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

Some recollections of Camberwell college of art from the 1970’s by Shelley Davies

“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

New Channel Four show about Life Drawing

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!

Crimes of Passion Art Exhibition at the RWA in Bristol

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.