Ron Mueck - an inspiration

I've never felt that sculpture, for some reason, was something I could really relate to - it often being too abstract for me perhaps to understand. I went to see Ron Mueck's recent exhibition in Christchurch, NZ (see link) last weekend. All I can say is WOW. His works literally took my breath away.

An Australian born artist but based in London, renowned for being the quiet type when it comes to the press, he makes incredibly life like and often enormous sculptures. They evoke so much power, physically and emotionally. They are so real in fact that I couldn't help thinking they were at any point going to open their eyes, or begin to walk across the room. His huge sculpture of a pregnant woman forces you to sympathise with the weight and exhaustive burden of being heavily pregnant. His Dead Dad sculpture, only about 3 foot long, had a strong almost physical affect on me, having lost my own Dad recently. Never have I been so moved at an art exhibition. I urge everyone to see his works when the opportunity arises. Mueck is not one to be missed.

Enlarging an image

I think I was pretty successful in copying my drawing from the smaller squares to the larger ones. I really tried not to look at the picture as a whole, and just tried to focus on each square and what it contained. I was actually quite surprised at how it all came together so well once I'd completed all the squares.

The mug was fairly easy to enlarge, but the handle looks a little bit wonky.

The trickier parts were the more detailed squares like the ones containing the scissor handles for example - I think next time I try enlarging something that has more detailed parts, I would choose to use a grid of smaller squares, to enable more accuracy.

Using texture

I really enjoyed this texture project, but I feel like there's an awful lot more you could explore as long as you had access to more and more materials. I tried out lots of new things to get a textured look. I found the frottage technique a useful and interesting addition to my explorations. I ended up using mixed media for the drawing, to get the right effect for each of the items. I found that soaking a sponge in ink and lightly pressing it onto your paper gives quite a nice fluffy effect so I used that method to depict the woolen texture of the scarf I decided to draw, then used pen and ink to draw each stitch in it's woven pattern. I went for oil pastel for the driftwood because I wanted to show that it was quite a smooth piece of wood after years of being smoothed by the sea. Where the grain slices across the wood I scratched into the pastel with a sharp pair of scissors. The cardboard was the tricky part. I tried about 4 or 5 differing methods in my sketchbook to get the right look and none of them were perfect to be honest, but I settled with using pencil crayon to get a smooth flat surface colour. I then rubbed over some actual cardboard to get the corrugated lined effect, with a graphite pencil. I'm pleased with the end result.
I didn't do any tonal hatching at all, and yet managed to make the forms of my subjects look pretty reaslistic and interesting. Where the scarf's darkest parts were, I basically blotted more ink onto the paper, going over and over some areas. On the driftwood I blended in black, grey and brown oil pastel to show where there was shadow or hollows, and darker areas where the bark still remains. I used graphite and rubbed over the ready made lines of the corrugated cardboard to depict the darker areas of the piece of cardboard underneath the scarf. I also used graphite to just shade under the cardboard  but decided not to draw/paint in the wooden surface all my objects sat on. I didn't want to distract the eye away from the subject, and also felt that it looked finished as it was.
Frottage is definitely something I will use again. Not only is it useful for getting the right pattern or texture of an object, but it adds an attractive and unusual effect too. There's no real limit to what you can use with frottage, as long as it is textured, and that makes for an appealing technique to use when drawing.

Still life

Initially I started this project using glass items, which you can see above in the top left corner of my sketchbook. However, I got distracted I didn't finish and had to start over again in a totallly different house with completely different items! So, I used a selection of ceramic objects, which didn't have quite the same reflective properties as the glass ones but did have interesting shapes and textures. I used graphite pencil, which gives a lovely smooth line and is great for shading.

For the natural objects I chose an animal bone, a bulb of garlic, a small clam shell and a piece of drift wood. They all complimented eachother well in texture and colour (they were all quite light) however not so well in shape, so I struggled a bit to get the composition right. I used a brown pencil crayon for this drawing.

My opinion is that it is easier to suggest three dimensions on man made objects. I can't say for sure why this is but I think this may be because man made objects have a familiar form, a uniform, something that we are used to witnessing and so find easier to replicate. Natural objects are never the same from one to the next. The intricate details of the garlic bulb for example, where the light falls on a scrap of it's fragile peel, will never be the same as on the scrap next to it. And man made objects tend to have far more flat surfaces, or perfectly rounded edges for example, so we can almost second guess how it's shadow may lie on the surface under it.
I placed solidity in the composition by carefully noting where the light was coming from and therefore where the object's cast shadows were falling, either onto the surface they sat on or onto their fellow objects. To get a three dimensional or solid effect, light and shadow are most important.
I found that changing the compostion many times over made a huge difference to my approach. It helped me to look at the objects in a different light, from a different angle as it were. The way one jar reflected the other may not have been noticed had I not moved one more infront of the other, for example. The more you move things around, the more you notice and the more you get out of your chosen objects.
I decided at first to sit above, looking over the objects, thinking that at this angle I would get an advantage over the items, being able to see more. Then I moved the objects further away on the table, so that I was looking at them from a lower angle. It was at this angle that I chose to do the larger drawing, because the compositon was more pleasing - the drift wood stretching across the page to carry you eye, the shell in the background (I was worried this would look a bit like it was floating...) and the bone and garlic filling the space in the foreground. I still think the composition could be better, but think perhaps it is the objects themselves that don't quite work together. The shell is perhaps too small? The bone too angular?

Reflected light

The objects I chose were metallic and therefore very reflective. It was a bright day and I placed the objects on a white surface. I thought a white surface might make it easier to see the cast shadow. The reflection of the drinking flask can be very clearly seen in the metal surface of the tin, as the metals were quite different from one another - the tin very shiny, almost mirror-like, and the flask quite matt but still relatively reflective.The reflected light from the window created white bands across the objects, and these white bands in turn were then reflected between the two. They also cast shadows onto one another. I held the charcoal quite loosely and contacted the paper very lightly to get the the reflected light. I was able to make quite dark lines by brushing the paper firmly with the charcoal to create the darker cast shadows.

The question in the brief asks "What are the difficulties in separating cast shadow from reflected light and shade?" I find this really quite hard to explain in words - too absract a question!? Or am I readin into it too much? Will ask Emma.

The reflections of shadow and light are pretty distorted because of the curves of the objects, but I followed the contours as well as I could by looking carefully and marking the light areas by cross hatching very gently over the paper, or where there was shadowed areas, more firmly.

Research Point - Patrick Caulfield

Whether or not Patrick Caulfield was pleased with his categorisation of Pop Artist, his work without doubt had the credentials to fit into this bracket. He used screen printing techniques in the most part for highlighting commonplace objects, but using bright and often primary colours and black outline so that they burst out of the canvas. The viewer is almost certainly surprised by how striking such a mundane item such as a lamp, can be. (More info in my sketchbook.)
I enjoyed doing the piece in the style of Caulfield. It was a break from my usual style and it was an opportunity to look at the shapes of my subjects in a totally different way. I didn't need to focus on their every detail, just mainly their shape and shadow. It was fun.

Research point; Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon, photo taken from Bridgeman Education

Wow! What an artist. I really enjoyed this research project (it is in my sketchbook). I had never heard of the man before but am so impressed, especially because you can see so clearly through his artwork how his life progressed and changed. He was a quiet man, and it may seem a silly thing to say but I think you can tell through his work that he was so. There's something thoughtful and tranquil about his style. The colours he eventually began to use in his later life are not garish or showy, they are soft and almost serene. His strange and at times slightly disturbing earlier works have a mystical thing going on - they aren't so much scary as they are fantastical and just peculiar. He had some smart things to say about art too. I especially like this quote; "The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence." It seems that despite his otherwordly, and one could say underground and alternative art work, he felt that art itself was a unifying force. Something for everyone and something that will make the world a better place.