Course Review

In terms of development, I feel the parts of the course that have furnished me with the most creative resources were:

Landscape exercises – this is the area I always struggle with the most but, as with everything, it is the things we find most difficult that make us think and work harder to achieve a satisfactory result.  The three versions of a “soft landscape” of Langdon Hills totally infuriated me because I wanted to be able to achieve a realistic but expressive result without becoming bogged down in detail, resulting in a tight, boring painting.  Acrylics are not my favourite medium anyway, but for speed, sometimes they have to be used when you are applying layers (in the confines of a timed course) and so I was determined to find a way I could use them effectively.  The technique employed (large brushes heavily loaded) worked well for the soft landscapes but more so for the hard landscape of Bow Lane, a detailed townscape image which I created without pre-drawing, and which I was very pleased with.

I also found the personal development section beneficial in terms of creativity – personally, I would have liked the section earlier in the course.  I think using different materials / textures / ways of applying paint could be useful to many more sections of the course.  One of my favourite paintings created is the elephant over a heavily textured canvas of torn kitchen roll and cleaning cloths.  Using a dilute, transparent paint over texture allows the paint to move and run in ways which cannot always be controlled, so you have to be more relaxed and just go with it.

In contrast to the transparent paint used above, I have also found that I paint better using thick oil paint without dilution – if I use a painting medium to make the paint more fluid, I find that I am too conscious of edges, resulting in fiddly paintings.

Also in terms of texture, I found coating the canvas with a thin layer of texture medium (applied with a brush) stops me feeling the need to be too fussy with edges, and I have used this in a number of paintings: head and shoulder self-portrait; aerial perspective and Painting 1 of Assignment 5.  All of these paintings were completed on this layer, with old, rough hog-hair brushes and only two sittings, and are some of my favourite paintings from the course.

Assignment Five - A Series of Paintings on a Theme

Helen Tennant – 484022

Practice of Painting – Assignment 5

A series of paintings on a theme
 
Series Title: Only Still Life

My painting series for this assignment is based on a theme of still life, as this is the area in which I have most interest. 

I began considering the genre of still life and how artists past and present have approached the subject.

Traditional still life, especially the Dutch masters of the genre (such as Willem Kalf) have shown us luxury goods (sumptuous displays of exotic fruits, flowers, glassware and precious metals) – displays of unattainable perfection that were beyond the reach of most.

This approach to still life is still very much used by modern proponents of this genre, showing the artist’s skill of depicting perfect objects arranged to their best advantage.

I was thinking about this subject when doing my weekly shop and looking at the fresh produce on offer made me consider the differences between what I was seeing in front of me and the perfection we see in still life paintings, and even more so now, the “food porn” of magazines, advertising and blogs. 

The food most people buy is generally over-packaged; wrapped in layers of plastic and so you get a feeling of “look but don’t touch” which is as far removed from nature as the images created by the Dutch still life painters was all those years ago.

The other thing the packaging reminded me of was glass – the very delicate, see through composition of the material and how it was used in the past.  Glass was a traditional component in still life because of its properties of reflection and transparency, and the difficulty in catching the fleeting moments when light hits the glass.

I completed a number of drawings and studies of objects in packaging, making notes on the studies as I completed them, especially noting the difficulties in gauging from the objects what is the tonal variation in the object itself and the effect of reflected highlights from the plastic. 

I also completed a study on tracing paper to try to separate the layers of plastic from the object itself – although painting (with watercolour) on tracing paper wrinkles the paper too much, I did find the layered, slightly obscured image, interesting and so may explore this further.

I researched contemporary artists who are inspired by food and packaging.  The first artist is Janet Fish, an American artist whose early work included detailed paintings and pastels of fruit wrapped in clingfilm (annotated below). 

Fish’s later work is very colourful and effusive, described by herself as “a dance involving her, the objects, the painting and the sensations of the painting”. 

Somewhat surprisingly, when I researched Fish further, she cites her main influences as the Abstract Expressionists (she studied art in the 1960s), stating “it really came out of all the abstract expressionist training, those paintings are about colour and paint and movement, and the idea that you can organise a painting through movement.  I went along with that and then saw other ways of organising the painting through repetition and change, more like music”.

The second (also American) artist I discovered was Pamela Michelle Johnson who has created a series of paintings entitled “American Still Life” based around food and the cultural references around typically American junk food.

Johnson’s earlier Series 1 paintings are on a very large scale (up to 6’) and are quite disconcerting; first impressions are of delicious foods, such as waffles with syrup (Waffles 2007) but when you see the scale of them on her website, the size of the images transforms them into something completely different, as if the viewer is being subsumed by the food.

Her Series II paintings explore further the use of packaging “empty wrappers forgotten and abandoned in a world of nothingness … (hence the blackness surrounding the images) …question the sustainability of our excess”.

Reviewing the work of both these artists, the influences I learnt from them are:

·      The ‘whole’ composition – both artists utilised the whole of the canvas, cropping the image so it filled the picture plane.

·       Size matters! – most still life paintings are normally fairly small in size, these are either large or very large.

·       Concentrate on light – the reflections (waffles/Eggo) rely on reflective surfaces (whether syrup or plastic) to bring the paintings to life.

·       Pamela Michelle Johnson – seemingly innocuous images can hold a darker meaning – both in using scale and close-up cropped imagery, and in using a traditional style for junk food/packing.

·       Janet Fish – treating each object on its own visual merits rather than applying cultural values to an inanimate object. 

·       Janet Fish – organising a painting through movements around the canvas rather than traditional layouts (particularly light, pattern and colour).

·       Janet Fish – using as many objects in a painting as you wish and using a high viewpoint to see objects in a different way.

My starting point for sketches was to organise my weekly shop of vegetables, still in their packaging, onto the table and create “traditional” still life groups from the objects (charcoal pencil and marker pen)

The last one of these I thought had potential, but then I also decided to try the “Janet Fish”, "more-is-more" approach, and so put all the shopping onto the window sill so it was grouped more closely together and then completed two further sketches.

As this was quite a sunny day, the objects created a wide tonal variety from the white highlights to the deep colours and shadows.

I preferred the second sketch (notes on each drawing) as it was stronger compositionally (felt the eggs dominated the first drawing).

Due to the variety of colour in this arrangement, I experimented with colour mixes, aiming to use the minimum number of paints to achieve a colour balance without colours clashing or becoming muddy.

Colours used in painting 1 “Shopping”:

• French Ultramarine
• Cobalt Violet
• Alizarin Crimson
• Paynes Grey
• Cadmium Yellow
• Yellow Ochre
• Titanium White

From previous colour experiments, I knew that using the purple/yellow and/or blue/orange complimentaries would create a wide enough range of neutral hues to compliment the more saturated colours (red, purple and yellow) in the painting.

After creating the purple for the figs, I felt the colour was too dull against a white background and so created a patch over red acrylic, which glowed through to create a much more vibrant colour.

After applying a thin layer of texture medium with a rough brush (previously used on a self-portrait and landscape painting to slightly “scuff-up” the canvas, I gridded the canvas and created an underpainting with dilute umber acrylic.  To this I firstly applied an umber acrylic underpainting plus lemon yellow for the lemons, red on the figs and a very dilute red on the eggs.  

I then painted in oils, more or less in one layer with a hog-hair brush, beginning with the figs, followed by the eggs, lemons and then working out to complete the less saturated areas of colour and shadow.

The lemons were the most complicated area to work – I decided before painting that I would create the flesh of the lemons negatively to leave the net packaging as the paler, lemon acrylic.

Completed Painting: Just Shopping

After completing this painting, I decided that I would like explore the painting of lemons further – they have such an interesting colour and surface texture, while still being everyday objects. 

The second painting was done after I had visited the Still Alive exhibition at the Mall Galleries (previously reviewed) which had me considering the question of the size of a painting, and the relationship between the objects and size of the canvas.  I therefore decided to try a more unusual shaped, elongated rectangle for this painting and so completed a number of sketches on that theme.

I choose the view of the lemons (some cut) in a row which I felt described the lemons the best; different angles, sizes, cut in half and sliced through.  I also looked at the rough surface texture on the lemons and then reviewed the previous experiments completed with texture. 

One texture I particularly felt suitable was pressing foil into wet texture paste to create a very rough surface texture.

In terms of paint application, I recalled my experiments with using sheer, transparent paint on the elephant against the very rough background texture.  

The transparent paint runs and settles into the texture to add sometimes unexpected but interesting results.  I experimented with this surface on a large sheet of canvas, applying loose washes of colour onto the textured canvas, using mixes of the colours previously used in the first painting.  I felt the most successful of these experiments was where I had used transparent washes, allowing the colours to mix on the canvas and then applying thicker paint in loose brushstrokes over the top.

After completing this painting I wasn’t sure about the layout – I felt the whole lemon on the extreme right didn’t sit well with the rest of the painting; the shape and colour jarred somewhat. 

I therefore photographed and experimented with cropping the painting (before actually cutting!), deciding to remove this area completely after the painting was dry.

Simply Lemons

For the third painting, I again decided to look at the scale of the support, this time referencing the smaller, more intimate paintings seen at the Mall Galleries (Barbara Richardson, Lilias August).  I had two small pieces of hardboard (actually protective covering for a print I bought) which were a good size to be intimate but large enough to be able to paint detail.  Again I decided to use the lemons and figs set against an art deco sugar bowl and plate for detail.

In order to get the right scale, I used the exact size on paper and completed two sketches.

For the second sketch I completed a more detailed, tonal drawing at a slightly higher viewpoint and moved slightly off-centre to create a stronger diagonal and therefore more dynamic composition.  I wasn’t sure at this stage whether to create a detailed, traditional painting using glazing and natural colours, or a looser technique, so created two contrasting acrylic sketches.

While I felt the more traditional approach would work well here, I felt the more textured (and loosely painted) acrylic sketch had much more interest with the broken colour and paint texture.

I applied a thick layer of gesso to the paper, and then brushed over it while still wet in the opposite direction which gave more of a texture key for the paint to skip over, leaving under layers showing through.  I applied dry brushed layers of beige, dark brown and blue for the background, then more realistic colours for the objects.  While I did not think the colour combination was ideal (the pale blue too chalky), I felt this sketch could be developed into an interesting painting in oils.

Transferring this to the hardboard, I added a number of layers of acrylic gesso to create a slight texture, followed by a base layer of cream and a dark neutral dry brushed to add a darker tone.  As in the acrylic experiment above, I added a blue layer for contrast, but carefully mixing (ultramarine, lemon yellow & titanium white) to achieve a stronger, less chalky blue.  Even though the bowl and saucer are white, I wanted to add a contrasting tone to avoid the whole painting being "too blue" and so mixed a neutral brown (violet & lemon yellow and a little ultramarine) for the shading.  A much darker tone was created for the darkest shadow area behind the bowl and saucer.

Painting halfway through below.  Happy with the bowl (except the left-hand edge curves slightly at the top and needs correcting), just need to add some white highlights here.  The lemons are almost done - just need to add more detail to the left hand lemon.  For the figs, I added layers of alizarin crimson, violet and ultramarine - I need to add the detail here and play with colours to achieve the dusty finish you see on figs.  The saucer needs more work - I had to stop at this point as the paint was still very wet.

 

 

Completed Painting: Still Life with Lemons and Figs

 

 

 

Paintings in order:

 

 

 

 

Assignment 5 – review

Series Title: Only Still Life

The starting point for this series was still life; a genre which has ebbed and flowed in popularity over the years but one which artists come back to time and time again to explore concepts in composition, colour and paint handling.

Beginning with everyday objects, fruit and vegetables in their packaging, allowed me to explore the forms, tonal variations and the effect a transparent covering has on an object.  The pencil drawings of tomatoes and lettuce in cellophane bags were time-consuming and very complex to draw, especially without the aid of colour to show variations between the object itself and the effect of light on the plastic.  However, completing these drawings was very helpful in terms of focussing on and investigating these variations.

The artists researched (especially Janet Fish, both her close-up studies of fruit in cling film and later still lifes) influenced my first painting “Just Shopping” both in terms of the compositional concept (cropping the image to fill the entire canvas) and to treat each object on its own visual merits.

I think the first painting, “Just Shopping”, is actually my favourite painting of the series – once I had created the tonal drawing, I knew it would work as a painting before I had planned the colours.  Although a complex composition, it was relatively straightforward to paint; beginning centrally with the more saturated colours and working around the canvas.  Although a representational image, I was careful not to be too fussy with edges and so used a rough hog-hair brush for most of the painting, only using a small, detail brush for small areas (such as the area of netting to the left of the figs) where detail really was necessary.  I also had to think carefully about the strength of colour in some areas, such as the red of the peppers and tomatoes; being such a dominant colour, I needed to ensure it did not detract from the lemons and figs in the foreground to show the recession in the painting.

 

The area I was most concerned about (and left until last to paint!) was the plastic coverings on the peppers and tomatoes but using grey and white tones, and a very loose brush stroke, does give the impression of plastic and reflected light without being too fussy.

The second painting completed “Simply Lemons”, I have placed as the third painting in the series.  I felt I wanted to explore the form and colour of the fruit further but without being fussy or concentrating too much on precise detail.  To this end, once I had decided upon the basic composition, I created a textured canvas using acrylic texture medium and crumpled tin foil (a surface I had experimented with earlier in the course) which I knew would allow for a freer, more transparent application of paint, contrasted with impasto for the lemons themselves.  Experiments with colour and paint application onto the textured canvas allowed me to consider which areas to layer with transparent paint and where to add thicker, impasto strokes.  For consistency, all the colours in this painting were created using the same six colours as in Just Shopping.

As in the notes above, originally this painting had a further whole lemon to the right which I cropped after it was dry.  I feel the simplicity of this painting worked in its own merits as well as contrasting with the “Just Shopping” painting in terms of the compositional complexity and exploration of surface texture.  The one thing I am still undecided upon in this painting is its scale – I may complete a larger-scale painting before assessment and compare the two; both individually and as part of the series.

Painting two (the third painting completed) entitled “Still Life with Lemons and Figs”, I originally envisaged as a more traditional painting – possibly using a grisaille and glazing for depth of colour.  However, after completing the acrylic colour study, I decided this would be too dark and would probably jar with the brightness of the other two paintings so created a much looser sketch with broken, dry brushstrokes.  My impatience was a bonus here; while applying the gesso, I brushed over while it was still wet which left an interested dragged, slightly raised texture which I felt would assist with the dry-brushing I planned to use.

As this texture had been created on the flat surface of paper, I decided against using canvas and instead chose a piece of hardboard coated with three layers of gesso, the last layer being slightly textured as described above.  This painting took the longest time to paint because of the thickness of the paint used (from the tube as I didn’t want to dilute at all) and the fact that I wanted clear layers of paint to show through the additional layers in the background.  I also wanted to diffuse the margin between the background and the table the objects were sitting on as I felt in my original drawing this was too harsh a boundary.

The objects in the painting were completed in two sittings; I wanted to use an alla prima technique as much as possible, again to stop being too fussy and keep the brushwork loose, although I did have to add further detail in a second sitting.  As in the other paintings, the same colour palette was used, this time in a split complementary scheme using a pale blue to contrast the yellow of the lemon (although I added an additional layer of cream over the blue background as I felt it was too blue overall).

I feel the area around the bowl and lemons works the best here.  I am still not sure the saucer is quite right and I think I should have added more of the dark tone to the background (the area immediately behind the saucer/figs on the right).  Although I added a layer after the cream base layer, the overlayers are slightly heavier than originally envisaged.

One of the hardest things I found was how to title the series!  Didn’t really think about this too much until I had finished the paintings but probably should have thought about it earlier.  May give this some more thought before actually having the series assessed.

 

 



 

Abstract painting from man-made form

For this exercise, I chose to firstly draw a can opener from various angles to find a view which would allow me to isolate areas of particular interest.

I focused in on the underside of the can opener as there was an interesting mixture of textures, angles, lines and colours.

From this, I transferred the main lines to another sketch and, ignoring the original drawing, added tones to the composition, changing the focus of the drawing and also to change it from the original.

Final painting (oils)

Gallery Visits 21 September continued

National Portrait Gallery – Jonathan Yeo

I picked up on this exhibition after watching a BBC2 Culture Show programme (not on iplayer but clips below):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bgb77

As always, it is fascinating to get a glimpse into artist’s studios and to actually see them working and seeing the process of a portrait in the making.  It was also interesting to see how worried all the sitters were about how they would be portrayed!  While we did not get to see a complete “start to finish” of the portrait he was making (actor Tom Hollander), we did get an insight into how he approaches his work.  He also discussed how some of his famous sitters wanted to be portrayed (such as fellow artists Damian Hirst and Grayson Perry (as his alter ego Claire)). 

The exhibition itself is in two rooms of the NPG.  I did not make any notes at the exhibition itself as it was very busy and while some of the larger portraits were more widely spaced in the first room, the second (smaller) room had all the portraits grouped together on one wall.  While this is very effective in terms of the display, it is not so easy to be able to have a good look at each portrait!

The portrait which has probably got the most interest in the press was the painting of Malala Yousafzai.  Personally, I liked the way he portrayed her; a neutral background, a very realistic, soft face and loosely painted headscarf with the ground and gridding shown.  However, a lot of the press reports (Telegraph and Metro below) reported this image and other images as being too saccharine and not inquiring of the subject enough. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10298388/Malala-Yousafzai-Jonathan-Yeo-Portraits-National-Portrait-Gallery-review.html

http://metro.co.uk/2013/09/13/the-jonathan-yeo-portraits-exhibition-plays-safe-with-family-friendly-content-3986359/

Mark Hudson from the Telegraph writes: “These are strangely quaint images, not so much in their technique, which varies from image to image, as in their apparently artless flattering idealisation of their subjects. Nowadays we expect portraits to dig a bit deeper, to act out a kind of confrontation with the sitter. Yeo doesn’t do that. His large portraits are reminiscent of Annie Leibovitz’s super-glossy photographic portraits for Vanity Fair, images that exist in a slightly queasy middle ground between portraiture and fashion photography, with the sitter’s ‘attributes’ lending a narrative dimension in a way a Renaissance portrait painter would readily have understood.”

The quote that stood out for me there was “we expect portraits to dig a bit deeper, to act out a kind of confrontation with the sitter” which I don’t necessarily agree with.  While it may not be hugely fashionable to say so in the contemporary art world, most people do actually want a portrait that looks like them! And I would imagine it would be quite difficult to get famous sitters (who, after all, depend on their image for their livelihood), or even your average person on the street, if the artist were trying to show a confrontational image.  Throughout history, portrait subjects have, to a greater or lesser degree, had a level of control over their own image for their own purposes, whether that be flattery, political power or a sense of superiority.

In the case of Malala, I don’t think you need anything else to understand the image and the reason her portrait is important.  Everyone knows about her shooting by the Taliban just because she wanted to get an education, thus becoming the symbol for young muslim girls under repressive regimes.

My other favourite portrait was of Helena Bonham Carter, the actress, portrayed in one of her very eccentric outfits in front of a house.  The whole portrait is comprised of pink shades, with the background and her outfit very loosely underpainted, leaving the textures and drips of the ground showing through.  The link above shows the painting in the making, and the photograph which he partly used in its making.  You can clearly see from this how much he has taken from personal sittings, and the overall feel of the portrait captured from the photograph.

Many of Yeo’s portraits have an unfinished element to them; sometimes being a blank canvas (as in Erin O’Connor / Sienna Miller), or allowing the ground and the underpainting to show through (Malala / Helena Bonham Carter).  When I was in the NPG gallery, I was listening to a conversation behind me pointing out the unfinished nature of many of the works and why an artist chooses to do this. 

I considered this further.  From my point of view, especially in portraiture, having the contrast between a very polished, finished face (and sometimes hands/arms) and a very sketchy, painterly background really does focus the view onto the face of the sitter.  And from a student’s point of view, seeing how an artist has constructed his work is very interesting; Yeo’s backgrounds are often gridded, with a very loose, sketchy coat of paint which often looks as if it’s pearlescent. 

May have to revisit this exhibition to have a closer look (but not on a Saturday afternoon – far too busy!)