What I was hoping for

I planned my garden for colour. I’d love to see a butterfly or two.

When Elizabeth came for her drawing lesson on Tuesday, as she was drawing the foxglove beside the lilies and this is what we saw:

I got colour, n’est pas, but better than I hoped, I have butterflies traipsing through my yard. This one stayed quite a while and allowed me to photograph it while it explored the bright orange petals. I like the background fill in this one. It sure brings out the  sunshine in the flower

Here’s a slightly different view.

The butterfly is more fully defined  in this one.

One of my readers has let me know: This is a Tiger Swallowtail. Isn’t she beautiful?

Lucy Adams

Reflections on Lucy Adams’ work at the Fort Gallery

I was over at the Fort Gallery on Tuesday. Once again, your intrepid art sleuth did not check times and found herself in front of a closed gallery. I did, however drop in at the Birth of B.C. Art Gallery and there is an interesting watercolour show on there.  It’s all representational, and some of it is hyper-realism, if you like that kind of art. There are lots of flowers, landscapes, seascapes and a few animal paintings.

I had lunch with the woman who manages Gallery Direct – blog that I show my art work on, especially my watercolours.

Being hard headed, I returned to the Fort Gallery afterwards. I don’t know if I thought I would find a stray artist in there who would let me into the Lucy Adams show or not, but there wasn’t. There are long banners showing this month. They appear to be done on canvas and hung from rods. I’d say they were about 8 feet long.

It’s a very appropriate show for summer. Each banner has a specific garden flower painted on it, cascading down the length of the canvas. It’s a bright and happy exhibition, a little unusual in the display and therefore more interactive than paintings hung flat on the wall.

Framing is always a major issue for artists. To frame or not to frame. The problem being, most artist as struggling to pay for materials. Framing for an exhibition can easily be over $2000 unless the artist is in some way creative in the framing department. Hanging these as she has, she has found a more economical means to display, and it’s very effective, even startling, which is a good thing when you want people to engage with your art work.

I took photos through the window and with all the reflections on the glass, I got these photos which I found very interesting as photos. The reflections obscure the actual paintings too much for you to tell. But I loved the photos and how they cut up the colours and allowed the flowers to peek through sometimes and then not.

I’m hoping to get in touch with Lucy to see if she has some photos of her work to add to this blog. Until then, you’ll have to do with my reflections.

Form and volume

Graphite on paper approx 5 inches by 5 inches. Student work.

It’s been two weeks since I last saw Elizabeth for a drawing lesson. We had discussed tone. As in the musical arts, drawing and painting have scales that need to be practiced. Tone is sometimes referred to as shading, since it is often used to produce the effects of light and shadow.

For the lesson, I had Elizabeth make seven small squares (like music has seven notes going up a scale). There is no point in trying to do this on a large scale since the purpose is simply to be aware that one can produce distinct grades of light to dark by varying the amount of drawing material on the paper and by applying more or less pressure. There will be plenty of opportunity later in your drawing life to tackle larger areas.

To refine the task, I asked her to fill in each square evenly (no variations in tone within the square) and to be precise, going right up but not over the edges. This exercise was done in vine charcoal which is a relatively forgiving.

If a person wants to draw representationally, then they need to be able to control their materials. A technical understanding of drawing methods and concepts is essential if we are going to be able to discuss drawing (and by extension, painting and all two dimensional artwork).

As homework, I set her the task of drawing some flowers from the garden. I asked her to remember all the other things we had learned while she was deciding on her imagery. I wanted her to be aware of the placement of objects in her drawing so that there was an interesting composition. I asked her to be mindful of specific shapes; to obtain a balance of light and dark; and then to apply and develop her skills of translating the light and shadow throughout the picture by shading.

“This time I was smart, ” Elizabeth e-mailed me mid-week. “I was drawing in the garden and I knew the light situation would change so I took a photo to remind me.” A few days later, she sent me this photo of her drawing, above.

Elizabeth has only been drawing with me for about three months, so I think her progress is phenomenal. She did a great job of the composition. The tonal balance is excellent. The pattern of the petals provides good textural interest and the details of the stamens and pistils is sharp and contrasting to the smoothness of the petals. She has been quite specific about each flower’s shape. I think she has done a wonderful job and I wouldn’t ask her to change the tiniest bit of this drawing.

For her next drawing, though, the best step forward would be to practice tonal differences – to catch nuances, to look more closely at how light and shadow work together. Note on the drawing above that the glass container appears to be flat when I suspect that it must have been round. Note too that there is an outline around each of the flowers.

To deal with these minor problems, I set Elizabeth the task of drawing an egg. It’s not an easy task. I challenge you to try it! First of all, I set out a plain surface that would show the shadows well. Then I shifted the desk lamp to ensure that there was strong light coming from one side. For this exercise, a strong light source is essential.

Then I set out three eggs. One was in an egg cup, to demonstrate that the lighting affects the egg differently when it is standing on end. One was on a black surface and the other on a white table napkin. The one on the black doesn’t reflect light back up from underneath; while the one on the white cloth has reflected light coming back up from underneath.

I asked Elizabeth to show me the whitest, lightest spot on the egg (the highlight) and then asked her to note that the shadows were actually coming from two light sources – the window and then from the lamp. Where the two shadows meet, there is a darker overlap

So here’s the set up:

Elizabeth started with a simple oval which she refined as she sketched around a the same shape a few times.

I asked her if she thought she was finished, and she thought she was. But I wanted her to push the frontiers and to see that there was no line around the egg – it has no edges; and to my mind, whether she could see the darkish shadow on the lower part of the egg or not, it didn’t aid the observer to identify this object as an egg. It made it looked rather more like a plum!

I asked her to observe whether the material she could see behind the egg was lighter or darker than the egg. I asked her to observe where the linen napkin met the egg, and she adjusted her drawing accordingly. With the shadows that she had determined, she had the possibility of a good compositions.

For the hour that she had to do this in, she learned quite a lot about drawing.

• Shading provides the means to indicate form. Learning to make transitions in shading can help give volume to a flat shape.

• Some objects do not have lines that contain them; they are continuous. Eggs are a great example, but faces and body parts have those subtle transitions as well. When a drawing looks flat, think about what you know and help make the object three dimensional by graduating the shadow and highlights.
• A dark shape behind a light one increases the intensity of light on the forwards shape and removes the need for a line to define its shape.

As a final consideration of her work, I asked her to take another look at the composition. The parallel and diagonal light-coloured shape underneath the egg tends to bring you into the image on the left hand side and drive you out the right hand side just like an arrow.

If you go back to the photograph of the egg, above, you will see that the napkin edges play a significant role in the composition. They provide a vertical influence on the picture.

I asked her to think about cropping the image she finished with (the last illustration, above) and perhaps to find a way to use the vertical edges of the napkin to improve it.

I sent her home with a challenge. Try the same thing over again, but use pen and ink for one drawing and graphite for another. It sounds simple. But just try it!

Pig Heaven – Diana Durrand and Jo-Ann Sheen

Where are the Pigs, Where are they? Diana Durrand Acrylic on Canvas detail

I was unable to attend the opening, so I marked the first day back from New Mexico on my calendar as a day to go to the Fort Gallery to see the Durrand and Sheen show. I was tempted by the happy pig faces by Durrand, grinning out at me from the invitational poster and the accompanying moody etching by Jo-Ann Sheen.  It took me longer to get there – I was not prepared for the various duties that awaited my return that ended up making me wait a day or two – but I got there on Friday afternoon after a hour-long wait at the Albion Ferry to Fort Langley. Thank goodness, the day was bright, warm and sunny.

Diana Durrand has worked on a theme of pigs triggered by her interest in the Hearts on Noses charity (based in Maple Ridge, B.C.) that rescues and rehabilitates  abandoned, unwanted,  orphaned, injured, abused or neglected mini-pigs.

Where are the Pigs, Where are they? Diana Durrand Acrylic on Canvas

From a distance, the nine happy pig faces looking out from the centre block of the largish square painting are the same ones I had seen on the invitation. They appeared to be surrounded by wallpaper of some sort, but on closer inspection, the wallpaper effect is made up of many, many pig bodies – the signature, side-on view – in Chagall-like detachment from any reference to the ground. They are upside down, down-side up, and many positions in between, floating on the canvas at all angles, really.  The brush strokes are direct; the layers of colour are subtle and rich.  Durrand is a painter’s painter. Yes, the imagery is quietly funny; the compositions are inventive; but for a painter, it’s the application of paint to canvas – the mark-making, the freshness that makes these paintings luscious, and dare I say, with this porky subject matter, tasty!

Pigs are considered one of the most intelligent of animal species – very close in brain matter to humans. Durrand mentions the contrast between the pigs she has met at the Hearts on Noses pig refuge, happy, able to roam, free within the confines of the property; and she compares them to factory-style pig farming where these intelligent animals never see the outdoors, cooped up in miniscule spaces while they fatten up for market.

The second large painting of note, Listening, illustrates three pigs with black background and stripes like zebra stripes contouring their shapes. The pigs seem to be enclosed behind bars, like in a cage or in a transport truck going to slaughter. The pigs listen intently to what is going on about them, ears perked and eyes alert.

Matisse Revisited, Diana Durrand, Acrylic on Canvas 12 x 16

The third large painting is another with a central rectangular canvas with a van Gogh-like picture of sunflowers.This is framed by a number of ochre canvas panels to complete a larger rectangle, then the total is framed by a simple  wooden frame. At first sight, it’s a copy of van Gogh’s work, but on careful consideration, the pig shape emerges, hidden amongst the pots and sunflowers. It’s a visual joke.

Klee Revisited, Diana Durrand, Acrylic on Canvas 12 x 16

Which came first, the van Gogh or the Kandinsky, the Matisse, the Klee  or the Mondrian, is a moot point. Durrand uses the same pig form, a profile of the body shape, in each of several paintings where the apparent image from a distance, is a copy of one of these master’s paintings, but the pig emerges, is always underlying it.

Joe The Butcher retired and took up gardening; Diana Durrand,  Mixed Media 10 x 16 inches

The third theme on our porcine subject is entitled Joe the Butcher retired and took up gardening. These images are mixed media, partly pastel, partly collage. The recurring pig-shaped profile now is the subject for infill with various flowers in colour harmony. The collage pieces are cut much like a diagram of a butcher’s diagram and in doing so, the patterned pig seems to be slightly more voluminous than  a simply flat shape.

I came away from these images with a smile. I liked the whimsical ideas, the historical references  and I admired the meticulous craftmanship.

On the opposite wall, there were five long panels of wood “cradles” which is a popular new support for painting. Topping each of the fifty two inch panels, separated by an inch or so,  are five smaller panels, the same width but eleven inches by sixteen. On each small panel, there is a charcoal drawing of a head. On the five long panels, there is a drawing mid-panel of hands expressing a particular mood.

Jo-Ann Sheen,  five wooden panels with charcoal drawings.

These works are filled with stillness, like five  nuns standing in a medieval austerity, although the faces are expressive and lively. Sheen is exploring the perceptions of identity, mirroring the soul of her subjects through their hand gestures and facial expressions.  Body language is not explored – the bodies that the heads and hands belong to are not there.

The remainder of Sheen’s works are complex psychological portraits (heads only) created through a layered process of etching, monotype printing and chine colle, a process of gluing very fine paper onto the etched paper whilst running the etching through the press.  This method produces beautiful surface qualities.

Etching with chine collé by Jo-ann Sheen

The show ended on Saturday. A new one will be up on Wednesday, with the opening event for Betty Laughy happening on Friday the 27th of May. See you there!

BTW I looked up both Sheen and Durrand on the ‘Net to see what kind of web presence was available and to explore a larger body of their works. I only found one for Durrand, and I think you may enjoy it very much. This it it:

www.dianadurrand.myartchannel.com/collections

Note: Hearts on Noses is a Mini-pig Sanctuary, a non-profit organization in Maple Ridge, B.C.  that rescues, rehabilitates and cares for unwanted, injured, orphaned, abused, neglected and abandoned mini-pigs. Web address?

www.heartsonnoses.com

Taos and Santa Fe

Lizbet and I went travelling for a week (not counting the three days on either end that I needed to get there.

We stayed in a hotel in Taos, New Mexico and we rented a car to explore the countryside. It’s marvelous  new scape for me to absorb.  We both took our watercolours with us but we were so busy going places we wanted to see before we left that we never stopped to paint.

We spent a morning at Taos Pueblo – a world heritage site.  You can find quite a good explanation and a few good pictures of it on Wikipedia.

When we bought our entry fee, they charged us an additional five dollars per camera for the right to take pictures for personal use. They forbid publishing of them, so in respect of that, I won”t post my pictures of Taos Pueblo. I must say though, it’s a stunning place to visit.

Taos is in nosebleed country. My sister who lives on the top of Red Mountain at 5000 feet from sea level spent the first two days recovering from altitude sickness. Taos is approximately 7000 feet up.  I, who live at sea level, felt no effect whatsoever from the altitude.  Well, maybe, a little shortness of breath and a few threats of nosebleed.

The weather was hot, hot, and sunny but with a bit of breeze. The skies are a perfect blue until late afternoon when clouds take a stroll across the sky then dissolve.  At the Pueblo – the earliest multilevel structure continuously inhabited in North America – the warm grey adobe colour scintillates against the cerulean heaven.

When we got back to the hotel, after dinner, my sister retired early. I need much less sleep than she does, so I was up late with my palette of colours and I took out a big brush and painted this painting, above, trying to work from memory. I was happy, not only with the colours but with the impression of the pueblo construction.

Here’s the second one I did:

Outside our hotel window there were birch trees with brilliantly white bark. With the sun coming through the leaves in the morning, there were such beautiful overlays of the new green leaves. It’s spring there, in the mountains. During the week we were there, the flowers in the gardens started to bloom one after the other in quick succession. It’s the heat. It brings them out much earlier than here in Canada where the succession is drawn over a two month period, not just a week.

So in the morning, before Lizbet was up, I took time to draw a section of the birch tree, trying to capture the light, the beautiful shadows and the overlay of the new green leaves.  It’s a very graceful tree. It shimmers in the late afternoon breeze. It glows with the morning sun and the afternoon sun. It was quite captivating.

Here is my version of it. I must say, I missed the precision of the shadows on the trunk, but I’m nevertheless not unhappy with the result.

So, there it is. My production whilst on holiday. More about the holiday later.

Elizabeth’s Garden

Elizabeth sent me an e-mail the day before her art lesson.

“I finished my Charcoal Landscape. I am so excited about it!”

But the tease! She didn’t send me a picture of it. She made me wait until the next day when she turned up for her next lesson.

Indeed, she had done a fine job.  For a neophyte at drawing she has remarkable skill and she understands the concepts – this time on texture and pattern.

To understand just how remarkable this is, you need to understand that this is her first sustained drawing. She has brought together her lessons on composition, shape, and texture quite wonderfully.

With regard to the texture, you can notice that the grass is different from the plants; she has used pattern repetition in the plants themselves, the texture of the debris in the wheelbarrow is again different; and she has a number of smooth areas, both light and dark.

Having said that, the image you see above is cropped just slightly.

Here’s the full image:

The few problems that she has with it are solvable without doing anything further to the image simply by matting the drawing that crops off the edges or by cutting them off.  Doing so, however, will take away some of the rhythm of the painting and alter the composition.

And what’s the matter with it, you may ask?

These are picky things – but the kind of things that elevate a drawing from good to excellent.

First, on both the left hand side and the right hand side, the drawing trails off in a couple of spots.

It’s important to carry the drawing to edge of where you are working. Just a few more strokes, just a tiny bit of finishing and that bit of unfinished work can be brought up to the same standard as the rest of the painting.

I’ve cropped out the right side of the image to help you focus on the left hand edge, the unfinished spot down by the rocks and really, all along that edge:

The problem with matting that part out is that she loses the lovely climbing roses along the  same edge. Ditto for the shadows from the pots.

Elizabeth discovered in doing this drawing that her sleeve was dragging on the paper and much of the charcoal lifted. She had to start all over in a number of areas. As you can see, she managed to reconstruct so that we don’t even notice.

Midway above the left-most fence panel, there is a smudge mark, darker than the rest of the sky area. It’s an unfortunate mark probably as a result of either a thumb holding onto the paper there as the drawing was being put into its folder. Our fingers have a very fine oil on the surface. If you use your fingers on the paper, the oil sticks to the paper and holds onto more charcoal there than elsewhere.  If you rub it out, the eraser also can leave a fine trace of oil or something and then when you go over it again with charcoal, trying to fix it, it only gets worse.

What’s the solution?  This is such a fine first sustained drawing. That smudge looks even darker on the original (as compared to this photo).  So solution one – crop it out – is a valid response, if it doesn’t compromise the composition.  The other possibility is to extend the foliage to encompass this smudge. Since the foliage is darker, it will essentially disappear – will no longer be noticeable.

In this drawing, the fence exerts a strong horizontal influence. Extending past the fence with the foliage may help to stop the eye from travelling westwards right out of the image.

On the other hand, if the sky is cropped out, then a similar effect happens. With a negligible amount of sky at the top, the fence posts act as verticals to  stop the eye from travelling westwards.

Either solution is acceptable.

Kudos to Elizabeth, don’t you think?

Texture and Pattern 2

I’ve gone looking through my photos to see if I couldn’t illustrate the beauty of texture or of pattern. Here are a few:

Referring to the drawing, above, the grasses need a build-up long mildly-crossing strokes. The flowers heads in the foreground need dot like marks,. The pattern of the central shrub is radiating from the central trunk. The various trees all have their own shapes as well as different textural qualities. The sky and the mountain in the background need smooth, solid marks and because they are calm and solid in aspect, they provide a perfect foil for all the non-smooth textural areas.

This close up of a sheer, patterned curtain fabric with light coming through has many opportunities to explore both pattern and texture.

These are blueberry bushes, red with new sap, just waiting to green up for spring. The tangle of red branches could either be represented as an overall shape with a smooth texture, or they could be represented with layer after layer of small red twisted marks that would build up a richness in the textural qualities of a drawing. The trees above have an altogether different texture which also contains the tree skeleton’s pattern. Closely looking and understanding the organization of branches along the trees will help in representing one species  of tree in differentiation from another through a textural pattern that imitates it.

There is a good contrast between the round, smoother big branches in relation to the small dot like blossoms and the criss-crossing smaller branches. There is a busy-ness about the blossoms and a quiet strength in the more massive branch structures.

Texture and pattern

When drawing or painting, texture is that aspect of the work that makes you think that you could just reach out and touch it and it would feel just like…. satin or sand, feathers, soft skin or dried, wrinkled old skin.

Artists like Vermeer began to paint images where every fabric and every object was identifiable by a realistic representation of its texture – fur, wool, feathers, wood, tiles, bricks. There are lots of images of Vermeer to be seen on Wikipedia.

Another painter who excelled at this was Dominque Ingres.

My kleptomaniacal talents are not very good. I tried to lift some images from Wikipedia to illustrate these two artist here but was unsuccessful. So you will need to do some Wikipedia-ing yourselves to see examples.

In times of high realism, texture referred to the ability to reproduce the  illusion of an object which relayed the sense of touching and feeling to you.

Come the revolution, which in this case was late nineteenth century, the Impressionists provided texture in a whole new way. Through their goal of having the viewer do some of the colour mixing in the process of looking at the painting, they daubed colour on canvas in small dots of pure colour. The epitome of this was the work of Georges-Pierre Seurat, father of Pointillism. Degas used small cross hatched strokes to build up layer after layer of colour to build up his pastels and then he took this method into his oil paintings.

As the Twentieth Century rolled into view,  artists were beginning to break down the rules and regulations that had contained the expressions of image making. Artists began to refuse all the rules. Still, most of them were all trained in classic art education; so the result was that they couldn’t really toss out everything. Minimalists attempted to bring things down to their most basic forms – and textures. Kasimir Malevich painted a scandalous painting called White on White which had a square white canvas with a second, smaller white square turned on an angle. The only distinction between them was a slight shift in white and the texture of the paint.

(And we all know that this  is possible, that white  – the absence of colour in pure light rays, when translated to paint pigments, has some trace element of another colour so that we get cool whites and warm whites – just ask your house-paint dealer!)

Yves Klein painted  completely blue paintings. The absence of a remarkable (as in, being able to identify it as being there) texture only meant that the texture was completely unified in that piece.

Expressionists expressed textures in wild gestural marks – Willem de Koonig and Jackson Pollock, for instance. The Canadian painter, Riopelle, achieved texture through carefully placed marks, where these became the only reason for the painting.

But you may say, “Get more practical! I want to know how I can use texture and pattern in my drawings; and I’m not going to do those flaky abstract things.”

So how do we explore textures that can serve us in our own image making?

The only way to find what pleases and serves you well in your painting and drawing is to experiment.

First, start with drawing. (See the illustration above.)

Use a roughish piece of paper like a Manila or any kind of paper recommended for charcoal drawing. Use a medium thick vine charcoal because it can give you good dark marks and light delicate ones as well.

On the paper make about five lines from top to bottom and and about seven horizontally so that you end up with about 35  contained shapes which for ease of discussion, I’m going to call squares even if the shape is more randomly formed.  Try to stay within the lines so that you don’t get halos around the texture you have filled in to it.

Start by filling in one with charcoal. Leave it alone. It is your bench mark.

In another one, fill it in and gently smooth the charcoal to see if you can get a velvety surface.  Try and get the charcoal to be even all over. In another square, tap the charcoal tip all through the square.Try doing this in one  square with a light touch and in another , almost pounding the charcoal against the paper. Try putting the charcoal firmly on the paper and then twisting it slightly as you begin to make the mark, then repeat that throughout the square.

You can see, above, that there is a square that is randomly done with circles and one where they are lined up. Textures can be random or organized, as you need for your image.  You can make marks even (all over, just the same) or not, with variations in pressure and tone.

Some of the results will look more like pattern than texture. What’s the difference?  I’d say that pattern is more repetitive of a single type of mark, and the mark would tend to be a specific shape, but then, I’ve always had difficulty separating the two, or defining one versus the other. There are grey areas where pattern is texture or vice versa.

Do you see in some of these textures something that would be suitable to indicate a designer’s beard? grass? polka dot pattern on fabric? felt? fur?

Look at the objects around you that you feel have a rough texture. Try to find a mark or a series of marks that could represent it. Then draw a picture where the various objects represented have a variety of textures.

Elizabeth, my student whom I introduced to you in the blog on Shape, chose a scene outside the studio window with 1) grass, 2) debris in the wheel barrow 3) a shrub just coming into leaf 4) a wooden fence with lattice work on the top 5) some plants in the garden behind the wheel barrow and 6) a nice flat looking shadow.  Each of these six textural areas required different mark making to help them represent the objects in a realistic manner.

We made this exercise into a consolidating one, where not only did she need to express objects with pattern and texture, but she also had to think about her composition, the placement of objects,  and to think about the shapes, and in the overall image, to get a good balance of light and dark.

She had done marvelously well within the hour that she was here, but she took the drawing home and I will just have to wait until next week to see the results!

Shape

Recently, my friend Elizabeth asked me to give her Art lessons.

“What do you hope to accomplish?” I asked her.

“I don’t know anything. I just want to be able to draw,” she said.

“But you already know how to draw,” I replied a little perplexed.

Elizabeth is a talented writer of children’s books. She had produced one complete with illustrations and brought it to our writers’ group for comment. She had a good bit of innate talent to start with. She wasn’t starting from scratch.

“Okay, ” I suggested. “Why don’t we start with drawing. It’s the base to everything in art. If you never get to be a star artist, you at least will learn to see things very differently and you can improve your drawing skills a lot. I think you will be a good learner – a quick study.”

We began with a two hour lesson and then reduced it to one hour. In fact, Elizabeth picked things up quite quickly. The first thing, as a teacher, that I have to do is to break the fear of the students of making “mistakes”. Too often people have been discouraged in their attempts to draw by some other categorical critic who says “that’s not what a rabbit looks like” but when they produce their version of the rabbit, if you ask me, that’s not what it’s like either.

Every time we try to represent an object or figure or landscape, all we ever get is an interpretation, a representation, no matter how “realistically” we can draw or paint. Even in the school of photographic realism or the animalier “hair of the dog” school of painting where every bristle is painted to exact length, it’s represented on a two dimensional plane, the paper or the canvas. That’s not realistic! It’s an impression. It’s a translation of how we see something. Some are more believable than others.

Elizabeth has gotten over the first few lessons quite admirably. She understood the underlying principles of composition and now is able to point them out in magazine advertising and in photo journalistic displays. Soon she will be adapting her own work to these principles. I had Elizabeth draw an object from memory. It’s a good task and lots of fun as long as one realizes that the resulting drawing is going to look like a child’s attempt at putting information to paper.

Following right on, I had her then take the object she was drawing – a cork screw – and let her look at it very carefully. We noted the places where memory had glossed over details. We looked at how the image would be very different if we looked at it from one side or the other, or what it would look like from top down, or from bottom up. We agreed that those were not typical views, so in order to have someone else agree upon the nature of the object being drawn, it was helpful to know which was the most typical view.

After she had done a second try at the memory task, accompanied by a bit of anxiety and much laughter at the results, I had her draw the object, focusing on observation of the various details. It was amazing how much progress she had made in observation. A light bulb had turned on in her mind. Observation was about to become a new game for her. As far as representational art goes, observation is a key to creating believable imagery.

Our last lesson was about shape and line drawing. Using a graphite pencil, I had her develop some hand-eye coordination by asking her to do a blind drawing. Blind drawings are those where you let your pencil act as if it were your eye, tracing very slowly down the edges of the item you are drawing, making marks out to the right side of you at the easel, and your eyes never leaving the object as you inspect where the edges of it travel.

Here is the blind drawing:

And the hand-eye coordination drawing with more intense observation:

We have a tendency to say “Wow, what an improvement!” but I delight in both kinds of drawing. The first one is exuberant. It has all the essentials – the hook with which a cool beer or bottle of pop can be opened. It has the spiral indicating the screw portion of the device and it has the circle that fits over the wine bottle top. It has the point that goes into the cork. It’s sufficiently complete to represent the object. It’s sufficiently sparse in detail to make the viewer question what it is and then come to a conclusion as to it’s identity.

It’s a lively drawing. It holds both information and mystery which, like a well dressed woman, is really more interesting than one who displays and tells all.

The second one is more sedate. Despite my imposed rule of not rubbing anything out, some erasures have been made. This object is far more instantaneously recognizable, but it’s lost its exuberance. All the parts are carefully observed, some more hastily than others. For our purposes it turned out very well.

In the progress of our learning, this drawing was transformed into another so that we didn’t waste time in getting on to the next subject, Shape. I asked Elizabeth to fill in all the parts on her drawing that were made of metal. That was easy. It was all metal. I gave her a fat yellow felt pen to do it with and that was a quick way to accomplish the task. The yellow shape is essentially the Positive Shape. Positive Shape is frequently discussed in Art. It’s often the subject of one’s painting, the principle image or the secondary image. If you carefully cut this shape out of a coloured piece of paper with an Exacto knife paying great attention to detail, what is left will be the Negative shape.

I wanted Betty to be very clear about Positive and Negative shape and how it affects the composition of an overall image. I drew a rectangualr shape around her cork screw drawing leaving no space between the extremities of the object and the sides of the box. I then asked her to identify each of the negative shapes produced by enclosing the object with the rectangular shape, and then to draw them to one side of her image.

She used charcoal to fill it in. It contrasts well with the yellow and dramatically illustrates the effect of background to foreground.I asked her what effect she felt the black shape had on her image.

“It unbalances it – a whole lot!”.

Yes, that’s exactly what it did. Each time she filled in another of the negative shapes, and we got about seven of them, we stopped to see what effect the infill made to the weight and composition of the painting. Now, you will say, those negative shapes were still there, even if it was just the paper colour. That’s true. But if one uses the negative shapes in balance with the positive shapes, then compositional effect is achieved (becomes balanced or unbalanced).

In fact, every mark one makes on the paper, whether positive or negative in shape, alters the drawing. It’s why the drawing process can be quite meditative as we consider what the effect of a change is and whether or not it meets our purpose or vision in doing the drawing.

When Elizabeth was all done with her drawing and all the negative shapes were identified and filled in, we looked at it compositionally. There’s an entry on the left hand side for the viewer to easily approach the drawing, there are a number of different negative shapes, each different, the drawing is off centre which assists in a pleasing viewpoint – symetrical would be less interesting. Mission accomplished.

I then found this image amongst my photos which shows how positive and negative shapes can sometime confound themselves in a very pleasing way. Which is positive and which is negative? It keeps the eye inquiringly engaged in the imagery, which is a good thing.

Well, there you have it! I sent Elizabeth home with some work to do.

When all you are exploring is the effect of positive shape in relation to negative shape, there is no need to redraw everything. I asked her to draw a smaller version of her object one more time, then to divide her page into about eight rectangles. Using carbon paper with this one drawing, reproduce the same drawing in each of the eight compartments. Cut them up so that each is a separate image. Using felt pens or something that is easy to fill in quickly, chose two colours for each of these eight images and see how different colours affect the balance of the relationship of the positive shapes and the negative shapes.

For the fun of it, I’ve done these thumbnails (small drawings used principally to test out ideas and work out composition or colour) using Adobe Photo and the the paint bucket infill.

The edges of the line drawing need to be entirely enclosed to work this way. By the end of my manipulations, the drawing was beginning to disintegrate. That in itself added some interesting textures to the image – but texture is for a different lesson.

Lone Tratt and Dorthe Eisenhardt

Garden of Life, Lone Tratt, Acrylic painting (copyright held by the artist)

I wish you could see this painting full size and in the flesh, so as to speak. This painting is approximately 3  by 5 feet and is rich in warm tones of ochres, cadmiums and greens. It’s lush, and the paint handling is fluid. There’s an obvious control of both colour and brush handling. It’s loosely painted but controlled at the same time – a quality that I like to see in a painting.

Lone Tratt shares an exhibition with Dorthe Eisenhardt at the Fort Gallery in Fort Langley, B.C.  that opened this evening and runs until May 3rd. It’s well worth taking a look.

Tree of Life, Lone Tratt, acrylic painting, copyright

Tratt works from imagination, not identifying any particular subject matter, but the forms in the paintings above and the series that accompanied it are clearly plant forms. There are flowers and foliage of sorts. The flowers resemble poppies or tulips, in bright, varied reds. There is lots to look at- good composition, movement in the forms and interesting shapes. The paint is handled  both in thin glazes and in impasto paint build-ups producing a sensuous texture of the paint surface.

A second and less convincing series by Tratt  in this exhibition has a theme of evening skies, signifying the ending of a period of one’s life. These paintings are approximately twelve inches square.  The colours are violently clashing – purples and oranges, blues and yellows. The painting technique is more rigid and the surfaces are matte. They lack the compositional intricacies and subtleties of colour found in the first series.

In this show, Dorthe Eisenhardt exhibits her first truly abstract body of work.

Passages #7, Dorthe Eisenhardt Acrylic on canvas 30×30 inches, copyright

She starts without reference to any object. She seeks to express light and dark, warm and cool. From this modest beginning, Eisenhardt chooses the colours she wants to work with and then builds up forms, reworking them day after day until she has resolved her visual idea.   The resulting canvases almost glow with light and warmth, yet are tempered by the teal blues and other dark colours.

These are compositions that are brought into perfect harmony. The layers are enriched with textural components achieved by combing, brushing or scratching through thicker paint. In the process, she builds up rounded forms that draw you into the dark crevices or convex shapes that expand towards the viewer. There’s a strong sense of volume in these works.

Passages #1, Dorthe Eisenhardt Acrylic on canvas 24×24 inches, copyright

If you refer back to her web page, you will see that her previous work often has been inspired by garden flowers. The iris semi-abstracts are a precursor to this exhibition of purely abstract imagery. To see more, take a look at:

http://dortheeisenhardt.com/gallery/gallery_c/

Photographs do not do these paintings justice. They almost vibrate with light.

Lone Tratt also has a web-page worth seeing at:

http://www.lonetratt.ca/painter.htm

and you will see that her work is interesting and varied.

The exhibition continues to May 3rd, at the Fort Gallery, 9048 Glover Road in Fort Langley.