Tag Drawing

“Oh Betty!”

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s good to go back to basics, so I signed up for Chris Koning’s online workshops on drawing – admittedly today’s on negative space was the first one I’ve been able to attend as I’ve had all sorts of IT issues.

They are based on Betty Edward’s tome – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

A friend bought me this book many years ago, so today’s workshop has motivated me to get on and finish reading it (I’ve suddenly got so much reading to do!). The book’s message is that if we understand how to perceive something, we’ll be able to draw it and, in this respect, there are five perceptual skills of drawing:

  • The perception of edges
  • The perception of spaces
  • The perception of relationships
  • The perception of light and shadow
  • The perception of the whole

It’s all about how we see, and it’s always good to review how we perceive things, as we might end up noticing something different.

Miscellany I

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I’m conscious that I committed to doing an automatic drawing a day to try and change my mindset. I’m allowing myself the inclusion of exploring Procreate as well!

I particularly like the charcoal drawing. I used a piece of compressed charcoal and made swirling marks using it on its narrow edge and full on its side. I then rubbed it out and repeated it but this time playing around with the end and varying the motions. The concept of layers appeals to me (memories, past lives/ identities…) particularly the traces left behind of the first drawing and I was surprised by the range of marks I made depending on how I held the charcoal and the pressure I used. There are some delicate areas, followed by some jagged, harsh marks. Some lines appear to be faltering and hesitant whilst others have more purpose and at times are almost punctuation marks in what would otherwise be a stream of unconsciousness.

The second image I am treating as an automatic pastel drawing – I randomly chose colours and effects from the Procreate menu and I think the result is interesting, although I miss the haptics and the smell of the real thing as well as the tactile relationship between the medium and support. I’m not sure that I would use it going forward, except maybe as a tool to experiment with, although I have previously decreed that collage is just not my bag – how times change! I might use it if I decided to go down a graphic flat colour route (as in the third image) and digital collage is something I will definitely explore further – no bits on the floor and no need to glue – what’s not to like? I’ve been thinking about how I could incorporate digital collage into a mixed media piece of work – perhaps a giclée print onto a canvas, sealed with medium and then oil paint?

There are lots of thoughts chasing themselves around my head – I’ve been ignoring them in the hope that as and when I consciously acknowledge them they may have already got themselves into some kind of order. Just doing what I’m doing at the moment seems to be creating even more possibilities and permutations which is exciting.

I can sense that I’m feeling a lot more relaxed about making my experimental work ‘public’. I really look forward to starting the day by just letting my hand wander across the page – it’s the only time when there’s no expectation on me to achieve anything – renewing the buildings insurance, fixing the E20 error message on the washing machine – just a moment when I’m at one…

“Ever Tried. Ever Failed…

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

…No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Samuel Beckett)

I hadn’t come across this quote until my daughter went to secondary school, where the headmistress used it as her mantra in her quest to produce strong, independent young women who would leave school ready to deal with whatever complexities the world threw at them. It was used to encourage the girls to go beyond their comfort zone in trying new things and not to be put off by the risk of failure – “feel the fear and do it anyway” was another one of her favourites!

There are many inspirational quotations dealing with the concept of failure such as:

“Try and fail, but don’t fail to try” – John Quincy Adams

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm” – attributed to Winston Churchill

That’s all very well, but they don’t deal with how we should actually process the feeling of failure, and this is something we touched on in our online session this afternoon. The problem of dealing with failure is that the ego gets in the way. Strategies to overcome the ego include sharing stories (this allows others to learn from the failure without actually experiencing it); over-acceptance of the failure (that is actively taking it and collaborating with it to make an alternative outcome); and distancing the failure (for example, by using the third person when reflecting on it). The last strategy is particularly effective as it allows you to view the failure and the person who failed objectively giving rise to feelings of empathy.

So, our task for next week is to take a risk and do something in our art practice which might not work out!

For the first part of today’s session we finished our short introductions. I had been feeling ok about it, but towards the end I felt quite overwhelmed by emotion – maybe it was because I had mentioned my constant feeling that time is ticking by at quite a rate, or maybe it was the sudden realisation that it is only now that I have made the time to do something that I have always really wanted to do. Either way it came from nowhere and left me feeling quite out of sorts for some time afterwards. Even more reason to carpe diem!

Below is today’s automatic drawing in which I used a thin and a thick piece of willow charcoal, holding a piece in each hand moving at the same time. I then used a sanguine and black conte pastel on top. It’s not as dynamic as the previous drawing and seems a bit contained – maybe because I was using both hands at the same time – I’ve never been able to do the head pat/ tummy rub thing. Next time I think I will stick with charcoal, but maybe build up some layers, and also begin from a different starting point.

Trying Not To Overthink It

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Guilty as charged: I have form for overthinking, overworking, not knowing when to stop and basically bludgeoning a piece until there is no life left in it. My problem is that I have an expectation of how it should be. It’s not even as if I enjoy the process – it makes me frustrated, stressed, and downhearted to the point of threatening to pack it all in. So, to put an end to this way of working I need to adopt a new approach; create a new habit but one which opens up possibilities, as opposed to closing them down. Admittedly, I have already begun to experiment more recently, but it needs to become second nature.

There’s a lot to be said for drawing exercises; I’m a particular fan of continuous line drawing but the drawback (excuse the pun) is that I’m still drawing something, I’m just not allowing myself to draw it as accurately as I might otherwise want to, and so there is still an expectation as to how it should look.

Sometime ago, I watched a documentary about Maggi Hambling. She gets up at 5am every morning and with a cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, she starts her day by making a drawing – she doesn’t like the term sketch – using an ink dropper and, in this particular instance, with her eyes closed. It is a form of automatic drawing, a concept embraced by the surrealists and latterly by the abstract expressionists, which involves the artist making marks without any conscious control.

I think this is for me!

There are numerous possibilities: pencil, charcoal, ink, paint, collage, eyes open, eyes closed, different ways of holding, holding more than one, dominant hand, non-dominant hand and the list goes on.

So this is the first of my daily automatic drawings:

I used a charcoal pencil in my dominant hand and, with my eyes open, I just let it wander over the page without any conscious thought or control. Maintaining the same pressure and manner of mark-making started to become a bit tedious so I almost unconsciously varied the pressure and the way I made the marks, holding the pencil higher up so that there was less control from my hand, rocking it backwards and forwards in my hand, holding it perpendicular to the page and then on its side. It was a sensory experience in that I was aware of the feel and the sound of it: the sound of the charcoal on the paper and the squeaking and stuttering of it on the upward stroke creating broken lines, as opposed to the smooth downward marks. I then randomly smudged and blended some areas.

There are some quite interesting passages and if this is my subconscious expressing itself then I might have cause for concern! All in all, I’m pleased with what I produced because I enjoyed the process – instead of being mindful, it was mindless – and I hope that if I do this often enough I might just free myself up.