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.
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.
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
“From the beginning it was clear Camberwell School of Art wasn’t for the faint-hearted – the expectation was that we would arrive promptly at 9.30am, work through until 4.15, then continue at 4.30 with one of the compulsory evening classes that ran four nights a week and ended at 7. Then home to work on the weekly essay, the fortnightly (and massively important) Creative Brief or our daily sketchbooks. Saturdays kicked off with another compulsory class, this time a field-trip to one or another of London’s lesser-known sights of artistic relevance – the meat market, The Daily Express building, gallery archives, museum private collections; more sketching, more art history. As we moved on up through the school, some of us dared to flex the rules, but never without repercussions – Camberwell had a history and reputation to maintain and we were there to maintain it while we benefitted. Compared with my friends in Universities, suffering anything up to 6 lectures a week and a couple of tutorials a term, I had it tough, no matter how many times they called me a skiving art student…
Life drawing was an essential (and again compulsory) element of the education we received, viewed as one of the foundation disciplines – even though at the time (1979) drawing was in general far more fundamental in art education than today, Camberwell was still regarded as relatively hard-line on Life and all other drawing. The compulsory sessions (there were optional classes too) were 3 hours long and involved lots of easels, lots of silence and a fair bit of tension as well. As the tutor moved slowly round the room, pressure would build until it became almost impossible to put pencil to paper for fear of making a wrong mark. That there was a definite ‘way’ of making a mark didn’t help either, it was as difficult identifying and adopting a foreign way of drawing, the Camberwell style, as it was getting foreshortening right.
‘The Camberwell Style’, established between the wars and tumbling through the practice of the school 40 years later, was developed alongside the figurative painting style that put the school on the fine-art map. Drawing was an exploration, an information gatherer, a question and answer session using the pencil to record the process – accuracy was imperative and in order to ensure accuracy the lines needed to show each step. Rubbing out wasn’t frowned upon because nobody was stupid enough to try it – if a line wasn’t right then why was it drawn in the first place? No prisoners in the life class…
But this rather stern approach to what has become for me now a very instinctive process was extremely useful in instilling a sense of Thought as part of the creative act. My own style of drawing was always anathema to the Camberwell style, too expressive and undisciplined, less Q & A, more Therapy. But as long as it was accurate I would get away with it and so I thought about my marks, I measured, above all I looked at the model and when I had done all those things, I drew.
At Camberwell I learnt to draw by learning to look; once I knew how to look, I learnt to see and after that drawing was relatively easy. It taught me skills that I use every day, every hour and also skills that, amazingly, people now pay me for! Today, distanced from the mortuary-quiet life room and the eagle academic eye, I’m thankful for learning to draw at such a good school of drawing before drawing became old-fashioned and I’m proud to have had a part to play within the marvellous piece of social and artistic history that is Camberwell School of Art.”
Shelley is a long standing member of the life drawing class. I’ve been nagging her for ages to contribute towards the blog because I like her work and I thought her time at Camberwell would be interesting to read about also so thanks to you Shelley. You can see some more examples of Shelley’s work at www.shelleydavies.co.uk
Thanks to the Independent and Daily Mail newspapers I now know that Channel Four are going to be running a five part series about life drawing during the Summer. Initially I thought they’d probably get someone like Alan Carr or Justin Lee Colins to present it but this is apparently going to be a serious treatment and will be shown at 6 oclock for five consecutive evenings in July, although there’s already been a lot of “educational” nudity on tv lately so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. The articles focus on the channel’s past history of provocative tv programming, how life drawing has fallen from favour and is no longer taught in a lot of art colleges and also why it’s proper art and not just a bunch of people staring at ladies without any clothes on. Or something.
As someone who runs a life drawing class I have a bit of sympathy with those people who question the need for nudes. I’ve taught a few figure drawing classes for beginners where the model has been partially clothed and in my opinion as long as you see how most of the bits and pieces connect with each other I think it’s a pretty valid excercise. At various times men have been required to wear loin clothes and women masks to protect their modesty so nudity is not actually a given. The following is from the excellent “Masters and Pupils-The Artistic Succession from Perugino to Manet” by Gert-Rudolf Flick” and is worth quoting at length.
“If male models were sometimes hard to come by, it was even more difficult to find women who were willing to pose, especially in the nude. Indeed, female nude models only became the norm in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which is remarkable given the importance of life drawing in the Western tradition, and the centrality of the female nude in Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting. The availability of drawing from the female nude remained so unusual, indeed, that when William Hogarth re-founded the St Martin’s Lane Academy in London in 1735, the regular presence of a female model, and the chance to draw ‘the naked’, was one of his prime means of promotion.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bologna might perhaps be perceived as in some respects a provincial centre, but even, in larger cities laws were sometimes enacted forbidding women to pose nude. In the Accademia di S Luca in Rome, for example, only male models could pose without clothes. For a woman it was strictly forbidden to pose nude, or even clothed, and a fine of 10 scudi was imposed for each violation. To overcome this problem Leonardo da Vinci had already recommended working from drawings of the masters, or from three-dimensional models, such as bronzes or plaster casts. Artists had to face up to the task of painting the female nude without having seen too many in the flesh, but in practice they refused to be defeated by this problem. They could resort to the advice of Leonardo, or they would perforce model the female figure after the male model, and it is sometimes observed that Michelangelo’s female nudes appear to have male torsos but with breasts superimposed.”
But, on the other hand the nude has a long history in art going right back to the Ancient Greeks. It is a vehicle or a subject that allows the depiction of humans as they essentially are, stripped of clothes yes but also of any kind of badges of wealth and status. It’s a powerful genre, one of the few really lasting ones that can also be continually reinterpreted by successive generations of painters. Once upon a time it may indeed have been about celebrating the body beautiful but in our own day painters such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon have been far more likely to depict the naked human form as if it were a slab or meat on some kind of makeshift operating table than in an erotic sense. Boucher’s nudes may have been pretty hot in their day but the souls of the damned in Hans Memling’s “The Last Judgement” are nude also.
If you banned all nudes from art and forced artists to make all their figures semi-clothed would it not also be true that they’d look even more sexualised and pinup like?
I’m also a bit suprised when people talk about the nudity as if it were the first time that it had actually occurred to anybody, let alone an artist that depicting the naked human form could be in some way problematic. That tension between what makes a painting a work of art or a pin up is something that we can see in Manet’s “Olympia” for example where his contemporaries were more than happy to see sexualised pretty young women standing in for Greek godesses as long as their eyes were averted but couldn’t cope with a depiction of a contemporary Parisian type on a bed looking straight out of the canvas.
In truth though I think it’s like trying to explain anything to a non-enthusiast. If you’re interested in art you’ll get it, if not you won’t. I can see some interest in kicking a football around a pitch but not enough to inspire the levels of devotion that David Beckham does.
Apparently ( This is where the whole project really starts to go off in the deep end folks) viewers at home will get to draw models on the screen and get tips as they do so. I can’t wait to see how that’s going to work. Just remember kids: Despite what they may have told you at art college it’s just plain wrong to trace around the image on the screen with felt tips!
I wouldn’t normally have made the effort to see this show so thanks are due to the RWA for having an open day last Saturday. Grafitti Art has been around since the 1980s and to be honest I’d always thought that unless it was produced by genuinely poor and underpriveledged angry kids it was all a bit of a pose. One of my objections to Banksy has always been, paradoxically, that his work has always been a little bit too considered and polished to be produced by somebody who supposedly spends all day smoking ketamine and running away from the police. I was a bit suprised to find out that he used to be a pupil at Bristol Cathedral School however. Of course the other side of the coin is that just because it may be produced by the authentic voice of the streets or whatever doesn’t mean that it’s going to be any good either. As you can see I have reservations
So, thankfully no Banksy and no posturing but a lot of genuine drawing ability, energy and witty use of materials. I mean I’m not sure what the dinosaur version of Clifton Wood is really supposed to be about or whether the giant painting of the heroic looking man with the spraycan means anything aside from the fact that he has a really cute girlfriend (really should be wearing a mask as well though from a health and safety point of view) but you have to have a heart of stone to not be able to see thow well done they are. The work that made the biggest impression on me were Filthy Luker’s street sculptures but there are fifty other artist’s work on display here and they’re all worth a look.
Tony Hancock’s 1960 film is not only one of the best films that have been made about the life of an artist it’s also pretty funny too.. You can read a full summary of the plot here but it’s basically a parody of the Somerset Maugham story The Moon and Sixpence, (itself based in part on the life of Gauguin) where the English comedian Tony Hancock gives up a life of dull bowler hatted conformity to live the life of an artist in the Paris of the 1950’s.
The character Tony Hancock plays in the film is a hilariously bad painter (and an early influence on Iggy Pop’s graphic work I’m sure) who falls in with another artist called Paul. While Hancock is lionised by the Parisian art establishment with his “infantile” school of art, Paul who is ironically a genuinely good but unrecognised painter is so thrown into emotional turmoil that he decides to give up art in order to move back to London to live with Hancock’s landlady and get a proper job with the bowler hats. At this point a dealer played by the fantastic George Sanders pays a visit to their old studio. He mistakes the paintings that Paul has left behind for Hancock’s paintings and offers Tony a contract which at this point being totally peniless he is forced to accept. From this point he has to pretend that Paul’s work is his. One very funny scene shows him at a private viewing of “his” pictures with a beret and cape smoking from a cigarette holder. When he thinks noone is looking he quickly turns round one of the Paul pictures to show one of his infantilist masterpieces before being promptly told by his dealer to turn it around the other way again.
Both the good and bad paintings were produced by the artist and teacher Alisdair Grant who at the time had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. He fed the writers of the film examples of what was going on in the art scene at the time. Tony Hancock riding over a painting with a bicycle is a great spoof of Abstract Expressionism and his comments about “Infantillism” are brilliantly close to some of the things that Picasso had been quoted as saying about Cubism.
The great success of the film is the way in which it questions standards of what is good and bad in art as well as making us laugh at the same time. Finally Paul returns to France and produces some paintings which are indistinguishable from the naive stuff that Hancock was producing at the beginning of the film but which George Sanders now believes are amazing. The message seems to be that if you are a true artist whatever you do will somehow be art. Baffled by this Hancock returns to London and at the end of his film we see he has returned to live with his landlady Mrs Cravatte in his old flat and produces a new version of the sculpture “Aphroditie at the Waterhole” which we see at the beginning of the film in the above clip. I hope you enjoy it.
She’s back in our lives! Fantastic life model and fastest thing on two wheels (bicycle that is) Elise was finally able to pose for us this week. The fifteen minute drawings below were done by myself after the break from a vantage point on the steps by the entrance, hence the foreshortening.
Are you finding art a struggle. Husband/wife/girlfriend/partner still not convinced of your talent. Does your Mum or Dad still wish that you’d listened to their advice and gone to hairdressing college? This is one American companies (genuine) response to the, er, global negativity surplus. And remember, it was featured on the Ellen deGeneres show. I’m not sure about the money back guarantee though.
The price for 10 weeks is £50 with no extra 'model fee'. Contact willstevens@lifedrawingclasses.
co.uk for more information I will also be running classes on a semi drop in basis in Horfield over the Summer term for £6.50 per session.
THE BRISTOL LIFE DRAWING CLASS-HOW IT ALL WORKS
Welcome to the Human Form, the website for members of the informal life drawing class that meets during the evening at Bristol Grammar School in Clifton. There is a choice of four models each week with different poses of different lengths for which the cost is curerently £49 for ten weeks. If you are in the Bristol area and you'd like to pop along please email willstevens@lifedrawingclasses.co.uk or visit the page marked " About the Bristol Life Drawing Class" for a fuller description of how the class works.
If you visit the home page you'll find some examples of work by some of the wide variety of people who come to the class,links to various interesting websites and a few articles with some (hopefully) interesting information concerning figurative art and life drawing in general.
Many thanks to the group members who've been able to donate images to these pages
