Wednesday 30 April 2014

Early Etchings



In my posting of January 14th, I mentioned I’d taken up art classes and showed you my rather effeminate attempt at a Greek bust in charcoal. To our great joy, in January, we were allowed to start dabbling in oils. Despite my stated preference to work in water-colour, our lovely teacher, Evangelia, suggested we use water-soluble oils. The owner of the art-supply shop I had previously gone to rather sniffily replied these were modern materials that probably wouldn’t stand the test of time. No worries, I thought, we’re hardly in the David Hockney league! 

Once I collected my supplies, I felt a mixture of self-importance (here I am: a ‘real’ artist, complete with canvas, brushes and oils) and trepidation – what kind of mess was I going to make with these colours and wasn’t working on canvas just a touch too presumptuous?!

Virgin-white canvas is equatable with a blank A4 sheet of paper and an essay topic alongside. It’s the where-do-I-start anxiety. Then once the pencil outline is done, will I muck it up with the paint? At least water-soluble oils are more forgiving as a mistake can be fairly easily worked over, which is not so for water-colour. 

 I donned a lab-coat hanging outside the studio, clearly used to protect other wannabe artists. I noticed two things:
  • none of the other painters were covering up
  • shortly into the exercise, Evangelia came over and draped a second garment across my legs Somehow I manage to splosh paint everywhere.
Building up the colour to achieve depth needs quite a bit of work. My untrained eye often tells me a piece is done, then Evangelia will come and advise me to start on the shading next!

This is my first ‘oil-painting’. Now it didn’t help that the blooms were of synthetic materials – and mine most certainly convey a strong sense of the inanimate – but they are recognizable as flowers, so not bad.
                                                  


      In our pre-Christmas pencil/charcoal phase, one of the subjects we worked on in charcoal was a bowl of quinces. What really surprised and pleased me was the reasonably accurate appearance of window light reflecting on the shiny surface of the bowl.
So I set my next goal: doing the same subject in oils, to see if I could get that same effect in a different medium. First you can see the pencil sketch with the background washed in, as well as what are lines supposed to mark the material folds but which resemble stranded jelly-fish!
                                               


   
Next the material has been painted in, though I think I overworked the folds and tucks a little and that distracts the eye from the quince-bowl. In the next picture the quinces are now being worked on.

        

 








                     
The final version below was completed at the end of January, and the leaves are mostly artist’s impressions as the leaves in our original pre-Christmas composition had withered beyond recognition.       I left the bowl, focus of much anxiety, to the end, hoping I could get that desired lighting effect. Eh! – achieved to some extent. So now I have a set: quince-bowls in charcoal and in oil.                   
 



   

                                         
 Our classes are held once a week in the local council premises, and we are mainly lady ‘penshies’, as the Scots vernacular has it. We all have one thing in common: for three hours we shelve our household duties, dump our daily concerns and do our own thing. We lose ourselves in representing or recreating a subject of our choice; we push our skills of perception and manual dexterity until we achieve the effect we are after.

 I have tried to work with diluted colour to attain the delicacy of water colour; I have thrown caution – and oils - to the wind and applied thick dollops of colour, leaving on the canvas thick brush curves and satisfying strips of sheen.

Last week as I left the class, Evangelia asked if I was going straight home. Her concern was that I might be going out into public places looking like a woad-painted Ancient Briton – my face was spattered with cadmium blue! 

No matter. I get the same sense of satisfaction from practising my art as I do from trying out a new recipe. The initial sweet anxiety of anticipation gives way to full-on concentration, total involvement in the task. 

At the end it feels like you’ve experienced a mental massage, been transported to another place.          If the finished article is recognizable and presentable, then so much the better.
But that will never cease to surprise me!
                                

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