Pentimenti and Restatements

A pentimento is an alteration to a drawing or painting where evidence of the previous work can be seen, showing where the artist has made a new decision.

Evidence can be seen in either the underdrawing or any of the subsequent layers, and most examples from the Old Masters have only been found by the use of x-ray and infrared imaging techniques, although as oil paint becomes more transparent over time, an underpainted section may show through a reworked version.

Pentimenti in drawings are easier to see, and examples often quoted are found in Leonardo da Vinci’s and Edgar Degas’ work, such as the multiple adjustments of line around the shoulder area below.

Ballet Dancer seen from behind, Degas, c.1870s

 

As more examples come to light, it has become clear that pentimenti are very common in the work of the Old Masters. They play an important part in determining the originality of a work as there should be none or at least less in subsequent copies. Painters such as Rembrandt, Titian and Caravaggio appear to have worked directly onto the canvas and thus corrections and changes are going to occur more frequently.

Marks which reveal a totally different subject are not generally classed as pentimenti. Often such examples are where the artist has begun a new work over a previous, abandoned canvas, for example Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”. These significant or different changes are referred to in some sources as “restatements”. Picasso had begun two distinct works beneath the final layer which were identified by x-ray and infrared in 1998.

x-ray showing earlier compositions

infrared image showing woman's face

 

 

In a slight deviation from the subject, during my research I came across this site http://www.webexhibits.org/feast/analysis/reconstructing.html which examines a painting begun by Bellini, reworked by Dossi and finished by Titian, which shows the process of restatement very clearly.

 

 

A Brief History of Landscape Painting

It seems like common sense that before I embark on the next assignment I should familiarise myself with how landscape has been portrayed through the years. My knowledge of art history is sketchy at best, although there are three specific research projects in this section to begin to remedy this, and it seemed that researching the development of the genre would help place the practical exercises in context.

My first brief in this assignment was to look at how different artists have depicted landscape, so it seems logical to examine the development of landscape painting in an historical timeline, particularly as my knowledge of art history prior to the twentieth century is practically non-existent.

Landscape has been painted from Classical times, although more often used as a decorative mural on villa walls than as a subject in its own right. It did not gain popularity until the Renaissance, when the idea of the land as a place for pleasure was reborn. Initially it was used as a backdrop to religious scenes or portraits, as shown in this work Madonna and child with Saints (c. 1454) by Alessio Baldovinetti.

As accuracy in depiction improved, so did the proportions of the figures within them, and there was increased use of colour to suggest the mood of the overall composition. This process continued to evolve through the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

By the seventeenth century there were two main schools of landscape. The Italian school remained idealised and classical, and was not highly regarded as standalone landscape representation, as portraiture was still seen as preferable. In the Netherlands, recently free of Spanish rule, people eschewed the Catholic artworks and found national pride in depictions of their own country’s landscape. However, the use of light and colour continued to be heavily influenced by the Italian style at the end of the century, and artists such as Aelbert Cuyp produced mannered and stylistic works on these lines. A typical example of his work, Landscape with a Hunt (1650-55), is shown below.

In the eighteenth century, the fashionable “Grand Tour” set wanted to buy souvenirs of the places in Europe they visited. In a grandiose forerunner to the picture postcard, artists responded to demand for landscapes inhabited by romantic ruins or dramatic architecture. Sometimes the artist would travel with their wealthy patron, recording the adventures of the Tour. One of the best known artists of the day was Canaletto, as Venice was one of the most popular destinations.

Closer to home the focus moved to France and England in respect of a new landscape tradition. In France, Watteau invented the “fete galante”, pastoral idylls showing picnics and walks in the countryside. They have a fantasy element in their carefully constructed arrangements and several suggest quite racy exploits in the course of the “picnic”.

Watteau, Le fetes Venitiennes, (c.1718)

 Meanwhile Gainsborough in England was making preliminary studies and even models to make his landscapes more accurate, although it is interesting to note that his group portraits set in landscape have all the quality of bad Photoshopping in respect of the lighting on the figures (a case of giving the customer what they want?!), and it is the rural and peasant views which seem to integrate across the picture surface.

 

Across the Atlantic, American artists were using the landscape as a means to create their sense of history, often on an epic scale to reflect the enormity of the new land they now roamed, or emphasising the raw power of nature. Thomas Moran’s paintings of Yellowstone helped to persuade Congress to award its National Park status.

Thomas Moran, “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” (1872)

When photography was invented in the nineteenth century, artists were freed from their former role of merely recording the scene and could seek out new ways of portraying it. New equipment, such as premixed paint in portable tubes and boxes, allowed artists to paint outdoors and have a direct experience of the landscape, and the railways allowed them to travel more readily. By the latter half of the century, the Impressionists were exhibiting work which appeared unfinished, but was all about catching the light and mood of the moment.

Claude Monet, Poplars on the River Epte (1891)

 Art was rebelling against the strictures of the old Academies.

New media in the twentieth century has opened up many different ways to portray landscape. Many new styles and movements developed, and new techniques were employed in increasingly unreal or abstract renditions of landscape. Urbanisation has now had an impact on subject matter, possibly best known in Lowry’s depictions of industrial townscapes. Below is shown “Market scene in a Northern Town” (1939).

In some cases, landscape became a means to express an emotional journey, much as Terry Frost does with his “A Walk along the Harbour” (1960), left, and Peter Lanyon with “Porthleven” (1951), right.

       

 

As environmental awareness grows, a picture can often have a political or environmental message about the plight of the countryside. Hawaiian artist Christian Reise Lasser uses colourful marine landscapes to celebrate and raise awareness of the fragile shore around his native islands, often using a split composition to show both surface and underwater landscape. The Majestic Kingdom is a typical example of this device and is shown below.

Other artists have taken the tools they habitually used and have explored new ways of working with them, both pushing the medium to its limits and integrating new media and substrates. A particular favourite of mine is Michael Morgan, who uses watercolour in a way I have never seen before to create richly textured imagined landscapes.

In the twenty-first century, there are now a wide range of approaches to landscape. New technology has brought new ways of creating art in the digital age. Satellite imagery has inspired some artists, myself included, to paint landscapes seen from space, as they seek a distant objectivity from the immediate pressures of our society, and the growth of digital media has been embraced by some, shown most recently by David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2012) an i-Pad generated landscape exhibition of 2012, in which he has used the most cutting edge technology to revisit the countryside around his native birthplace.

Ben Nicholson and his still life pictures

 

Ben Nicholson had little natural drawing ability, and was pushed toward the study of art largely because his parents could not comprehend that he had not inherited their own talents. Finding himself enrolled at the Slade, he frequently bunked off classes with his friend Paul Nash, also a (self-confessed) draughtsman of ineptitude. Often they would play billiards at the Gower Hotel, where he later attributed the colours and forms of the balls as being an important factor in his road towards abstraction. His sole offering for the Slade’s in-house exhibition was a striped jug, and he left the school the following year.

In 1924, after his first forays into pure abstraction, he returned for a time to the humble jug and mug, which he painted in silhouette, with one or the other form competing for dominance in the space. These were much admired by Jim Ede, then assistant to the Director at the Tate, who as a result obtained several works either gifted by Ben or at a knockdown price.

The chance meeting with Alfred Wallis in 1928 was to have a profound effect on Ben’s approach to landscape, and later that year his painting 1928 (Porthmeor Beach, St Ives) included an architectural feature on the right-hand side (which Checkland construes as a gable end, but is more probably one of the dominant three arches in the pier at St Ives).

The picture is clearly painted over another image giving it additional depth, and is generally regarded as the precursor of these layered landscape/still life works.

Ben’s collection of mugs, jugs and jars was precious to him and travelled with him throughout his various homes during his life. Drawings of these are often simple outlines, often overlapping each other, superimposed onto an abstract background which sometimes have elements of landscape in them. He developed a signature fusion of abstract and realism during the war years, when there was no market for progressive “Modernist” art, and often portrayed views over rooftops and out of upper windows, a device he had previously seen in Cubism, combined with still life groupings in the foreground.

The works showing a more realistic and definite landscape setting he referred to as his “pot boilers”, or “Cornish best-selling schemes”, terms which were designed to indicate how contemptuous he was of the need to be so commercial, and they were produced purely from the need to bring some money in during the early years of his relationship with Barbara Hepworth, who had little time to work herself as she was exhausted from looking after the triplets and in poor health as a result.

Possibly the most prolific output happened in February 1945, when, having secured scholarship funding for the triplets to Dartington Hall in Devon, the pressure was on to raise the necessary balance, and he completed twelve paintings in just ten days, of “fishing boats and flags on mugs and still life generally”. These include the well-known images including Union Jacks, which are often erroneously attributed to a celebration of the end of the war in Europe, although in fact most were painted before VE day.

The series ranges from 1944 with works such as Carnstabba Farm (above), a relatively conventional view, to the late 1950s, e.g. August 1956 (boutique fantasque), in which the background has been reduced to fields of colour only suggestive of the landscape. In between, the landscape sits at varying degrees of tension with the still life elements, a particular example being November 11-47 (Mousehole) (shown below) where the realism of the scenery is at odds with the lopsided panel of still life shapes in the right foreground, and at the other end of the scale the later work 1959 Argolis, painted in Greece, synthesises the tabletop with the sky and sea completely.

 

While Ben himself clearly had a low view of what he achieved in these paintings, moving away from his ideal of total, pure abstraction, there is no doubt that he inadvertently hit on a unique pictorial style, one which has become as recognisable, if not more so, than the White Reliefs with which he first shook the world of 20^th century art.

Artists Working in Contrasting Styles

I have struggled with this exercise for a long time, having been asked to find two artists, one of whom works in a rigorous and controlled way, and another whose style is expressive and loose. Eventually, while looking through “Vitamin D”, I isolated two of the featured artists which I felt met the criteria and could be compared.

The first is Spanish artist Ernesto Caivano, who works in New York. His drawing style is linear, precise, with the elements carefully plotted within the picture plane to arrive at a dynamic and interesting composition. His subject matter comes from a post-apocalyptic novel of his own writing, dealing with themes of bifurcation, polarity and duality, and he produces works in a non-linear order to the story. The works are of varied sizes and worked in black ink, and have a carefully crafted illustrative feel to them.

While the text mentions his occasional use of colour in vignette pieces, none are illustrated in the book. I found a couple of examples using colour, along with other works, on a gallery site here: http://whitecube.com/artists/ernesto_caivano/

The drawings are intricate and complex, with an incredible range of marks and a brilliantly inventive use of negative space. The landscapes e.g.The Land Inhibited (2003) show a strong Oriental stylistic influence, while a portrait of one of the main characters, Breathing the Code (2002) reminds me of the fantasy art of Chris Achilleos in the arrangement of elements and the pose.

The second artist is Lithuanian Mindaugas Lukosaitis. He has used factual accounts of partisans in the guerrilla war against the Red Army during the Soviet occupation to  produce a series of around 100 drawings, titled “Resistance”. His pencil drawings have a sketchy, slightly unfinished look, with variation in the amounts of tone employed rather than a consistent finish, and typically show one or a few figures involved in active conflict with an unseen enemy. The compositional style is very much like the story-boarding for a film or comic strip, utilising unusual angles and close-up figures to convey the dynamism in the scene.

I was unable to find a site with a representative example of his work, however typing his name into a Google image search brings up a wide range of pieces including some not directly relating to the Resistance series.

While these could be seen exclusively as a mythologized patriotic statement, they also beg the question of how we identify and generate resistance to our current world view. I find them particularly interesting as I work with a number of Lithuanians, and while being largely ignorant of their history, I am watching this new generation coming to grips with how to define their lives against their current reality.

So, two different artists, using different styles, but both telling a narrative to explore how the individual relates to the external.

Sven Berlin, his Dark Monarch, and the Tower

I have just finished reading the recently republished "Dark Monarch" by Sven Berlin, expecting to discover a behind the scenes look at the art colony of St Ives, filled with tidbits of gossip about their antics.

In point of fact the book really has very little about the activities of the group other than as a means to advance and string together the narrative, which is a loosely autobiographical account using alternate names for places and people. St Ives becomes "Cuckoo Town" presumably because of the number of infidelities described.

At the opening, Sven, only recently returned to the town, is coming to terms with the breakup of his marriage. It progresses through a poignant and ultimately tragic love affair to a final betrayal of Sven's personal sense of freedom and integrity. Told exclusively from Sven's viewpoint, some events are occaionally subsumed by his violent bouts of temper: in writing surfacing as occasionally libellous vitriol. It is difficult to decide how much these mood swings were caused by his self-confessed use of barbiturates, or whether an underlying psychological condition had been triggered during his breakdown following war service.

While his demons are personified in the folkloric Dark Monarch of the title, another recurrent theme in the book is that of his "Tower", a building he rented as a studio and workshop. I believe the symbolic relevance of the Tower, taken in context with other events in the book, gives an enhanced understanding of Sven's ambivalent attitudes to his life, friendships, and sense of both place and security.

Having first obtained the Tower in a shared arrangement with some acquaintances, he is then forced to fight over possession of the upper floor, which is to him the most important area of the building. Subsequently having obtained sole use of a space one could suppose he would settle into, instead he seems to have a constant stream of visitors, party-goers and lodgers - one having escaped from the mental hospital - and one is left with the impression that the Tower never truly became the hermitage and refuge that he looked for at the outset. He distances himself geographically from the town in the book by placing the tower on a (ficticious) tidal island.

Today the Tower still stands, by the slipway to Porthgwidden Beach adjacent to the public toilets which were built on the space Sven formerly used for working on his sculptures, and which represent one of the final great betrayals at the close of the book. It is a nondescript edifice, easily overlooked, barely seen from the road until one is level with the toilet block. The window facing the road is now blind; boarded over. The door is painted the ubiquitous blue of St Ives. Intriguingly the east window was ajar and a curtain of contemporary design was half-drawn, suggesting current occupation.

I had gone in search of it because the most recent photo found on the internet was taken in 2009. There has been some building development in the area, and I couldn't honestly remember seeing the building despite frequent walks in that area of town. It has a mystique by virtue of being overshadowed and camouflaged by the toilet block, and, in its uncompromising utilitarian location, has a certain pathos in the very fact of its continuing existence.

On leaving St Ives, Sven moved to Hampshire, where later he wrote the "Dark Monarch", and which was to bring all his demons crashing down on him. The resulting libel suits ruined him financially and the book was withdrawn only days after publication. Now, the manuscript has been republished, following permission from interested parties, and enable us to see a self-critique every bit as incisive as his comments on others.

For me, his prophetic vision of what St Ives would become at the hands of bureaucracy and commercialism (even then most of the town was owned by a handful of families) set the seal on Sven Berlin's ability to clearly see the truth beyond the petty manouverings of those around him, and sadly, all too many of his predictions have borne fruit.

Dark Monarch, Sven Berlin 1962 (2nd ed.,Published 2009 by Finishing Publications)
ISBN: 978-0-904477-320

Artists who exemplify detailed drawing

I find this an interesting research project as I have only recently begun to appreciate drawing properly as a finished work in its own right, rather than part of the process to a final painting, and to focus on finding artists who are dedicated practitioners of drawing proved to be rather a challenge. Certain names will inevitably spring to mind from the historical artists, for example da Vinci and Durer, as their scientific approach required great accuracy in recording each image, and more recently George Stubbs whose anatomical studies of the horse are still used by modern day vetenarians.

I chose to look at the work of Albrecht Durer as I know less of his body of work than I should do. Actually tracking down his drawings is difficult as his work is bound up with the amazingly beautiful engravings, however, these illustrate his mark-making abilities equally well. It is known that he was an adept draughtsman from an early age, as there are surviving drawings from his earlier years. His fascination with Italy at the start of the Renaissance, led him to travel and learn new techniques, which upon his return to Germany he disseminated through engravings and publications.

Of the drawings I have located, the most beautifully rendered (to me) is the study of hands with the sleeve of what appears to be a monk's robe.

Durer made many such studies in the course of developing larger works and alterpieces, but the sensitivity of tone in the drawing captures every imperfection of the model's skin in an amazingly lifelike way.

The need to find a contemporary artist proved to be the most difficult. I had it in mind to search for botanical artists initially, as detail is something one tends to associate with scientific work, but the specific technique of drawing rather than painting or print techniques proved elusive to track down, most of the search paths leading to watercolourists.

By chance, on a visit to St Ives, I saw some work by Jon Tremaine. He produces extremely detailed pen drawings of wild animals, whose outlines are are imaginatively filled with flora and fauna of their native habitat. I have seen his work periodically over the last couple of years but this time wrote his name down to pursue further. ( website here )

There is an interesting video here where Jon talks about his work and develops a new piece, while sitting in the window of the St Ives gallery currently representing him. His work is all the more remarkable for having been self taught, and illustrates a sound grip of tonal value as he selects which animal has the best overall tone to fill a particular shape in the drawing. Using the finest nib sizes, many areas of his drawings employ stippling and a work can take many months to complete. The video briefly touches on the reference material and how Jon uses a sketchbook although it would have been interesting to know more. I hope I can get to meet Jon at some point as he comes across as a lucid and interesting conversationalist.

Odilon Redon 1840-1916

Bertrand-Jean Redon was born to a French father and Creole mother in Bordeaux. The name Odilon, by which he was commonly known, derived from his mother’s name Odile. The family were prosperous, having built up successful business interests in America.

Redon always showed an interest in drawing and won his first prize at the age of ten. The majority of his childhood was spent on his uncle’s estate near Peyrelebad in the Medoc, and he spent many hours observing nature, and running wild with the local children while absorbing their tales of witches and folklore prevalent in the area.

From the age of fifteen he studied drawing with the artist Stanislas Gorin, who taught him the principles of Romantic art i.e. to make every line express both sensibility and form, rejecting all rules and formulae.

His father wanted Redon to study architecture, however this was brought to a swift halt when Redon failed his entrance examination at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts 1857. Back home he began to study sculpture, and was also introduced to etching and lithography by Rodolphe Bresnin who was to become a close friend and mentor 1863. In 1864 he was finally accepted to the Beaux Arts to study painting, however, he rebelled against the establishmentarian values he found and turned away from the formal art world, into almost certain obscurity.

Redon turned to his friend Bresnin for guidance, who introduced him to the work of Durer and Rembrandt, and taught him to transform nature through imagination. Redon turned to graphic art, principally in black and white which he referred to as his “noirs”. The subject matter was often both fantastic and disturbing, using a cross-section of references, and show elements of Surrealism, a movement which was to surface later, and of which he was critical. The deep tones of the layered charcoal, built up with layers of fixative, have an almost sumptuous quality, which, like all his work, provides a feast for the senses although the subjects may be macabre and unfamiliar.

Link to NY MoMA Redon collection here - this has a good selection of his work which can be viewed clearly

Recent research by the American Institute of Conservation (article here ) has helped to identify various media used in the noirs, which has subsequently allowed better dating of his work. Primarily, Redon used vine charcoal, sometimes soaked in oil, which gave a brown-black tone as the oil worked into the paper surface. Later he also used forms of compressed charcoal and a type of black chalk, exploring new blacks as they became available to him. He preferred to use a balsam-based fixative which discoloured to a warm yellow tone and which he exploited, similarly using toned papers, so that in fact the “Noirs” do contain elements of colour. Redon himself stated that he always used coloured paper for all his Noirs, and that they should not be referred to as black and white for this reason. He also saturated the back of each piece with fixative as a final process.

His application methods were as varied as the black media he used, although generally he would tone the paper with ground charcoal before working with oiled charcoal. He stumped, scraped, erased, smudged and overworked the surface, in some cases using his fingers and possibly scraping back with a fingernail, as his prints are clearly visible on certain work. In later work he used black pastel in the top layers which is visible by its blue-black cast over the warmer tone of the underdrawing.

He had a brief interruption when called to serve in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Following the war he returned to Paris to work almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. His first album was published in 1879, entitled Dans le Reve (In Dream).

He married in 1880, and inspired by his wife Camille began to use pastels in his work. His paintings from this period display a confident use of colour and light, such as Rocks on the beach (c1883) (oil on canvas) and illustrates the solid grounding he had in colour media prior to his output of the pastels.

His first son Jean was born in 1886, but died at the age of six months. This plunged Redon into a “melancholy of the mind” which was to endure until the birth of his second son Ari in 1889.

In the early 1880s Redon was introduced to the writings of Flaubert, Baudelaire  and Edgar Allan Poe, which were to have a profound effect on his work.

In 1884 the publication of a cult novel, Rebours (Against Nature) whose protagonist was a collector of Redon’s work, was to bring his work to increased public awareness.

In 1890 Redon suffered a religious crisis, in part due to the suicide of his close friend Armand Clavaud, who had instructed and informed him in many aspects of natural history. This was followed by a serious illness, and it was after this time that he turned increasingly to pastels. His work transformed into an optimistic and colourful style, often inspired by mythological themes, and the many studies of floral still life were greatly admired by Henri Matisse, among others.

His techniques in colour pastel developed dramatically through his career. Early work was often applied over noirs, using them in the same way as a painter prepares an underpainting. At a later date he experimented with many ways of application including wetting the pastel and using brushes, while continuing with his repertoire of stumping, incising etc. which he already employed. Initially he continued to use balsamic fixative, but later changed to a non-yellowing type and gradually became more sparing in its use. Towards the end of his life he used it rarely, and never on the final layer, thus preserving the colour and luminosity of the pastel pigment.

He died in 1916, and while he was then a distinguished artist in his field, he remained until the end a very private person.

Of his drawing he said;

 "My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."

Patrick Caulfield -positive and negative space

PATRICK CAULFIELD (1936-2005)

Patrick Caulfield was a painter and printmaker known for his Pop Art canvasses, and was a contemporary of David Hockney and Allen Jones.

For many years I had a postcard of Pottery (1969) without ever finding out more about the artist, but I always liked the strong colours and at the time was working on ‘O’ level screenprints and lino cuts using a similar linear style.

There are many images of his work on the Tate website and it took me over an hour to browse through them in order to get a feel for his work. I particularly liked the breathtaking simplicity of Bathroom mirror (1968) .

Many of his pieces are screenprints, and the same image or element may be used in several ways and with different colour choices, but a large body of these are characterised by bold outlines and flat, saturated colour.

Later in his work he combined the strong linear graphic with areas of photorealism, as in After Lunch (1975) .

In certain works he breaks the tonal areas down to a minimum, typically using black, white and a third colour, and these are best seen in his series known as the “White Ware” prints (1990) of which all eight images are listed below. The links go to the Tate website images.

Large White Jug

Lamp and Kuan Ware 

Lung Chu'an Ware and Window 

Chu'an Ware and Black Lamp 

Lamp and Lung Chu'an Ware 

Arita Flask 

Arita Flask - Black 

Sue Ware Jar 

The strong contrast of tone is carefully balanced into positive and negative areas, with the focus being on the white areas describing the vase and the light source. The odd one out here is Large White Jug, as the backlit shape appears solid white with only the shadow thrown by the handle to describe it.

EXERCISE IN POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACE IN THE STYLE OF CAULFIELD

My brief is to produce a drawing in a similar style, and as the need to define clear tonal areas calls for a drawing with plenty of contrast, I’ve selected a still life study I did some months ago to develop.

The first process was to define the shape of the light and dark areas and to decide what elements to include. I opted to use the jug and pot and leave out the china mug which seemed a bit too clean lined for inclusion. I used the marks on the background (pentimenta from old masking tape under the paper) to suggest a door which helped break up the large area of negative space in the background.

I started by making a line drawing of the basic shapes through tracing paper from the original- it helped me to see the likely dividing lines between tones more easily. After I had familiarised myself with the shapes I moved on to developing a series of thumbnails in my sketchbook, using 4B and 9B pencils to give two distinct tones. The 9B has caused some light-bounce in the photograph.

Of the second two studies, I first completed a negative version to compare the relative balance of tones. I’ve learned to do this when painting- a quick black and white photograph can highlight areas with insufficient contrast and can easily be flipped into negative for an alternate view.

My first tonal sketch seemed to have too much white so I reworked it and made the table a mid-tone as well. While I was working on these I realised how dependent the image was on complete accuracy of tonal shape in order to make it readable, as I had now lost most of the linear information from the drawing. Details such as the lip of the jug and a tiny curl of light around the base became crucial to get right.

Finally I did two more versions, one in marker pen and a colour version in sepia and sanguine Indian ink. The inks bled slightly on the cartridge paper so they are not as crisp as I would like, I will have to repeat the exercise on marker pad for a clean finish.

I was rather surprised that I succeeded in producing an end drawing from this project as I was more drawn to Caulfield’s earlier linear style and could immediately see applications for it from sketches I have in development. The White Ware series was in complete contrast and I took a long time to find a way in- I’ve been working periodically on this project for nearly a month, and up to last week was still reading other student blogs to see how they had approached it.

It’s been interesting to focus on the extreme contrast of tone. The White Ware prints tend to have two relatively dark tones and the contrast of the white areas gives them a very intimate focus. Their elegant simplicity has echoes of Yin and Yang and complements the subject matter- seven of the series are titled for the Chinese pottery which is their focal point.

(10th Aug) I've now completed a final version of the still life, in marker pen. I chose a slate purple colour to echo the desaturated reds and browns which Caulfield often uses in his backgrounds as I didn't have a suitable brown.

Time to put Caulfield to bed for the time being and progress to the next exercise, although I'll be using what I have discovered in other work of his to develop other pieces.

Eric Ravilious 1903-1942

ERIC RAVILIOUS 1903-1942

Biographical notes

Ravilious began his career as a muralist, not becoming known as an artist until 1924, and going on to become one of the best known of the 1930s. He also worked as a lithographer and printer.

He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs and their chalk figures, and his stippled watercolours are prized for their otherworldly quality.

His woodcut of two gentlemen cricketers has appeared on the cover of every Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack since 1938, and he also designed for Wedgewood and London Transport, among others.

In the war years he became an official war artist which was ultimately the cause of his death while accompanying an RAF air-sea rescue mission off Iceland.

His work

Having searched for a variety of Ravilious’ work on the internet, I realised I was not familiar with any of it, although the style echoed other work of the 30s and 40s especially where designed for printing, as in book-jacket illustrations and transport posters.

The wood cuts I looked at are on the whole intended for bookplates or vignettes and have a rather stilted feeling to them, although it was interesting to see how he used line width and cross-hatching to develop tone, remembering of course that each carved line becomes a highlight when the print is taken.

His style irrespective of medium tends to be somewhat graphic. No doubt his experience in the print industry influenced the use of line and shape, as there is often a strong design element in the composition of his landscapes, and I am reminded of Susan William-Ellis’ “Tudwal Lighthouse” reworked to become the cover illustration for “Portraits of Islands” in 1953. (Magic Gardens, Portmerion Ltd 2008, p24-5)

My initial impression of his Downs landscapes was of strong verticals and horizontals balanced by sinuous curves. Colours tend to be muted and of limited hues with occasional accent colours.

These sinuous curves sometimes appear not quite “right”, which reinforces the perception of his work as otherworldly. It is particularly well used on two of his landscapes with chalk figures.

Some of his wartime images, particularly of planes and submarines, show strong graphically abstract elements where the shape of a wing or partial hull is pinned to the edge of the picture plane in an interesting precursor of Roger Hilton’s work from the early 1950s.

His The Greenhouse: cyclamen and tomatoes (1935) with its numinous upward arrow of light describing the receding space, could at first glance be the prototype shape for Gormley’s “Angel of the North”, and the quality of light achieved in this picture is similar to Naum Gabo’s ambitions when he worked on his Perspex spacial sculptures in 1938-40.

It was interesting to find studies which were later used for final works as it allowed a glimpse of his workflow. Using pencil first, colour is then layered up, often with watercolour and at other times cross-hatching with pastel and crayon.  From the Isle of May looking to the Forth Bridge (c1940-1) (scroll down for verso image) shows how colours were developed in layers of carefully applied strokes to accentuate the wake of the boat and movement of water.

The work which most stood out for me was Submarines in Dry Dock (1940)  which uses pencil, watercolour, crayon and pastel and most strongly shows the effects possible with linear media in describing the textures on the scaffolding and the shapes of the submarines. The submarine studies appear in an earlier montage piece but are here grounded among a cradle of scaffolding. Once again there is one element which is slightly “wrong”- in this case the top profile of the right hand sub, which curves down despite being above eye-level. One wonders whether Ravilious used this deliberately in order to accentuate the somewhat alien shape to his audience.