Thursday 17 January 2008

Plan no 2

Part of plan 1 - a week up far North West Highlands in late-September to paint in oils with David Tress has already been scuppered due to slowness in decision-making on my part [the course is already fully boooked], I thought I'd write a bit more about plan 2 - mixed media and line work... and make other plans for a glorious highland/island summer holiday...

Using the sketchbook much more extensively over the past six months has been really good, not just as source of inspiration but also as a more sustained focus on lines and markmaking with drawing media. The line drawings in December have gone towards addressing my hangups about drawing trees - btw: thank you to all of you who've left such nice comments of late :).

So, one thing I want to do more of is using paper-based works in a way that becomes more minimalist - if that makes sense. The quick sketches out in the fields where a first attempt of that and while part of it is the time constraint, I also very much enjoyed the indicative, subtle and ambiguous type of marks left. I want to explore that more, and also the extent to which collage can facilitate this - as in: do more so that it becomes less, or: how little can you do to get more...

This may sound far too woolly and mysterious but I think it's a plan that is only becoming formulated - in the meantime, it'll be about drawing and markmaking - I hope to find something in the way of life classes to help me in this too, but that'll be later on in Spring, I think.

So: as a starter a limited palette ink drawing with a bit of collage.



Fields study, Ink and collage on paper, 28x21cm

And: I had to laugh when I went shopping for my missing oil colours - excited to find the missing essentials I spend a lot of money on: yellow, red and blue - my friend to whom I paraded my acquisitions on Monday did look a bit perplexed about my excitement with these very plain choices.


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I really enjoy your work and the way you talk about what you're doing. I had to laugh at the anecdote about your friend's surprise at your color choices. I'm a Very Beginner with watercolor and have been looking for the "right red" to complete my palette of five colors for a couple of weeks. :-)

vivien said...

oh no!!!! what a shame - I love his paintings (David Tress) it would have been fantastic


I like the painting :)

Lindsay said...

Sounds like a very interesting direction and I like your start. Looking forward to seeing more!

And its always those"plain" colors that cost more due to expensive pigments!! It's the only way to get clean colors though.

Gesa said...

Hi Melanie and many thanks for dropping in. It's a funny one with palettes and rights choices... but I seem to always learn quite well from my wrong choices too ;)
Yes - Vivien, I know! The place is one of my favourite parts of the world - the landscape in the North West Highlands is just so otherwordly; and then I had seen that you mentioned how much you liked David Tress, which confirmed for me that he would be an excellent tutor. I'll try again next year - well, I hope they repear this!

Yellow said...

Wow, Wow wow (repeated ad-infinitum) I am so excited at the field study you've pictured. It's intense, spontaneous, suggestive, atmospheric & loads of other great stuff. Wow. I would love to see more of your sketchbook workings.