Studio day

Sometimes I find myself battling with an idea for an extended period of time, searching for that visual solution fits the various components that I want to include.  It can go on for weeks or months without anything significant coming out of it all.  That was kind of the state of things towards the end of last year, but then suddenly things started to change and develop and suddenly the possibilities seem endless.  Technically it is not quite a return to the Renaissance ‘tondo’ painting, but a ring painting is as close as I have even been.

Ring2 – pen on paper

Ring2 – acrylic and oil on canvas

Ring1 – pen on paper

Ring1 – acrylic and oil on canvas

It is at moments like this I feel I could do with an assistent to make my rather time consuming round canvases. But without such help it is simply a question of getting on as best as is possible.

 

 

 

 

Magical Miniatures

I have never been someone who has made large artworks. For me above, let’s say, 60cm in any direction and you already have reached one of my larger works. I feel an affinity with smaller artworks, The intensity and intimacy that they offer draws us in in a different way to how larger scale work often tries to dominate us.
The work of the miniaturist portrait painter takes us into this area, but for me at least such portraits have always felt like a compromised, shrunk down version of the work of the full scale portrait artist.
The small format work on show at the Museum Catharijne Convent in Utrecht certainly doesn’t have this problem and it overflows with intensity, craftsmanship and meaning.

The exhibition Magical Miniatures displays in its carefully lit glass cases an array of thick and immaculately bound Medieval manuscripts. Each individual book is of course in itself almost enough for a complete exhibition that once open displays just two carefully chosen pages from the binding that potentially offers so many possibilities more.
The fineness and intricacy is extraordinary, the amount that can be crammed onto a page of perhaps 15x10cm quite mind blowing. You can’t help but wonder about the world from where these books come and the hands that created them. The consistency of the work and the shear quantity make you wonder about the rituals and devotions for the makers. It is highly appropriate to see the books lying open in the halls of a former convent, a building with its own history that has so many parallels with the displays.
The museum in a series of film offer insights into their processes and techniques. These leave you even more baffled by the degree of commitment and knowledge of the working contexts that these unnamed artists found themselves working in. In our world of fast moving imagery and sound bites the contrast could hardly be greater.

Capturing the imagination – a photographic remake

It is normally a pretty good sign if some colleagues in the staff room know about a project that you are working on before you’ve told them about it. It means that pupils themselves are talking about it!

This was the case last week. I had taken my fourth-year classes (15-16 year olds) to our local museum, the Jan Cunen Museum, to see an exhibition by the Dutch photographer Micky Hoogendijk. Most of the work on display were quite large-scale portraits with varying degrees of digital manipulation often in the form of overlays of other imagery imposed over the head or face. Three works stood out though as slightly different. These particular photographs didn’t have the same manipulation, but they did have a historical resonance with seventeenth century Dutch art.

We talked about the set of photographs whilst at the museum, the clothing, the poses, the use of light and the restrained expressions on the faces. The linking with seventeenth century art was strong and something the pupils later explored in a homework assignment.

Whilst the Hoogendijk works don’t seem to have been based on specific images from the past they offered the pupils a contemporary route back to artworks that they often pass quickly over in other circumstances.

The photographs also offered me a chance to make use of a practical assignment that I have used in the past. This involves a photographic remake of an art historical portrait where the pupil plays the part of the subject of the portrait. It is a relatively straight forward assignment to explain, and maybe this helps in the way that it seems to have captured the attention of my pupils in the last couple of weeks.

I provided a large selection of images for the classes to search through to find something that they thought that they could work with. I gave strict instructions for the photographs that they were going to take, and these were going to become my marking criteria when evaluating the work:

• The pupil really has to play the part, the expression involved and displayed was important
• Composition and the arrangement of figure and attributes were important
• The use of light in the painting had to be followed as much as possible in the photograph
• The pose of the figure should be used as a basis in the photograph
• The clothing can be updated but should show a relationship to the original painting   Providing the framework
• Cardboard box office
• Related posts:
• All photographs shown above are included with the pupils’ permission.
• Looking back on the results that were finally handed in, I feel that the effect of that having seen high quality photos in the exhibition had a positive effect. I feel that it made them approach their own work in a more ambitious way. It definitely seemed to help them in taking a step away from the idea that this was just going to be a relatively unconsidered snap shot, an approach that is the dominant feature of most of a teenagers photographic output.

Beyond these instructions I left my pupils to it. Sending them off with a two-week deadline to produce this practical homework assignment. Although I did also stress that this was perhaps not an assignment to work on in a hurry on a dark Tuesday night…..they were to try and make use the of the natural light that the weekend offers.

 

Looking back on the results that were finally handed in, I feel that the effect of that having seen high quality photos in the exhibition had a positive effect. I feel that it made them approach their own work in a more ambitious way. It definitely seemed to help them in taking a step away from the idea that this was just going to be a relatively unconsidered snap shot, an approach that is the dominant feature of most of a teenagers photographic output.

All photographs shown above are included with the pupils’ permission.

Related posts:

Photographic frames of reference

Cardboard box office

Are we all romantics at heart?

The exhibition ‘Romanticism in the North’ at the Groningen Museum in the north of the Netherlands presents an extensive collection of landscape paintings, mostly from the early nineteenth century, and features work by the likes of William Turner, Casper David Friedrich, John Constable and Johan Christian Dahl. It is a succulent collection of paintings that ooze technical quality and present, not unsurprisingly, a romantic view of, predominantly, the landscape. The effect of light and dark on our surroundings is a recurring theme as is the weather and in particular an inclination for the slightly threatening nature the weather can take.

But it is the locations that the paintings show and how they are framed up that catches the eye. There is beauty and drama, and it is all so carefully composed. I find myself almost wanting to be there. These are the sorts of places in the busier and more hectic moments of our day to day existence that we might wish to escape to.

Romanticism in art regularly encouraged a sort of reflective escape, an escape from the present and a look back to the past. A reaction to a period to change perhaps, the hints of a more modern world lay on the horizon.

Now, two hundred years later we can still relate strongly to these images. These are still the sorts of places we like to visit and document for ourselves, although nowadays that is more likely to be using a camera whilst on a day trip out or further afield on a holiday. We still love the landscape and still have a pretty romantic view of it. We like to frame up a photograph of a lighthouse in the breaking waves, a mountain stream or the descending sun that is turning the whole sky a burning shade of orange.  In these paintings human activity is held at arm’s length, we view any figures at a distance, there is little engagement. It all feels a little individualistic.

And yet in the romantic landscape there is an understated side dish, that takes us away from a sense of idealised tranquillity. This more unsettling edge comes in the form of weather at its more extreme. An impending storm gathers on the horizon, a lone figure battles with the wind, mist or darkness descend on the landscape, a ship is dashed on a coastline or a waterfall plunges from a dizzying height. All of these would have brought an edge of danger to the viewer more than two hundred years ago, a danger in these sorts of environment that they were maybe more familiar with than we are today. Yet of course, when viewed by way of a painted image then there is little actual danger involved. It was an experience more comparable perhaps with the way we approach, and love the safer sort of danger, as it is presented to us in an adventure or disaster movie.