EVERYONE'S WORK - HAY'S GALLERIA, CITY HALL AND THE THAMES 28/4/15

Well, the weather could have been SO much worse, so we were lucky.  Everyone struggled to keep out of the cold wind, but found various decent spots.

Starting with GERALD, we have the following:-

Gerald no. 2

Gerald no. 1

Gerald no. 3

We started off the day with a discussion about how difficult a subject like this was, surrounded by iconic buildings and vistas.  It is a very easy slip to make to 'draw the view', and feel that rendering the buildings in a recognisable way is enough. This is especially a trap for someone who has the great facility with drawing that Gerald has.

So, the jaws of the trap opened up, and Gerald stepped in!
In sheet no. 1 above, we can see 3 out of the four drawings (top right, and both bottom drawings) are doing exactly that.  The fourth drawing steered clear of this, because he had a moment of thinking what the drawing was about (and that was light falling onto this strange glass building).  So, you immediately get a drawing which doesn't just represent a view, it has elements to it that make you wonder and question.  It was interesting how others picked out this drawing, too, at the session at the end.

So, the key is to have that moment of consideration and thought, and awareness, before starting to draw.  Drawing no. 2 was done from within City Hall.

Drawing no. 3 was done after we had a chat, and he looked across the river and pondered, and then turned away and did this drawing from memory.  Firstly, what a drawing!  Also, the elements within it which accompany the church are very simple and beautiful - memory helps to weed out the clutter, and simplify the idea.

Gerald - a lot more of this, please.  Look; think/question; draw from memory; and THEN do another, observed drawing if you feel it is necessary, incorporating the realisations from the memory drawing - but you may well find that is enough.


PAT K. and I had had a long chat during the day, about how to keep her freshness of seeing, and her desire to extrapolate away from what she was seeing, but at the same time, to think about the individual component parts of a painting, and how they go together.

Pat no.1

Pat no. 2

Pat chose a really difficult subject, looking across the river at piles of buildings, all stacked oabove each other.
She made studies which really explored the rhythms of the various layers of buildings, with subtle colour shifts.

Pat, remember - elegant and simple divisions of space, with your lovely wet washes.  Almost as if you were just taking a small section of a painting.













Next we have PENNY, who spent most of her time in City Hall, and produced the following pieces :-

Penny no. 1

Penny no. 2

Penny no. 3

Penny no. 4

Penny's brief was to keep experimenting with her distortion of space ideas.  She takes a line from the foreground into something in the background, or inside/outside, and creates a new reality - very interesting.

She was looking at all the weird distortions in the glass layers within City Hall, and came up with these excellent pieces. Figures in different contexts, and spaces linking up with each other in strange ways.
Her final piece has the addition of the blue, which makes it a very striking and complete piece, just as it stands. So clever, with the use of line, pattern, rhythm, colour AND tone, all at the same time.  Spot on Penny!

I think the thing you need to pay more attention to next time, is your inclusion of figures - make them work better, and draw them a bit better, as gestural living beings, and less of the lollipop people (!).  Make it so they add poetry to the composition.



JANE brought in some very interesting work she had been doing on her i-pad, using it as a sketching tool.  She had also done some very useful colour experiments with paint.  What her i-pad had offered her was a tool to make drawings with a lot more textural marks, rather than just blocks of colour which she was used to doing with the paint.  It would be really good to explore this further, Jane, alongside what you are discovering about the use of muted colours.

Jane no. 1

Jane no. 2

Jane no. 3

It was really great to have PAT W. back with us.  Pat's brief was really just to spend the day getting her eye back in, and to 'play' with ideas.  This is when the best comes out for Pat, not when she's taking things too seriously.  She did a whole series of studies around the area, and I very much hope some of these can be worked up, Pat, maybe even from memory and imagination!



ELIZABETH spent the day sitting in Hay's Galleria, drawing people.  It was a very frustrating day for her because she was pushing herself to explore a different aspect of people - movement.  As we all know, she is brilliant at capturing the essence of people in more static situations, such as sitting and talking.  However, people striding about is quite a different thing.  One needs to just get the quickest gesture down, a summary of the movement of the whole being.  This has nothing to do with individual legs, arms, head etc.  It is to do with the flow, weight and counterbalance of that person moving, and forgetting they have all these bits and bobs to worry about.  Within that, the position of the head, or the shift in weight, is really important, but only as an integral part of the whole.  It was suggested that doing a drawing comprising many drawings one on top of another, of repeated studies of the same movement (made by different people) might be good, reinforcing the gesture each time.
Elizabeth, it's hard.  You just have to keep doing it.

So, next time, I will endeavour to get permission for City Hall again (hopefully it will be better weather!).  Gerald will be on holiday.  Other than that, if people could let me know nearer the time if the can come, I'd be grateful.