Reading

Book I have just read:

Jane Stobart ‘Extraordinary Sketchbooks’, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2011, London

I found this book very helpful and it has given something of a kick start. It was really nice to see extracts from a variety of sketch pads from all sorts of different artists, including some school children, practising artists and some famous names like Henry Moore.

But here are the things that struck me most and I have taken on board with maintaining my own sketch pads:

• Mark Gamsu (p. 52 – 55) lots of sketches of people out and about in cafes and on the street in Manchester and London. I liked the free drawings he makes which still communicate expression, posture and the way his subjects place their weight.

What struck me most was what Mark said here (p. 54):

‘The style I am trying to cultivate is really loose and impressionistic. I am least relaxed when I try to exactly replicate what I see.’

I realised from reading that that I feel just the same. I am rather uptight with my drawing in my sketchpad. Again and again, artists in the book say how their sketch pad is just a place to try things out, experiment and work Ferrell and experimentally. I took this to heart recently by plucking up courage and drawing outside in our University quad rather than at home. Instantly, with the slight pressure of being out and about, I drew more quickly and loosely. Okay the drawings weren’t great, but the process was interesting and fun and, well, I still rather liked some of the scruffy images that came out – here’s one of those drawings:

I then tried incorporating a looser approach to drawing at home as part of my ongoing 6 corners project. Here’s my attempt from yesterday:

I also liked what Mark had to say about drawing in public places, how he could blend in the background in some places which gave him great views of people and crowds! For example Cafe Nero near Manchester Piccadilly. Suddenly, all the efforts and anxieties I associate with drawing in public found common ground in what he was saying. His words felt real – yeah that’s just how I feel about that or how I might want to go about that

…I also liked the fact that Mark is working full-time as a civil servant. He’s not a professional artist, so it helped to make drawing and making art more accessible for me some how.

• Abigail Brown – she is an interior designer by profession and bases a lot of her designs on the human form. What I found so reassuring and something of a morale boost is that after all of her years as a practising artist she is keeping sketch books now with the main intent of improving her drawing. Again a comment like this makes drawing feel more accessible.

Here are few more points I took from the book:

• A lot of the artists in the book keep several sketchpads on the go for different purposes or themes
• I learnt about other materials that sound intriguing – brown permanent ink used by illustrators, gouache, mixed media
• some of the artwork in these sketchpads is really beautiful: Felicity House, and Linda Wu’s sketchbook drawings and paintings were lovely – I’d really like to try out watercolour (I added this comment later on 28th May: what I meant by beautiful here was the sue of bright colours to achieve an effect – with Houses painting sketches, it feels like you are outside – I loved the washing on the line for example and with Wu’s you get the feeling of the movement of the crow’s wings in her drawings).

• Judy Groves’ drawings inspired me to do some life drawing – I was amazed she had drawn some of these pictures without looking at the paper (harking back to some of the contour drawing exercises for this current course unit)

This is a great book – really inspiring for my own sketching.