NORTH BRISTOL ARTS TRAIL 2009

I haven’t been able to get around as much of the North Bristol Art’s Trail as I would have liked this year but I was able to visit John Leggatt, Helen Dufall and Magda Goss as well as Huw Morgan and Amanda Bennett who were exhbiting for the first time this year.  Hope you like the pics

David Ginola, Life Model.

Beginners can be very shy at life drawing classes and it’s not unusual to hear them apologising either directly to the model or via the tutor for not having done them sufficient justice. In my experience most models see it as part of the job, along with keeping still to be polite about people’s life drawings no matter how ugly or beautiful they may feel they’ve been made to look, which is why I found this clip of “footballing legend”David Ginola so funny. It’s from a  Sky satelite T.V. show over here called “Nude Britain” which is just the sort of show that although  pretending to be “informative” or “investigative” is really just the modern day equivalent of those old nudist camp “documentaries” from the 1960’s.   I can’t help thinking that the idea of having a footballer pose nude for a life drawing session has arrived tragically too late and would have loved to have seen what the painter here would have made of two real footballing icons. Ladies and gentlemen.(drumroll ) Saint and Greavsie!  Anyway, if you’ve ever been unlucky enough to draw a model as opinionated as David Ginola in this clip who at one point looks as if he’s about to strangle the artist, well, you have all my sympathy.

New Lifedrawing Stuff/Class cancelled 12.11.09

I’ve been flagging this up for a few weeks now so I hope you all know this already but there’s no class this week. We’ll be back in the 6th form next week. On the 26th Nov we go a-travelling to a different section of the school and then term finishes back in the 6th form block. Anyway, if you’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms get a load of these pictures

Van Gogh and Monet

Apologies are due once again for not updating this blog. Busy busy busy! If you are one of those people who check in from time to time I hope you find the above video interesting and I will try and do better.

The Traced Pastels of Edgar Degas

There was a terrific exhibition of late pastels by Edgar Degas a few years ago at the National Gallery in London and Art Institute of Chicago called “Degas, beyond Impressionism” consisting mainly of images that the elderly French Impressionist had produced by tracing and re-combining seperate figure studies into new compostions. The traced drawings were mounted on millboard, originally white but now pleasantly yellowed with age to a warm honey colour and then worked over in pastel. There have been a number of blockbuster shows that have gone over Degas’ output with a thoroughness that would put Crime Scene CSI to shame. The catalogue for this particular show even has on page 126, of all things, a graph showing the changing patterns of Degas subject matter from 1880 up to 1900 as if you couldn’t just work it out from reading the text itself. Thankfully Degas in all the various media that he explored was/is a fascinating artist so all this attention is not wasted.

Tracing was frequently used to combine different preparatory studies together to make a single composition. Richard Kendell,the author goes on to say:
“Almost a thousand (Gustave) Moreau drawings on tracing paper survive, the earliest dating from the beginning of the 1850’s, the last linked to some of Moreau’s final and most elaborate compostions of the 1890’s. Significantly, a great flurry of traced studies from the Old Masters were dated by Moreau between 1857 and 1859, the years when he and Degas worked together in Florence and Rome, and the period of Degas’s first tracings in his notwbooks. Like Ingres, Moreau relied on the tracing process for many routine tasks, working in ink or pencil on mainly small sheets of paper that would sometimes be collaged together into larger rectangles, as in his Study of a nude for “Salome”. Such drawings remind us again of the essentially craft based nature of conventional tracing, as Moreau added rough patches of paper to his evolving compostions and casually included registration marks and splashes of ink on his design. In certain larger, grand format compositions on tracing paper, however, like the two-metre/wide Les Sources (Paris, Musee Gustave Moreau), Moreau came close to Degas’s later expansiveness and perhaps offered him a prototype for his mature output.”
Anyway “Degas, Beyond Impressionism” by Richard Kendell ISBN 1 85709 129 9 is out of print but there are copies available second hand by Amazon.
The Leighton House Museum website an online collection of work by the Victorian Painter Alfred Lord Leighton has some preparatory drawings on tracing paper that you can look at. You just need to run a search including the words “tracing paper”.

Today’s Nude

“Today’s Nude” the Channel four programme that aimed to bring the life drawing experience into people’s front rooms by encouraging people to draw from a nude live model on the tv screen has been and gone. If you’re reading this you probably didn’t see it. The Flickr group which allows people to upload their own life drawings has 182 members and I’d guess that that’s probably what the viewing figures were, due in no small part to it being screened at 12.30 in the afternoon rather than 6pm as originally planned. I was expecting a little more controversy. The Daily Mail did it’s best, as did the Telegraph but if you look at the comments section on their respective websites they all seem remarkably sensible and measured. If they were hoping for a repeat of “Sachsgate” where most people saw the offending Russell Brand/ Johnathon Ross clip via the internet after being alterted by the Mail rather than actually hearing it when it was originally broadcast they would have been disappointed this time. Still, if you live in the U.K. and feel like being outraged you still have another three weeks to see the series on the Channel 4 OD website so you never know
I found the experience of drawing a life model on the telly not to be as daft as I first thought. I do a lot of drawing from the tv anyway and paused or screengrabbed images from dvds can be a rich source of inspiration. I hadn’t planned on doing any drawing. I was sitting down with my wife to watch the repeat of the episode where she posed for Gary Hume (“Hey honey, get a load of this!”) and after staring at “smoking hot Kirsty Varley’s” ( phrase copyright Zoo magazine) naked torso for about five minutes and listening to the daft commentary I felt embarrased into picking up a pencil and doing a drawing rather than just sitting there trying not to look as if I were ogling. I’ve done some embarrassing drawings in my time but I’ve never actually been shamed into doing a drawing before. That was a pretty weird experience.
I also thought the programme had some value in that it introduced to the t.v. viewing public some different types of nudes that were totally beyond the range what one usually sees in soap operas and in boy/girl bands. If you’ve done a lot of life drawing over the years I’m pretty sure that you’ll have had moments when you realised that everyone can be interesting to draw in their own way and can therefore be considered beautiful but for somebody who doesn’t draw I would imagine that the experience could be quite educational. The dancer and choreographer Maria Munoz in the final episode to me looked pretty incredible. Although it doesn’t really come across in the youtube clip she was very long limbed and muscley,almost like a race horse. I wish there were more of these types of people on television, particularly for young people to see and particularly teenage girls so that they could realise that there is something else to aspire to rather than just looking like Barbie. Tinka reminded me of an elderly lady called Kit who was the first life model that I ever drew at art college. I remember the sense of drama and also the huge sense of embarrasment. I thought I was going to double up with laughter but she was totally relaxing to be around with no frisson whatsoever. She even handed out sherbert lemons to everyone. I know that for some of you drawing somebody like your gran without any clothes could also be pretty disturbing stuff but all I can say is that if drawing someone in the nude, at least to begin with is always going to be strange experience then she was a good person to draw.
The background commentary by the tutors was by and large rambling and uninstructional. One was left with the impression that all the artists involved definitely thought that life drawing was a good thing, they just hadn’t done it for a loooooong time.(With the exception of Maggie Hambling). There would be one or two tips. Humphrey Ocean talked about looking for “landmarks on the body” and Gary Hume talked about negative spaces but after that the commentary seemed to be more about what the artist’s feelings were about how their own drawings was progressing. You weren’t able to see what they’d done until right at the very end .You could tell from their comments that both Gary Hume and Humphrey Ocean felt they started out quite well, then obviously got into some difficulty but still weren’t too worried as “it’s okay to make mistakes” then you could feel their mood darken. Humphrey Ocean even said at one point that “of course its very hard to draw and talk at the same time”. Oh well. Perhaps it was too late to get another artist who actually could at that point so they had to carry on anyway.
Art critic and poet John Berger leant a bit of class to the very last episode. The only only other time I’d ever seen him on telly was in the 70’s art programme Ways of Seeing so it was a bit of a shock to see he’d gone from being a “sexy” genuinely dynamic young Marxist art critic to then inflate in old age into something of a zepplin sized windbag. Still, he was very good at getting across some of the poetry in drawing another person even if he was a bit short on practical tips.
So, overall I’d say it was a nice idea. It’s hard to find fault with a programme that begins by encouraging you to grab any scrap of paper you can find and start drawing but I think that without some more basic kind of introduction the only people who would have found it of use would have been people who had done some kind of life drawing already.
Lest we forget. John Berger in “Ways of Seeing”.

THE AARDMEN (AND WOMEN) GO LIFE DRAWING

Matt Jones, a group member for the last two terms and also a storyboard artist at Aardman animations left a whole load of his drawings behind tonight. If you’re reading this Matt don’t worry as they are safe and sound.  Unfortunately he didn’t leave his original Mr Magoo cel set-up from UPA studios in the 1950s that was recently given to him by illustrator Ronald Searle.   As a short sighted person Mr Magoo is something of a role model of mine although I haven’t quite got to the stage of talking to fire hydrants.  At least not when I’m sober. You can read the full story on his blog mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com but basically in between his Aardman duties he’s been co running a fantastic blog about Mr Searle and has actually got to meet him several times.  Ronald Searle has long been a fave of mine.  He was probably at his busiest during the fifties and sixties when he illustrated countless books such as the Molesworth stories (“hullo clouds hullo sky etc”) and the St Trinians story although I’m really only just scratching the surface.

Anyway thanks to Matt I have a whole crew of Aardman types coming down every Thursday evening (10!)  who are working down on the life drawing as a preparation of the new Aardman project  “Arthur Christmas”.  These guys are fast workers and you can certainly learn a lot from looking at their speedy drawings.  I particularly enjoy looking at the studies that Matt does of some of the people in the class drawing the models.

See work by Matt and the other Aardmans here

Read an interview with Matt Jones here

Jim Dine

I’ve just returned from organising another painting trip in Auribeau sur Siagne for members of the beginners art classes I organise here in Bristol. I haven’t pushed them very heavily this year because I thought people would be just too skint so it was a nice suprise to find that there was sufficient interest from people who’d been on the previous trips to justify running another one anyway.
I was even able to do a bit of painting myself this time. I’d imagined that a lot of people down here would be so used to seeing people paint that I could slip by pretty much unnoticed but actually the locals were very friendly and interested to see what I was doing not at all bored with the cliche of somebody sitting down and trying to pain their beautiful landscape.
The Jim Dine exhibition was a nice suprise. Although he’s a big name, as big as somebody like Raushenburg really, it’s hard to see any of his big works in the U.K..   It was held at the gallery in Guy Pieters gallery in St Paul de Vence, a kind of commerical exhibition space but with a friendly museum type ethos. They were very happy when asked to let me take some photos of the exhibits.
Jim Dine belongs to a generation of artists  (Jasper Johns, Raushenburg and Claes Oldenburg were others) that could be classified as pop artists because of their interest in day to day mass produced objects even though they still used the painterly surfaces of the Abstract Expressionists.    A motif that he has been using for some time now is that of a a bathrobe based on a Life magazine photograph.  The show in St Paul de Vence has some nice examples. During the seventies he moved to the United Kingdom and embarked on an intensive programme of life drawing using charcoal, again quite radical for an artist from his background. They remind me of similar things by R.B. Kitaj albeit not as good technically.(I always felt that Kitaj was influenced by him) Some of them were erased so vigorously that he’d go through the paper which he’d  remedy by sticking more paper over the top before continuing working.  When I was at art college during the Eighties large scale charcoal drawings done on Arches paper a la Dine were quite the thing.
I’ve always liked Dine for the personal threads in his work. It’s hard to imagine an artist such as Jasper Johns using montages of tools in his pictures because they reminded him of his fathers commercial paint store and his grandfather’s hardware store let alone undergoing analysis three times.  His inclusion of still-lifey elements such as pot plants, flowers, skulls and teapot against a broadly painted background make his work seem odly intimate compared to the bombast in a painter such as Raushenburg.
He’s also a true multimedia artist whose oeuvre includes ceramics, sculpture, poetry and photography as well as painting.
For someone who has made drawing such a prominent part of his practice I do find myself wishing he could draw just a teensy weensy bit better than he does but hey, some of Cezanne’s drawing isn’t exactly brilliant.  I’d still rather have a Dine skull than a Damian Hurst one.

Class cancelled on the 18th June

I’ve mentioned this a few times now but there won’t be a class on the 18th. Everything will be back to normal by the 25th however.

NORTH SOMERSET ARTS WEEK

It’s time for the North Somerset Arts week once again.(1-10 May 2009) I wonder who first came up with the idea of the “art trail”, i.e. a series of exhibitions in different people’s houses grouped together by virtue of taking place in the same street, region or whatever? There are so many of them now that if it were possible to copyright such a thing they’d have made a tidy sum I’m sure. When I first moved to Bristol donkey’s years ago the Totterdown art’s trail was already pretty well established and now here and the immediate vicinity there’s a Southbank Bristol Art’s Trail, a Montpelier Arts Trail, an Easton Arts Trail, a Severn Vale Open Studios Arts Trail, a Chew Valley arts Trail, a North Bristol Arts Trail and the list goes on. The sheer number of them can seem a little overwhelming but there’s nearly always stuff worth looking at and I find there’s nearly always somebody exhibiting with a connection to the life drawing class so it can be a bit of a social thing too.
This time I particularly enjoyed seeing Brian Fowler’s work in Wrington (venue 71) Neil Murison’s work (venue 75) and John Kinkead’s work at Claverham Meeting House (venue 54). I was struck by Liz Avery’s (not a class member) hard edged flower pieces at Venue 74 which I thought were very nice for that type of thing, i.e. not your usual run of the mill still life (The small catalogue illustration doesn’t really do her work justice though.) and the silk screen work by Gail Mason and Alison Clayton at the same venue as Johnny K. (also not members of the group).
Inevitably with 118 different venues you’d be hard pushed to get around to all of them but quite a few of the exhibiting artists have got websites now so a good tip would be to look up some of the work online before you go. It’s so easy to have some kind of website or blog these days that I wonder why more of the artist’s don’t do it but there you go I guess. We also struggled a bit with some of the directions in the catalogue and next year will probably Google the postcodes of the different venues beforehand.
Incidently the food and refreshments at St John the Baptist Church in Churchill (venue 75) was simple but really nicely done. Their Parsnip and Apple Soup was a work of art in itself!
www.northsomersetarts.org.uk