Susan Gathercole

I recently ran into Susan Gathercole’s work. Looking at her web site’s Galleries there were pieces from the last few years present. The work seems to have been inspired by a range of artists, including Picasso. She doesn’t try for a highly realistic view, and has some of the multi-viewpoint properties of other artists. (I have to assume this is intentional, rather than due to lack of skill.) The colours she uses are rich and representational, and there is some feeling of depth from the use of tone.

Overall, I like her work because of it conveys a feeling about the subject as much of the reality of the subject. As always, it is worth seeing personally rather than via Internet based images if you get the opportunity.

Featured image: Stella and Sissie Rum Cup, Susan Gathercole, 2018, from http://www.susangathercole.co.uk/gallery_735176.html#photos_id=16052160

Research: Impressionist Still Life

My work in this part so far, including my to be finished Still Life in line, has been quite “tight” and detailed. This is in contrast to my more successful Life Drawing works, which are finished much more quickly – but in some ways are drawings I like more. This made me reflect on the Impressionist works that I’d seen, and I decided to do a bit of research.

Research: Cabbages and art

I started setting up to do a still life with a cabbage as part of the assignment work. This is based on a pointed cabbage we picked up. (Now eaten, but I’ve still got photographs.)

Sketchbook cabbage

As an investigation around this, however, I decided to have a look around at how different artists had treated still life images including a cabbage. It turns out it is a fairly rich field, as a quick Google search and following on from it revealed.

Research Point: Still life genre

Researching still life as a genre is a very wide brief, and so I started with a very wide net. I search for the term on wikiart, at the Tate Modern and V&A. The breadth of the collection of resultant images can be considered by comparing the featured image by CARAVAGGIO with one by Mondarian.

Project 3.2 Brief

Brief

The key points from the Project 3.2 brief are:

Deeper thoughts on Morandi

Morandi was one of the artists that my tutor suggested I should consider in more detail. He painted Still Life and Landscape pictures and tended to do so with relatively little detail. This article provides an initial introduction, but it seems there is more to consider.  I was, therefore, very interested to find the following lecture on iTunes:

Project 3.1: Brief and Research

Brief

So what is this one all about? Clearly the first, and most important, point is to demonstrate drawing in perspective for a complex scene. This means creating a “believable sense of structure and form” (from the brief) using perspective as the tool.

Project 3.2: composition practice