Around the web in 10 clicks

 Some interesting articles, exhibitions and thoughts on all things art and design this week:

An exhibition that I would love to be able to see, at the MoMA museum, is simply titled Cézanne Drawing, as in Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), a very neutral title for the show featuring an exploration of his drawings, using paint to build up studies and still life drawings, exploring drawing portraits of loved ones and so on. The drawings have a sense of lightness of touch, of freedom and time spent just exploring the process, shapes and lines. 
This wonderful essay/article from Two Coats of Paint features lovely nuggets of information on Cézanne's life and how his work came to be without being too pretentious and filled with jargon. The essay is writen by  Laurie Fendrich, also a painter who brings some clear insight of his work into the text. Well written, lovely painters, nibbles of information and some lovely images of his drawings, what more could you ask for? 

Well I would love to be able to see the exhibition, but Covid, newborn baby, life...the internet will have to be my lens for looking at art for now. 

Some beautiful paintings/drawings that are full of flurries of colour, pastels and paint strokes, speak of vast windy days in the country or on rivers and lakes, fitting not so neatly into landscapes, but also crossing borders into abstraction and expression. The painter Ashley Garretts really brings out the wild weather in her landscape drawings and paintings. Really love her work too. 

Sculpture, plus colour, fluidity and of course that beautiful and strange substance and material called resin, all feature in the work of Ben Godward. Again I found his work from a Two Coats of Paint article/post. Jonathan Stevenson's comparison of Godward's sculptures to ice pops and giant sweets is just awesome! 
Yet again such an energetic feel to the work, and a sense of whimsy and childish delight and fun with a brand new pack of felt tips of crayons. I love the way he fixes translucent layers of colour with each other, building up layers in a way that makes me think of gesture painters, abstract expressionism, mark making and colour explored, action painting especially seems to have maybe inspired this sculpture artist, his works are very physical, and many full of motion too. Again, another artist whose work really needs to be explored and discovered up close. His work from the exhibition at the Slag Gallery, reminds me of the beautiful crystals you would find in a computer game, crystals that make up a digital landscape, or indeed need to be collected by a spunky and amusing Bandicoot with a fruit bazooka.  

Lastly Antoine’s Organ by Rashid Johnson, highlighted by a post on Two Coats yet again (they always have the good stuff), is one that begs to be seen up close, to be wandered around, to go up close and photograph from angles, to look from a distance, from high above in a birds eye view way too. Reminds me of the botanical gardens in Edinburgh and brilliant greenhouses stuffed full and filled with green plants, light and life. 

Sketching text pointers

In charcoal is so much fun! Then even more fun with pen, no really, it is. 

Except for the O, S, G, Q, it's working out. 

I need to work on drawing up those letters though, 

that and proportion. 

Dig out squared paper and enlargement technique maybe.

 Also must work on stuff in the mornings, night light is not so good. 

Pointers for drawing/sketching text: 

Look at each letter individually.
Note shapes of each line.
Look at negative and positive space.
Note round shapes. How round is round? Slightly angled in places? 

Look at serif/sans serif where edges of text are, are they rounded, or blunt edges?
Look at proportion, is it accurate?
Spacing one letter and then the next, spaces between consistent with font spacing, which often is not the same as leaving a gap of a few millimeters between each letter.
Use pen or pencil as measuring device.

Be quick with sketches first.
Lightly sketch top and bottom and mid section guidelines (wish I'd done this above).

Narrative

Narrative within my writing can be a strange thing, as a reader, I am constantly finding texts, words, sentences and chunks of literature to read, in a single sitting or several days or weeks. But as a visual artist, it seems like my work lacks a narrative, because it is so caught up in colour and visual language, shapes and geometric, repeated forms and motifs falling into pools of white paint. Or is that a narrative of sorts too?

But I forget how interesting pictures and words together can be and become in front of a reader. Take for instance the classic imagery found within the Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis's childhood classics that have been his legacy to generations of people. Such imagery was penned by the artist Pauline Baynes, she presented them looking up to date at that time, now appearing perfectly vintage.

Pauline Baynes' map of Narnia 

http://www.paulinebaynes.com/?what=artifacts&image_id=495&cat=69 

A walk through the snow with Mr Tumunous and Lucy 

http://www.paulinebaynes.com/?what=artifacts&image_id=573&cat=69

Images captured from a copy of The Chronicles of Narnia:

Then Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. Even Brian Jacques, whose animals had the personalities of human beings, of heroes and legends and warlords and mothers, and whose images didn't hide away from emotions that inhabited.

Jacqueline Wilson's books, known by all of kinder kind, are illustrated by Nick Sharratt, an illustrator with a wicked sense of humour, whose 2D drawings have movement and life to them that I bet in 3D or CGI, or as photos, they would lack. Like drawings that the very reader can or might make, making the experience personal, the abundance of stars and hearts on the covers, in pages beside, on top of and underneath text are fantastic and full of imagination, of possibilities. Like her writing.

Nick Sharratt's website

These writer's books often have interesting particular visuals that are iconic for their books and readers. But what about in other fictional worlds? Fairy tales of course are classic cases of imagery abundance. 

Some scans from my own books of imagery that have really appealed- classical styled books, from which folklore and stories of ages are written in.

The images feature a wealth of pattern and ideas that are worth looking into for inspiration when facing an art block. 

Opposite are a few images that inspired this post, photographic of course. Beautifully coloured and looking paper cut like too, with hints of winter romance and the iconic image of red lips repeated upon the ballet dancer's costume, her tights I think and on her transparent sleeves.

Shadows and projections overlaid upon objects imagery works effectively with pattern and on strange shaped objects.

References:
Dahl, R., (1997) Fantastic Mr Fox. Puffin Books; Middlesex, England.
Dahl, R., (1997) The Twits. Puffin Books; Middlesex, England.Henshall, D. (2008) Pauline Baynes, The Guardian, Wednesday 6th August (online). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/06/booksforchildrenandteenagers (accessed: 23rd June 2015). 
Lewis, C.S., (2001) The Chronicles of Narnia. HarperCollins Publishing; Great Britain, pp.11 and 139.

Marie Claire (2011), January 2011, pp unknown.

Updates and changes

Marking 2015 with some updates to the blog layout and template, less distractions and cleaner layout, I hope. I was considering switching to Wordpress, but I've foregone that and decided to fix up this blog instead. Some old posts have yet to be posted, will be doing that asap.

Need to brush up on drawing skills too.

So much to do.

Ideas for patterns #3

Ideas for patterns #2

Ideas for patterns #1

 

The flower/leaf paisley combination looks

like my favourite to work with at the moment.

Lines of mixed variances, inspired by a piece of fabric, 

the change of block fill in to a cross hatched texture is worth playing with. 

 More lines, mixture of pencil and black ink, a nice combo, 

as I particularly like pen for its bold graphic look

but pencil provides a shadow like appearance.

Circular Studies 02

Circular Studies 02

2011

Stitching on paper and fabric

Surface doodles

Some surface doodles that caught my eye in the art studios at uni. They use simple shapes, but these shapes have a bold imprint into my own mind, its very hard not to like them.

Simple flower shape, clumsy like build but adds that childish imperfection that I like.

I wish I took more photos of this, using circles and building in shapes inside each outline of the middle circle.

A dripping gaping circle, kind of like a wormhole. Rapid movement marks.