more movement

... in poses and on paper. human form this time and no chickens in sight.

For all to see, right?!

Elqui 3, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

On Friday I spoke at a seminar on the role of policing for securing well-being. My brief concerned the role of policing for securing urban regeneration and more importantly, economic growth.

One of my two fellow speakers was the Chief Constable of the police force which saw on the day before the conviction of the biggest internet- based ring of paedophiles in the UK so far. No surprise that he was buoyed up by having secured the conviction of eight men so far with some 30 charged across the UK. As he said, these were ordinary middle-class and very respectable men. The news coverage went to some detail to list the - thoroughly proper - job titles of each of the men.

I'll be sticking with crime for this post, but it'll get to the (in)visibility challenge I'm posing myself for the time being.

The end of my talk led to a call for (a) acknowledging the necessity of conflict over the use of public spaces - that this is political and not subject to a predefined, however narrow 'consensus'. And (b) to name and make visible all those that get hidden, evicted, arrested when public space is for consumption only - young people, junkies and homeless.

But even more so: that focus on street crime is so reductive in its own sense. And the guy from the centre for business crime was rightly upset that I wouldn't present figures of how much shoplifting is done by junkies. But what I should have done and didn't do was present figures over health and safety offences committed in city centres by businesses; and of all those crimes committed BY businesses.

However, the one thing I got to, and which was thankfully picked up by the audience was the problematic division of public and private. A focus on street crime and the surveillance of street crime - while apparently a response to women's fear of crime leaves out the most dangerous place of women in the world: the home.

If it's on CCTV it's for all to see, right?

Two images and stories have been sticking in my memory all week.

Story 1: the first full face transplant undertaken by American surgeons. Now, several months after the operation, the patient gaver her first interview, accompanied by many photos of how she looked at various points in the past, how she may look now and how she may look in the future. What happened to her face? Her husband shot her in the face. So, after over thirty operations she can take food through her mouth again and hopefully will be able to taste at some point.

Story 2: a young man on steroids got convicted to a life-time sentence. Why? He befriended a TV presenter on facebook (I., I'm telling you: it's dodgy!!); went out with her, when she said no, he beat her up and raped her; after that she hid for a couple of weeks in her flat. Finally, she left the house. He was waiting outside with another man and threw a full canister of sulphuric acid into her face at point blank. She was quoted how she recounted that moment and every single moment since. She too has had more than thirty operations since.

So, what is it to see if you look at one's face?

Notes to future self

Ryuichi Hirokawa, Al Ram checkpoint, West Bank, 2002
Guardian, g2, p. 25, 30/4/2009

... really for in five years, but maybe also already in two?

I gave a research seminar on Wednesday and was talking about youth policing, workfare and the making of criminalised selves. Much of what I was initially interested in with my academic work revolved around questions of social control, discipline and importantly the practices, policies and experiences that make a responsible and disciplined citizen. Much of these original questions had gotten a bit submerged in the interim with a much stronger focus on policy and governance but after the seminar I ended up talking to two colleagues who have, though in different fields, maintained a keen interest on such disciplines of the self.

...

Longwinded, half-baked... it links up with some of the abstractions I am intrigued by, again and again, and which require a much fuller set of art skills, techniques, and experiences that I currently have. - Questions over person-making, the stuff that happens inbetween, outside, elsewhere or in the middle. Well: the stuff that matters.

When I was talking to my two colleagues about what art I do and would love to do, I for the first time made those links between academia, knowledge production and painting quite explicit. Well: I do tell people at university that I love the kinds of questions and problems a piece of art poses in its production, and how it is necessary to let it provide its own answers - that no will of my own can make that canvas into something finished.

And I do enjoy the way in which this undoes what so much academics perceive the individual ingenuity of the lonely, fabulous, young academic who raises, on the basis of his own achievements to intellectual and professional heights. - well: remember the snake fights?

But, the discussions with M. and E. took me back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish; they also provided links to some more recent work on the making of entrepreneurial selves in thoroughly flexibilised and casualised labour markets.

On the way home, I saw this in the paper, took it with me, scanned it and it's here now as a reminder. That look, locking the police officer in its stare, defiantly. Now: I love that kind of photography, holding, maintaining a moment which radiates outwards, captures stuff (incidentally or purposefully) beyond its immediate reach. For whatever I'll do in two or five years? We'll see. I doubt that it will be photography, and I doubt it will be figurative, but: who knows?

Travelog

Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
36x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii

The most recent moley I had from the exchange had gone travelling with me to London, Berlin and back to Glasgow. I like the idea of figuring out what to do next in each moley a lot: it's storytelling as process, and it's interesting to see how different each of us deals with the storytelling.

So: mine was action drawing... hahaha... on 9x14cm with a pen... no paint dribbles in sight.

Have a look - out of the window on the 9:39 am Glasgow - London Euston for 20 mins or so; a tube ride from Mile End to Victoria, until someone sat next to me and obscured the view; after breakfast in my friends' living room in Berlin when they had gone for work; and yet another airport queue in Schoenefeldt while the passport control was slow as usual. I coloured in when back home.

Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii

The stuff that matters

A few weeks back I had a little favourite fantasy of what I'd do if work stuff went wrong. Among various options was my favourite: get rid off the flat and use the money to go and study art. It was a nice and good thought.

And I figured that the kind of art I would go and study would actually be quite different to the stuff I'm doing now. What intrigued me most, and what it would probably be about for four years would be life drawing and painting; portraiture; figure drawing: exhaustively, excessively, single-mindedly.

Oil on MDF board, 30x45cm

I may run into problems with my quickly lost patience and interest. But nonetheless, there was something terrifically exciting in this thought: to have all the time in the world (well: near enough: four years) to do one thing and to learn one thing so that it becomes part of you and you find your way around it, intuitively, with your eyes closed.

And that it is about stuff that matters: people. Which are generally left out of landscapes...

On Sunday I remembered a conversation on my favourite radio show: Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on 6Music Sunday nights 10-midnight is my radio highlight of the week. His choice of music is a bit too folksy for me generally, but there is something wonderfully irreverent and all the same comforting about his show. In Spring, he had a conversation with Hal Glebe about the role of music for politics (small p, mind you); and while I was drifting into sleep, they talked about how a good song gets at the things that matter: they called it something like the molecular structure of something just before it turns into being political, but also the moment a kiss turns into a kiss. Guy continued to play a song by Jesca Hoop - Love is all we've left, which she wrote about Hurricane Katrina.

Now, this Sunday, I missed Guy on the radio because we had gone to see him and Elbow play at the Carling Academy. We missed half of the support - and it was only in the end that I realised it was indeed Jesca Hoop who was supporting the band. So, I went back to look for the song after - here is a clip of how she plays the song in front of an audience in New Orleans - she stops several times inbetween, overcome and wrestling with what she's doing.
I'm not too sure if it's a bit cringey/worthy, but maybe that doesn't matter?



Have a bit of Elbow too - here's one clip - that was the best one in the show - Weather to Fly, but also have a look at the very cool official video of A day like this, where a guy has some fun with an obviously redundant sign, advertising condos for sale.... hahaha...[see link here]



And thinking about it: there's of course some of this, that needs to make it into here:

Dora Maar with green fingernails

Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Green Fingernails
Oil on Canvas, 1936
Museum Berrgruen, Berlin

She looks at you from the wall at the Museum Berggruen in Berlin Charlottenburg. No - not really. She doesn't look at you.

She simply looks. Observes. All around her, her eyes surveying not one direction but several at once.

She was a woman who always saw a lot - so says the commentary.

For most of Picasso's distortion of female figures I do not care all that much. In particular the double noses (as in smelling a lot???) are weird.

But Dora with green fingernails... I like her, like how her eyelid becomes part of the outline of her face. How it emphasises her eyes, beautiful eyes, matched with eyeshadow and bright green nail varnishes. How 1980s in the 1930s.

She made it into my sketchbook, next to Paul Klee's Die Zeit. With that she's only one of two of Picasso's women - alongside the wonderful melancholic Woman with a Chignon I met in Harvard.
And funnily enough - the sketch is just of her face, so when I tried to look for the painting again I got struck by that starched, stiff and downright scary dress she's wearing. Maybe that says even more than her all observing eyes?

Sketch of Dora Maar with green fingernails by Pablo Picasso
Pencil and neo ii in Moleskine, 14x21cm

And I think it's time now that Dora made it out of the sketchbook and into print - the figure tasks for the monotype projects are the difficult ones; so I'm circling around them, thinking one up, trying a bit, dismissing it again. But I think I'll stick with Dora, not sure how yet, but that'll be freestyle no 3, I think.

'Taking a photo

is like an assault, a mugging.'

That was a line of the text that accompanied Laurie Anderson's Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) project at the Tate's Modern recent exhibition Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography.

Anderson, in 1973, made an analogy how a photo - or rather: a camera stuck into someone's face - really does resemble an assault, when she got fed up with the chat she got off blokes on the streets of NYC. So, Fully Automated Nikon is the result of her asking for a photo, in response to any stupid/aggressive/annoying chat up. So, there's a series of guys, white guys, black guys, young guys, old guys, with other guys, with their girlfriends; and a couple of lines of how they responded to her assault of taking a photo.

It stuck - or rather linked up with a series of other things: notably, my hesitation to take pictures of strangers. Something my PhD examiner remarked on in response that photos labelled 'young skaters in the city centre' don't really have that many young skaters in them, similar 'builders during a break' requires the onlooker to look hard for the builders. LOL.

Now: a picture, a snapshot is really something done reasonably quick, inconspicious.

But, what on earth about a sketch, a portrait??

My parents fell victim in August to my determination of sketching people. And after my mum was mortified about my (admittedly poor) sketch, I deliberately did not try to sketch my brother when sketching him... so as almost on purpose not to produce any similarity.

Now, a long lead-in to this: stealing sketches of unsuspecting people. I still - and in fact probably before I stumbled across Anderson so wonderfully single-minded let's turn the table kind of take on mugging - think of taking something not offered by sketching strangers.

At Central Station
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

But: here are some takings: at the train station on the way to the sea a few weeks back; and this afternoon while waiting on an appointment.

At the Coffee Shop
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

The woman on the bench in profile found her way into my printmaking project: it needed some life drawing; and the outline worked reasonably well, it probably needs a bit more colour (how about a trusted orange); but the backdrawing - sketching on the back of the surface which lies on a thinly inked print plate - works well. It effectively produces an old-fashioned carbon copy of the sketch.

Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper


Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper

They wrestle with snakes

... not ordinary snakes, no: pythons. I saw them. Not all of them do, but some. I am sure of that.

The certainty came to me on a lunch break last week in London's West End. Lunch at the Victoria & Albert Museum opened my eyes. To Frederic Lord Leighton's Athlete Struggling with a Python.

Sketches of Leighton's 'Athlete struggling with Python'
Bronze, 1877, V&A

So manly, so strong, so determined. Do you see his stare, the muscles on his arms, the strong legs? All enframed by the glittering body of the snake, so smooth, so strong. And still: held at arm's length, they struggle, they stare. Who wins? Because a victory it has to be! The athlete, the snake?

Studies in pencil

So, I went back with the sketchbook, after having watched more wrestling with snakes over the ensuing days. I sketched and giggled. Pictured those academics as snake wrestlers. And giggled some more.

But they do. They wrestle with snakes. At least some of them do.

Conferences, hey.... festivals, road crashes, snake fights... can't help but watch, or participate even? Now, how did it happen that it suddenly looks as if I may be going to Las Vegas next spring after all? I knew there was a problem with watching too closely...

I've been saving this one....

... didn't know why. But I suppose it was for today:


In a recorded interview with Joan Eardley from the early 1960s she speaks of her love for the back streets of Glasgow and the children playing in the closes:

" I have been painting them for seven years...they don't pose - they come up and say 'will you paint me?'... I watch them moving about and do the best I can...the Samson's - they amuse me - they are full of what's gone on today - whose broken into what shop and whose flung a pie in whose face - it goes on and on. They just let out all their life and energy... and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms...all the bits of red and bits of colour and they wear each other's clothes - never the same thing twice running...even that doesn't matter... they are Glasgow - the richness Glasgow has - I hope it will always have - a living thing, intense quality - you can't ever know what you are going to do but as long as Glasgow has this I'll always want to paint." (Joan Eardley, Exhibition Catalogue 2007, p. 31f)

In the close
Mixed media collage in Moleskine
13x36cm
[Lorraine's Moley]

So, I'm back...

Some music to go alongside the bit of Eardley?

Try these... they worked well yesterday to drown out the noise of the Motherwell supporters who got on the train in Edinburgh:







OMG... so many to choose from...

In the post... this time:

David's Moley and his Tango dancers

David's Moley from our Moleskine Exchange. His theme of Dancing is the one I'm slightly worried about: it clearly shouts: Gesa, draw figures! at me. And not just any old figures, but people dancing.
Hm, well... maybe it doesn't. I need to think about this for a while. David's Tango dancers in oil pastels are an excellent start, so I could digress to: oil pastels, blue, Spain, Flamenco, castagnettes, sound... I'm sure I'll find some more associations.

BTW: to my Flamenco-dancing friends: how about some pics from your last show? And I could go into Portraiture commissioning. Or maybe not, I don't think anyone would pay me for that. LOL.

Feeling a bit...

Pencil sketch in Moleskine, 9x14cm of
Pablo Picasso, Woman with a Chignon, 1901
Fogg Art Museum Harvard, Cambridge, MA

... like her here - parts of me got stuck across the Atlantic it feels and I need a wee while to arrive properly again. Just before leaving Boston on Sunday, I had stumbled across a couple of good paintings in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Amongst them this one by Picasso and another one by Toulouse-Lautrec: the Hangover.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, The Hangover (Suzanne Valadon), 1887-1889
Oil on Canvas, Fogg Art Museum Harvard, Cambridge, MA

While the latter one is an intriguing sketch in oil - lots of squiggly, dynamic lines to make up the scene of a woman sitting alone at a table with a bottle of wine. Picasso's painting is one of those intriguing figures/portraits of his where the figure is flattened. Picasso's abstraction in fact made it fairly easy to sketch from. Redrawing, paying attention to proportions, gestural marks and so on. A good thing to remember!

More figure drawing

Here are the images of my figure drawing session. Did I say that they did another one while I was away? It's quite funny how groups end up with different dynamics. Over ten weeks, that drawing class usually includes a figure drawing session: with different people in the group standing, or: sitting model. The group membership is quite fluid from term to term, and depending who's there, different things happen: well, kind of obvious, isn't it?

In any way: this current group is very good fun, and I think that there'll be a couple more figure drawing nights before it'll be finished in five weeks. Two weeks ago, we had three 20 mins poses - these two here and one with myself. I hadn't dared to do that - standing model before - but it was great: a bit apprehensively I went around after, seeing what these people had drawn of/with me. And how nice that was - all very different, some just little details, some portraits, some the whole pose and in different styles and media. Very cool.

So, here's my two attempts - in charcoal and contes, on 40x50 cm cartridge paper

At the airport...

... last week and people sketching.

The flight was delayed on the way out of Glasgow. And while everybody was sitting around reading, I got sketching. While everybody sat it was easy to sketch in peace. Another time I tried some people standing about, but that was far too fleeting.

My Wednesday drawing group has also been doing some figure drawing... but I need to photograph those sketches first.

Thus, in the meantime: people at the airport.

At the airport, Graphite in Moleskine, 24x21cm

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Bits and Pieces write-up part 2

Joan Eardley, Rottenrow, 1956
Oil on Canvas, 94x164cm
Private Collection

As promised, here is a commentary on the fourth and final part of the Bits and Pieces workshop about Joan Eardley. At the centre of this fourth part were again children scenes, but this time very much in the shape of complex street scenes with a lot of activity and well-developed composition.

The exhibition tour focused exclusively on the Glasgow room of the exhibition: a series of somber interior pieces and some of her lightest, and most complex compositions of street scenes: groups of children playing, skipping ropes, pushing prams, holding arms and hands.

These street scenes share a number of common elements in terms of composition - as you can see from the two images I've included from the catalogue: A fairly linear composition of road, pavement and shop fronts provides the urban, highly-structured yet dynamic backdrop for various groups of children.

Joan Eardley, Children in a Glasgow Back Street
Oil on Canvas, 74x140cm
Private Collection

The figures, not unlike the backdrop, are composed of what appears almost incidental and random colours, marks and textures. In both scenes, it is difficult to disentangle the actual work process - what shapes, marks and textures were laid down before and after each other. This sense of spontaneous development is all the same held together but a strong composition.

There is in fact a third, and later street scene, in the room - my personal favourite - the pavement is sloping upwards to the left corner, the children are in lighter, almost pastel colours, angled too - and in fact, the whole scene - titled Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing - is marked by a greater sense of abstraction: rythms of colours and shapes moving through a group of children where only the faces are discernible (unfortunately it's too large to scan): but, go and have a look for yourself.

The exhibition room with these street scenes also includes a number of interior scenes, a few years earlier, the four scenes depict Angus Neil - close friend and frequent sitter - in altogether more sombre and structured paintings. Yet, again, each features strong bursts of colour to offset the muted greys and a glorious sense of detail. I have included The Table as an example, and although the catalogue reproductions are pretty good, you need to think of the yellow in the top right as bright and shiny, and the red stripe in the left background as vibrant too. I very much like the contemplative calm of the model playing off the lived in/off table and the sun-lit window.

Joan Eardley, The Table, 1953
Oil on Canvas, 61x91.5 cm
The MacLeod Collection

I seem to be running out of time again and yet have to write about the workshop session and my impressions/insights from the series. So, again: more to follow.

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Bits and Pieces Collage Workshop: write-up

Sanna Head, Ardnamurchan Pen and ink on paper (24x30 cm) (week two)

The last session of the workshop alongside the Joan Eardley exhibition had been last week. And while I had posted the most recent collage from that session (here), I wanted to write a bit more about the workshop itself.

It ran for four session of 2.5 hrs each. We had begun each session with a tour around the exhibition, focusing on a few aspects of Eardley's work and in particular her work process.

Week One provided an overview of themes, approach and a closer discussion of her paper-based works: gouache, pastels and pen and ink; on the basis of this, we started doing stick and ink drawings of photographs of children. These, in turn acted as starting point for some simple collage of urban landscape and children's faces/figures - working with simple materials such as sugar paper, newspaper and oil pastels.

Pen and ink with pastel drawing 24x30cm (week one)

Week Two concentrated on landscapes: her landscape paintings, how she added and included mud, grit and grasses to achieve textures and the importance of composition within these. The activities themselves were again twofold: pen/stick and ink drawings of landscapes to bring out textures, vary these textures to strengthen the composition of the overall scene; we then prepapred with acrylics a number of papers - with various textures, tones and values as basis for the following week.


.... which I unfortunately missed. It included a tour around her seascapes and the assemblage of a whole series of impressive landscape collages which you can see in the photo. Secondly, people worked with soft pastels on sandpaper to develop colourful childrens' portraits.

Landscape collages and childrens' portraits (pastel on paper) (week three)

I will actually write about the last and final session later: I want to include some more of Eardley paintings in this as well as some of the various points I took from the sessions. So: more to follow...

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Children playing in a backcourt

Backcourt and skipping rope,
Mixed media on paper
24x30cm

Without too many words this morning: this is the final piece I did in the Bits and Pieces workshop which was running in conjunction with the Joan Eardley exhibition. A streetscene with cut out figures of children playing in acrylics, oil pastel, ink and collage.

I'll be writing more about the workshop at some point over the weekend. But at the moment I am smiling to myself as the 'contour drawing' of tearing out shapes with paper seems an easy and little scary way of starting to put people into my work... will continue with that.

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Resolutions

I am making use of this space as an annotated and visualised folder to myself: here is my first note to myself for the next year.

People and trees are the plan for practice. Let me elaborate:

Trees - much of this summer had been about paying closer attention to landscapes, changes and movement therein. So, plein air sketching and pastel painting has been a big step towards that; also, the observation of clouds and skies has help sharpen not only vision but also in developing a sense for how time of day, weather and season have different effects on and in the air - the invisibles which nonetheless carry so much.

Hence: next step is to move closer to living things: I've already begun to be a bit more systematic with my attempts at greenery, and there is plenty of scope for more.

Having begun in autumn seems like a fortunate sly of hand, almost: the dropping of leaves, autumn colours on trees and on the grounds leave trunks and branches. So, there's much to explore for structure, solidity and airy movement in the wind without the distracting and difficult addition of green. So. Let's continue with that one.

People - hm... I did a couple of life drawing and painting classes last year. The complexity of anatomy, movement and expression is fascinating - in part clearly because of its challenge. So, there is on one hand the wish to develop this rather rudimentary ability to draw from life further. On the other hand it is about peopleing - however abstractly - some of my land- and cityscapes. While I admire people who do this, I am somewhat unsure how far I'll be able to get there - am just thinking of all the hours, months, years of practice that I won't be able to fit in.

Study of female torso
Oil on canvas, 40x50cm

Never mind that, now, though. I just have to look at any of Joan Eardley's paintings (which I have been doing quite a lot with the exhibition opened in Edinburgh earlier this month) to get a sense of the vibrancy there is in painting and drawing people.

Pat Samson by Joan Eardley
Pastel on paper, c1962
Hunterian Art Gallery

So, there's a resolution for someone who doesn't do resolutions... I'll keep coming back to it.

PS: I suppose it's not really a resolution but a project, and projects I do like.

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Picasso on paper - exhibition

Eventually - and not before time, seeing that it was the last day of it - I managed to get across to Edinburgh to visit the Picasso on Paper exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Exhibiting over 140 paper-based works by the prolific artist, the exhibition provides an excellent insight into Picasso's draughtsmanship, his varied printmaking techniques and the innovation with which he approached media and subjects.

The exhibition covers a wide span of his working life - from pastel drawings from the 1890s, the pre-war era cubist work, many etchings from the Vollard suite of the 193os, 1940s lithographs and some fabulous multi-coloured linocuts from the 1950s through to drawings and etchings from the last decade of his life.

Many of the works are on loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, which holds an extensive collection of the artist's graphic work.

I had taken my sketchbook with me - but once we were there I quickly suffered from a good dose of artist admiration (which isn't quite the word but you hopefully get was I mean), but took out the sketchbook out to do a number of quick shadow shapes sketches.

I enjoyed the sense of artistic and technical development coming through his works - exploring different type of print techniques, mixing them up (e.g. by scraping on lithographs), and while my understanding of print techniques isn't good, I found Picasso's continuous search for something different, stretching the boundaries of what is known, done and understood fascinating.

Let me illustrate with an example from his cubist work - daily meetings with George Braque led to an exploration of collages and geometric minimalism - how little information is needed to denote a sketch as a human head?

Described by Brigitte Leal, in The Ultimate Picasso, as 'papier colle revolution', Braque's interest in materials was taken up by Picasso throughout 1912 and 1913. Here painting and collage influenced each other mutually.

Leal illustrates how the use of ready-made materials such as newspaper cutouts introduced an anonymity to the works - making art for the cubist not dependant 'on the painter's hand' (p. 162). In the process

the form no longer depends on a drawn or painted structure; papier colle has taken its space. Cutouts and assemblages alone define the spatial composition. Here color 'working simultaneously with form,' Braque put it, takes priority, disrupts the two-dimensionality of space.

Moving this further, Picasso created a series of head within which the capturing of a simple pictorial essence became the key. Only few reference points help distinguishing between different objects - such as this head and guitar here:

Head, Papier Colle, Pablo Picasso, 1913
Private Collection

Guitar, Papier Colle, Pablo Picasso, 913
Private Collection

Leal (p. 170), again:

The painter is playing with the ambigous nature of the clues: the same triangular bases for both, the same bands of black and blue glued paper to stabilize the forms without mimicking the subjects, and the use of the double curve that usually evokes the guitar to form the head.

There's more to follow on this one - notably Picasso's process of abstraction through a series of lithographs.

Festival sketching

I went to a music festival for the weekend - it took place in a beautiful part of Argyll, so for the landscape and for the people I took my sketchbook along. Yet, with it larger than my bag (note to self: get a smaller sketchbook when there is really no space extra) I left it at the place where we stayed.

Sketching all those people would have been a real challenge for me - with some life drawing I can get to grips with more detailed anatomy but the generic 'masses of people in a distance' way of sketching still evades me. So, there's something else to add to my to do list: look up and find out how to do figures in groups, distance and in a general way.

Another visual arts-related observation concerned the sense of vibrancy and movement. How do you capture and (re-)present people moving, music in the air and vibrancy? I don't mean drawing people simply with their arms in the air or one foot off the ground but other ways of getting that sense of movement.

I tried to get to this sense with one of the desert paintings - the Spring in the Sky one here - where my initial impulse came from a drive through the desert on the way to Tel Aviv airport and one hill after another buzzing by - yet, if you look at the resulting study, it is as static as can be: it ended up being about spring colours in the desert and there no sense of movement whatsoever.

Of course, the Italian futurist movement in the early 19th century, most notably Giocomo Balla's Dog on a leash, explored modernity through dynamic movement.

Giocomo Balla, Dog on a Leash,
oil on canvas, 1912, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy

I think I need another round of finding some information not only on the Futurists but also other ways of depicting and capturing movement.

A website I just came across in my search for Balla was the art education site Art in Motion - Capturing movement in art - initially targeting secondary school children, it offers a good starting point to the study of movement and the various ways to capture it in sculpture, painting and drawing.

Clay heads

While I didn't learn how to slipcast, I had a go at some clay sculpture:





I've been shying away from life drawing until recently - too complex for me, but working with clay and sculpting people, or heads, was pretty exciting: adding a bit here or there changed the whole expression in a much more involved way than adding lines, texture or shade on a drawing can do. Note to myself: do sculpture again, soon.