included this 'Morning (Landscape with Jacob, Rachel and Leah by the Well)'  by Lorrain because he has painted the sky so beautifully. In paint alone he has achieved a representation of that first feeling of warmth you get on your skin as the sun starts to rise on a summer day. It's very dramatic - bright in the dawn sky but dark in shadow in the foreground, both equally important balancing aspects of the painting.