Article: When Does Avant-Garde Art Go Too Far?

Tom OtternessDrunk, 2017
Marlborough Gallery
from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-avant-garde-art-far

Assignment 3 Feedback

Overall Comments

… You have responded well to the challenge of working things out THROUGH drawing that I set you last time. There’s a palpable sense of you taking control of the work in this submission. You’ve deliberately avoided doing in depth ‘book’ research in order to focus on making. This has worked. Well done. Obviously there’s work to do, but I feel that you have made good progress with this submission and that the work you have made is more ‘you’.

Project 5: Townscapes

Exercise 1 Sketchbook of townscape drawings

Barbican Corner

I chose this building because of the interesting curve in combination with the glass and concrete look. Quite typical for this area near the Barbican. The light was coming from behind in the early morning, with the building opposite throwing a shadow on it.The horizon was below the image bottom, which I felt emphasised looking up and size. For a taller building I’d need a touch of vertical foreshortening.

Project 3: Composition

It took some re-reading and thinking to understand what this exercise was really asking for. I decided that this was one of the projects which is effectively a single piece of work. The first part is to play with ideas for a major composition. The second part is to create an A3 landscape drawing based on the selected composition.

Exercise 1 Developing your studies

Seaside sunset

Some initial thoughts in my sketchbook…

Research Point: Landscape Artists

The research point states “Research artists from different eras who use landscape as their main subject.” I will also include a slightly wider catchment than this, as there are a number of interesting artists who produce Landscape images but without this being a primary subject for them.

To start considering this I decided to start by throwing the net wide. Searching for landscapes on WikiArt , at the Tate and the V&A provides a host of landscape based artwork to consider. Some of this falls within the approach that’s suggested by the question, but not all. Kandinsky, for example, might not be considered primarily a landscape artist – but the following is of interest:

Landscape with factory chimney, Wassily Kandinsky from https://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/landscape-with-factory-chimney-1910

In addition to those searches I also subscribe to a number art feeds on Twitter, and this regularly provides landscape material that I like. The resulting set of images quickly provides an idea of just how vast the field of landscape drawing and painting can be.

Technique: Oil Pastels

This is from Part 2, but I intended to do a quick write up. I tried an experiment with Oil Pastels quite early on in part 2, when I was trying a range of media for the first time. At that point I made the observation that this is likely to be a medium for avoiding detail.

Soft pastel experiments

Not strictly part of any of the exercises, but this has been an interesting experimental journey:

These images make up an experimental sequence where I was experimenting with soft pastels in an A3 sketchbook. In the first I thought I got some nice water reflection, interesting overall feel, and Quite liked the semi-line quality of the marks. I wasn’t so keen keen on the chairs unfortunately. I wasn’t trying for accuracy – but they’re a bit too far out. Need to concentrate a bit more on relative angles.