Session 6: Painting with Chris Hough

This was another tough exercise in starting from scratch. Another still life. Another attempt to locate and define the objects, this time in paint. And once again a dispiriting opening not just lacking in accuracy, but also weak in composition. It felt like I had learnt nothing: except, that these first cack-handed attempts were just that. Merely a first few steps on a much longer journey and steps that can be re-traced and re-taken:

 

But Chris was much more concerned with making a painting and his session was full of good advice (not that he was laying down the law, just offering us an approach: this is what I have learnt from him so far: you do need an approach and you should try and make it consistent, then adapt or try another, but not stick with what you've always done or hop about from one to the other).

Here are some of the ideas I picked up that seemed helpful:

• Try starting with a ground colour that gives you something to work from either being an opposite or a sympathetic colour to your eventual palette. Cover the paper then rub it down to give a lighter ground. In the above it was red rubbed down to a pink. 
• Then the outline drawing itself should also be in a colour that will work in the finished picture
• Once you start to put in colour 'float' in the shapes do not define them. Keep it rough. "Start loose and then tighten as you go". Also start THIN and apply colour more thickly as you go on. 
• In particular leave the white and highlights until last: they will need thicker paint. (We looked at several classic paintings and noted that the blacks were thinly applied and the highlights were laid on thick)
• Stick to your game plan! Once you settle upon an approach, stick with it. Especially in the choice of your palette. (He referenced the abstract work of Sean Scully here where he sticks to a strict set of usually muted colours, but builds up his patterns within the limits imposed).
• Use big brushes at the start, don't be obsessed with detail. It distracts from composition and colour.

But best of all he tried to get us to lay down the dark colours first and then lay the light over it. In particular with the shadows: lay shadow everywhere, then paint in the lighter patches. This counter-intuitive approach really worked and I was pleased with the way some of my shadows suddenly lifted of the paper when the light was floated in.
 

Struggled on, trying to put all this into practice and ended up with a painting that wasn't anything like as bad as I had expected throughout most of the afternoon. In the end I felt pleased with the colours and many of the shadows (it was a complex and somewhat inconsistent set of shadows).

 Certainly something to build on by way of a 'game plan.

Drawing on the iPad

I missed the first painting session as I was away in San Francisco. It was the paint mixing lesson I took a few weeks ago. However, I had become increasingly fascinated by the Brushes application on my son's iPhone and had begun to look at the art done on the iPhone and now iPad that was finding its way onto the art sites. Above all I was captivated by David Hockney's work on the iPhone. He seems to wake up each morning and does a 'painting' on his phone and sends it to a group of friends who all get a brand new Hockney before breakfast.

I was attracted to the immediacy, the rich colours and the plasticity of the process. I had a feeling it would help me to draw and paint more. So when in San Francisco I indulged myself and bought an iPad and immediately downloaded Brushes. I confess to being quickly captivated by all the aspects that had drawn me to it.

I is taking time to get used to, but generally I am enjoying the freedom, the inability to obsess with detail and the chance to float colour into anything. I also greatly appreciate the ability to layers drawings. It is starting to get me thinking about how print making might work. There is nothing special about my early efforts but they are strangely pleasing on the eye and most importantly they are encouraging me to look and draw. Here are two sketches:

 Finally, I have been importing some of my art work from the class and using the application to try out colours and new layers. Here's a charcoal drawing with some colour layers in anticipation of a lesson to come in taking our charcoal drawings and turning them into paintings.

Fifth and final drawing session with Tony Hull

We were asked to bring in a favourite object. After much thought, I opted for my original Leatherman in its leather case. Bought in 1993 in Portland Oregon, the home of Leathermen and very remarkably not lost in the interim, so a favourite of some standing. Also something that I quite liked the idea of drawing. There was a pleasing variety of other objects, but Phillip stole the show with a bottle of Teachers whiskey!

Tony asked us to scatter the objects across the floor. Then started with a blank sheet of paper and asked us each to place one of the three core shapes: triangle, circle square on the sheet where it felt right. After about ten of us had done it, the sheet looked like this:

The point was to think about how natural composition worked. Certain shapes in one area seemed to require a shape of certain size in another. Then we started to look at how vertical and horizontal lines were defined. We talked about the power of the thirds and the golden mean. Composition is about so much more: not just shape, scale and position: it is about how your eye gets drawn across and through the picture. I feel that I may intuit natural composition and my photography has taught me a lot especially about light and shade in composition, but I still do not feel confident graphically as the rest of the session proved.

Then we set about building up our own drawing by choosing some of the objects and placing them on the page. Initially thinking only about the composition, not the representation. My first efforts were predictably bland.

The Leatherman and its case featured, as well as the whiskey bottle, a corkscrew and a human dummy shape. It was peculiarly unpleasing as a composition at this stage. However, in true Tony style he encouraged us to push everything round. We consulted with each other. (the group is getting more and more supportive and engaged with each other). Eventually I managed to get things looking a little more 'composed' and with a little more tension. But as ever I was discouraged by my failure to take risks: these were still a bunch of drawings (not so small we were working on A1) laid out across the page. Others had achieved more contrast and more flow.

Once we had achieved a composition we were happy with, then we started trying to draw more accurately using the careful observation that Tony has been instilling in us. In the end I was happier with my rendering of many of my objects, but still felt dissatisfied with the overall composition. There is a little tension in the negative space between the dummy and the bottle and corkscrew is doing something. The odd abstract shape in the top right could have been more powerful and it is there that I would have liked to have done something that challenged the whole cosy set up. These objects need to interact far more dynamically and even the shadows of previous efforts fail to give it that interaction.

Despite my almost relentless sense of disappointment, I do feel that I have learnt a lot from these sessions with Tony. Drawing is hard! But it is about so much more than just making things look 'right'. The layers of a drawing, the pushing and pulling each line and each shape until it means something, that's what I will take away from this. I very much hope that I can take some these drawings into the next stage, because it was indeed the revelation that drawing can be just like painting in this regard that was the key moment for me.

Fourth Drawing Session with Tony Hull

This was a tough session. Another six hours of hard drawing only this time Tony started us off by placing a piece of paper on the floor and asking us to draw it! It was a significant agony! My sheer inability to 'see' the angles the lines, the perspective or anything was humiliating. (Reassuringly, I was not alone).


Turns out drawing a sheet of paper is indeed very testing. Tony helped by showing how to create a rectangular guide around your drawing and then to measure angels and proportions against the rectangle. Despite this and despite some basic explanation of perspective. (The sides are not parallel as I would have expected, but in fact converge towards the vanishing point), this exercise and its development into more sheets and more shapes, cruelly exposed my basic weaknesses both in seeing and then representing what I have seen. As more sheets and shapes were added my drawing became more chaotic and less accurate. By three o'clock ( a long time to be drawing sheets of paper!) I was weakening. Of course I realized that this is exactly the rigour that I need and that I need to keep challenging myself to see more analytically. To block out what I think I see and establish what is actually there.
Then just at the point when I would have chucked in the towel, Tony asked us to look at what we had and try to make a drawing out of it: something completely different. Follow your nose wherever these messy shapes suggested. So here is where I started:

And here is where I got to an hour later:

I found myself with a sort of Roy Lichtenstein pastiche:losing almost all of my original shapes (which was a pity . The real challenge of this was to adapt what you had in the first place, not remove it). I had succeeded in establishing a strong sense of direction, but nothing much else. I was disappointed in my efforts, but could see the benefit of transforming what feels like a mess into something vaguely visually interesting.
This whole session chimed with what I had been reading in Art and Fear.
Dean Melbourne mentioned this book in his blog. It is a reassuring little book which deals with just how tough it is to make decent art. Here's how it starts:

Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials or continue on long after their potential is exhausted.

Then a few pages on:

The fear that you are only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. . .It's easy to imagine that real artists and that they (unlike you) re entitled to feel good about themselves and their art. Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work.

Actually it is a reassuring book which I shall continue to dip into.

Colour Mixing with Chris Hough

I am going to miss this session when I am away in San Francisco and so Chris kindly let me sit in on the Saturday group's. Despite the fact that I have had several sessions with several teachers on colour mixing, I suppose you can never have enough. Chris certainly brought a different approach and I found it very helpful So a few pointers that made sense. First the palette. Mine have always been pretty chaotic and Chris is quite clearly NOT chaotic: possible a bit anal for me, but order must help at the outset at least. So here's how he suggested you lay out your palette:

Keeping colours in a line and in the right association across the spectrum. Then he made one other suggestion that really made sense: give yourself four separate piles of white. That way you can keep it clean for each separate colour mix.
He gave us a severe lecture on the importance of priming: preferably two layers of white acrylic (Chris does 8!!). I suggested that you can give yourself a ground colour at this stage as I have done with grey which I have liked.
He then introduced two alternative approaches to colour mixing Recipe v Senses. The recipe approach is traditional in origin: "mix these colours in these proportions to get skin tone" where a more modern and potentially much more satisfying approach is  based on a subjective judgement of what colours look and feel like and is based on a more experimental mixing approach: does this look/feel right? He linked the 'sense' approach to Bauhaus and the influence of psycho analysis movement in the 20's.
Then we started mixing, working in pairs which was very reassuring. Chris gave us some objects and told us to try and match them. So here are a couple of examples of our efforts:

Not totally inspiring but closer than I might have got before trying to do more by eye. One piece of advice was to leave the white until last.
Unfortunately I had to leave the session before we got into mixing much more subtle ( and challenging)colours: the grey of the wall, the brown of the floor etc. However, Chris did explain the approach which is to go with what you think are the colours that exist in these ambiguous shades and use them as your starter. I could see how it might work but I have a real problem seeing colour (a bit of a set back for a wannabe painter!). So when someone says 'what colours do you see in that drab grey?' I have great trouble. When I am with someone who can 'see and describe' colour, I realize how hopeless I am. However, that will not stop me taking a much more 'sensual' approach to colour mixing when we get onto painting.

Theory Session Contd

A couple more artists mentioned by Ed Jeavons. The first was Ian McKeever. Ed described his work as 'subdued'. From what I can see his work is largely large abstract which one of the biog's describes as 'essentially abstract but also anchored in experiences of the landscape and interiors'. An example suggests strong but limited and sometimes subdued palette, but well worth pursuing to fuel my abstract landscape aspirations:

And then he spoke about Luc Tuymans whom I have already come across. Not surprisingly I am drawn to his work since he took time out as an artist to work as a filmmaker and then brought back to his art all the language of film: close-ups, cropping and sequencing. However, a not of caution in that Ed reckons most art colleges have banned their students from pursuing Tuymans related work presumably because it causes rather predictably referential work.

 He also talked about Peter Doig. Again someone who's work I have come across and find very powerful if a little too mystical for my liking.

Session Three: Theory

This was led by Ed Jeavons and started with a presentation that took us through a list of different types of painting and in so doing introduced an interesting range of artists work: many I had not heard of.

'Ambitious New Plans' Jules de Balincourt

 First off was 'Political' and he used a painting by Jules de Balincourt.

Then he suggested 'Race' and we looked at the rather wonderful work of Mark Bradford: "map-like, multifaceted paper collages point not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also provide striking imagery of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to present-day protests concerning immigration issues." I very much like his mixing and mashing and then sanding the down and adding more. Multi layers and rich texture of real things. A nice collection here

 Then we got onto Gender (can't control the italics: this post has a typographical life of its own!) the example here was Cecily Brown. A lot of here work is abstract impressionism and when she does go more figurative I would say she is less concerned with gender as a political statement, and more  with feminine eroticism. But I like her abstracts: although this was what we looked at:

Cecily Brown: Teenage Wildlife

 The next category was 'Painting Tradition'. This seemed rather odd as a category but Ed showed us a range of painters making the case that they were deliberately located themselves within the tradition usually to subvert it. Although his first example was the 2006 Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts with what I would call respectful abstracts in the graphic style. An example here.
Then Frank Auerbach with  the emphasis on 'truth' and honesty his heavy use of paint  springs from the classical tradition, but is repurposed in a visceral manner. "Each brush stroke searching for truth" I particularly like this mono tonal portrait I found later:

Frank Auerbach: Head of E.O.W. IV

 

 

 

And finally in this section we looked at Glenn Brown who Ed described as mocking Auerbach  and talks about 'these paintings are habits of the hand'. Good example here.

There are another five categories to go, but I will stop here. maybe to return.