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.

Life Drawing Session

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.