Reflection on Assignment 5 Feedback

Overall

I waited a while between the last tutorial to write up my reflection on the feedback. This is partly because I have been very busy, and partly because its was worthy of significant consideration. In approaching Part 5 I was focusing more on my approach to work than on the finished result. I am planning, as discussed, going to create more work using this approach and possibly base much of my on-going work on the approach I’ve developed during this part. Where relevant I will update the cycle write up for the work I complete before submitting for assessment. If the new work is part of the best then I will include it in my assessment submission, and I would hope that there will be at least one piece that does.

Assignment 5

Artist’s Statement

Title:

Developing a body of work that conveys the feeling of the landscapes.

This enquiry was focused on building a body of work, rather than a single drawing, which was trying to convey the feeling of places in landscape drawings. This meant selecting an appropriate approach to creating the image that would convey something of the image which isn’t based in technical accuracy.

Life drawing session

After a set of initial warm up session we went to a 15m pose, and I decided to go for tonal work this time:

Cycle 1: Tonal study

Intent

For this first cycle I’ve decided to follow up on my tutor’s suggestion of focusing on tonal work. Thus I would like to achieve the following:

• Tonal drawing with no visible outline.
• Grey scale rather colour.
• Matching tone and medium to subject; and
• Conveying the feeling of the scene – rather than accurate technical portrayal.

An experiment linking to artists

On of the challenges that I have is that of considering artistic style and approach. One challenge my tutor left me with is to:

“Link your work to that of others and make it clear
that this is what you’re doing”

Part 3 Formative feedback

So, lets start by considering one artist whose figurative work I admire – Maggi Hambling. To start, lets examine a number of her figurative drawings that I like:

Portrait of Dr David Brown

Life Drawing

This is my first session in quite a while, and it shows:

The only one I really like is the 15 minute pose from behind, where I concentrated more on tone than line. For the 20 minute pose I managed to get lost in proportions, and didn’t have time to fix it. I think it was the foreshortening  on the leg that threw me. It was a similar story with the final pose, although here I realised my mistake (which was the angle of the back this time) with enough time left for a partial fix.

In terms of moving forwards, I need to keep practising and so need to find a way to get to life drawing sessions more reliably. That is going to be a challenge given the timings of my new role.

Life Drawing Meetup

I’ve found another source of life drawing to try. This is in Canterbury and centred around Meet-up. The session was of a fairly normal structure, but I was somewhat happier with the results.

First a set of 1 minute poses to warm up:

Life Drawing 4/9

The next of my Life Drawing sessions. We started with a blind contour drawing

Life Drawing

I managed to get to my first life drawing class in a while.The first exercise, the featured image, was Blind contour drawing. There are some recognisable elements at least. An interesting feature here was that occasional ‘repositioning’ was considered acceptable. I did so about 4 times in the 12m session.

High Tooth Paper

Some of the exercises in the course talk about using large paper with significant tooth. The biggest paper I had with significant tooth was A3, so I picked up an A2 pad of ‘Daler and Rowney Mixed Media‘ paper which I’ve previously picked up an A4 pad of.

Odilon Redon’s tonal drawings

A quick Google Search (https://www.google.co.uk/search?odilon+redon+tonal+drawings) on Odilon and his Noirs (the name he uses for his tonal drawings) quickly brings a wealth of information. This can be further elaborated by wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odilon_Redon 

Project 4.3: Evaluation and Reflection

Observation and Construction

In all cases, I’m not totally happy with the images but they are a definite improvement over where I was. In the hands images, for example, I’m not that happy with the fist. I was going for a darker image in the tonal range (which worked), but I’m not as happy with the observation and accuracy of this one. In the touching feet, the background needs a level of work. I might also have put more effort into the rendering of the material of the jeans. For the crossed feet the toe on the right foot (on the left hand side of the image) is a little too bulbous. Similarly the arch of the foot is somewhat off.

Project 4.1: Evaluation and Reflection

I will continue to use the evaluation framework from my previous tutor for convenience. Although somewhat long winded, the approach does provide me with a series of different lenses through which to consider my work on the projects. Although I’m sure a lighter weight approach would suffice, this approach does seem to be effective for reflection. As I did the preparation as a block, however, I will do the evaluation together as well.

Charcoal

Fine Liner

Graphite

Photo

Project 4.3: Hands

This has really been a long running project which has stumped me, and I’m not totally happy with the results as yet. I do feel, however, it might be time to move on. Maybe. In the second image I am, at long last, getting happier. The images are still far from perfect, but they have definitely improved.