Oil on 60 cm diameter drawing paper

A) Exploratory drawings… in black pen in my A4 sketchbook.

I’ve decided to go for oils, and as I’m not painting this fast and free I’m going to try making it into a slightly abstract by the geometrical structure (where the lines dissect and shapes echo (I did this when I was drawing up). And go for flat areas of colour… I’m not being bound by local colour but composing it as I go along…  I’m also going to try and use subtle tones.

My aim is to create a surreal interior which on the surface looks real but with subtle colour and compositional changes so it pulls the viewer in while pushing their eye to the window. By doing this it will take the viewer through the interior space to the outside, which we can look at and experience but never be part of as we live internally in our heads.

My exploratory sketches

This was a bit like auditioning actors, I really didn’t know what they’d look like till I drew them. And just when I thought I’d found the best view along comes a better one.

I had two criteria.  Firstly I didn’t want a close up view of a single/small group of objects as in the exercises (shelf, dishcloth, shoes etc) but a wider view. This is because although I didn’t arrange the objects as a still life, by moving the framing around them till I got a pleasing composition it gave them elements of a still life. It may not have been the ubiquitous flowers or fruit, or collated collection of valuable or hobby items, but the sketches were still about the objects more than my interior space, and I wanted this to be about my space… part of the interior space that I travel through every day, that makes up my sense of place, of home.

Secondly I wanted it to be visually engaging (which could mean aesthetically pleasing but not necessarily so as ‘visual interest’ doesn’t have to be ‘beautiful’) and have meaning (meaning could be psychological, narrative, spiritual or anything I could engage with beyond the formal arrangement of colours on a flat surface that may, or may not, be representational.) In this case it’s representational rather than an abstract rendering of space.

I really wanted to paint my interior as an abstract like Hodgkin’s remembered dinner parties, map my interior like Franz Ackermann mapped cities or capture it like Fiona Rae… but I bottled out. Even though Diana said I could go off piste I think for Level 1 that would have been a bit like getting a jet plane to a different continent.

So… here are my auditionees:

1. The lounge:

I’m decorating to make it into a home gallery, and a lighter brighter space and thought this might capture both a sense of space and be something I could connect to.

I guess it could work with colours (to show that I’m decorating), and I like the chair outside… in a sense the garden, especially the flagged area is another ‘room’. But the composition is cluttered and the message unclear.

And my foot (bottom centre right), which I thought might put the viewer into the picture gives it a sense of place, rather than space. And I want this to be about space, as soon as you put a figure in a painting it changes the dynamics. Also, there’s a danger it becomes about me rather than about my interior – and if I want it to be a narrative painting I need to give more story clues.

So, I rejected this.

2) The Kitchen

This was a reaction to my previous tondo. I went looking for something that wasn’t in flux (decorating is a process of change) and also away from narrative towards aesthetics.

I quite like the idea and if I had the skill there’s a very beautiful semi-abstract arrangement of the cupboards above the cooker. Placing the corner of the tile at the centre of the tondo uses the circle as an integral part of the composition, rather than as a frame.

Finding beauty in the everyday is valid as it changes perceptions. For a moment my kitchen wasn’t a slightly cramped, hot, smelly, steamy workplace that needs a good clean… but somewhere beautiful. There’s a little seed of pleasure that makes it a nicer space to be in.

But, I rejected this as although it might work in a general sense… it’s beautiful, it’s spiritual and it makes you think about your space… it’s not personal. And I realised that I wanted my tondo to be about my space.

3) The Decorating Tools on the Floor:

Walking back through the lounge it struck me that here was a random collection (so this is both about a curation of objects and an ‘imprint’ of an activity) that had meaning for me and anybody that was redecorating their house.

And that if I moved my frame around I could use the curves of the tins to mirror the tondo, and the lines to add tension.

It’s beginning to work.

Visually it’s interesting, I can play with it on a formal level (and feel no compunction to stick to local colours) and it has a universal narrative.

At this point I could have happily picked this and started my main painting but I’d decided to look at four views before I made my decision so put this on the strong candidate pile and carried on.

This raises the question of the balance between experimenting/looking and making – at what point do you make a decision and commit to an artistic choice.

4) View from the Bathroom through the Bedroom to the Garden and onto the Wider World.

I’d half made my mind up that I’d use the previous tondo, then remembered from Practice of Painting I’d sketched my basin and liked the shape, vaguely thought the shelf might be interesting, so decided to go through the motions and draw this.

I really like the composition and almost instantly decided that this is what I wanted to paint.

The eye is drawn through space space to the window. So it ticks my box of travelling through space rather than painting a fixed place.

It’s visually interesting with both detail, perspective and a strong movement to the centre of the tondo and out into the world.

There are some lovely shapes… and it also feels like the window is an eye and we’re ‘inside the house’ from where we look out, not sealed in the house, not fixed in place but mobile in space. Which matches how I feel about the house, it’s a bit like an exterior body… I have to live in it but my focus is on the world outside.

B) Coloured sketch to work from.

Double page of A3 sketch book:

I used my two thumbs and my second fingers to make a circle in space and squinted through it with one eye, this was easy and flexible – I couldn’t use two eyes to look through my ‘circle’ as when I did that I could see two different images.

This was difficult and fascinating.

Difficult because in real life we constantly stitch together what we see from lots of tiny head and eye movements, so what we ‘see’ as a ‘still photograph’ is actually one shot built from lots of ‘shots’ which is also part of a video. And we see in 3D using both eyes using some very complicated internal software, not 2D from a single viewpoint. And to make it even harder even a small change in viewpoint radically changes the picture. Being human meant that the position of my hands in space varied each time I looked through them, and my eye, head and body would also be in slightly different positions, so that each ‘squint’ produced a slightly different picture.

One solution was to try and find my eye-line and mechanically draw in perspective. This helped but fell down because my picture had been drawn from multiple slightly different viewpoints, each with different vanishing points. Another complication was that if I tried to measure perspective with a ruler, through my squinted eye, and transfer it to my drawing it changed every time depending on the angle of my ruler in space, which was slightly different every time.

The answer was to use my single squinted viewpoint and mechanical vanishing point as an aid but constantly go back to trusting my normal vision to draw what I saw with both eyes.

I’m sure, as with anything, this gets easier the more you do it.

There’s also the added problem of our visual software changing the size of objects in space, so the window looked much bigger than it was.

So the exercise was fascinating because it taught me a lot about how we see and how copying a photograph, which is a single frozen image from a single viewpoint is totally unrepresentative of what and how we see both mechanically and psychologically. Mechanically for all the reasons listed above but also because of all the brain processes we’re not aware of which make us see colour shape and forms differently from a photograph, such as our brain correcting white balance – take a photograph of white paper in shade and it looks blue. And our psychological differences such as training, mood and personality which make us ‘see’ different images from the same visual stimulus.

Using technology:

Having sketched of what I see (not copied a photograph) I was then left with the problem of how to define my tondo.

As I’ve read of lots of artists using technology and come to see this not as ‘cheating’ but as part of the creative process. For instance April Gornik takes a photograph, digitally manipulates it, then paints the digital image. Indeed, artists have been helped by technology since Canaletto used a camera obscura to copy buildings or medieval artists assembled a gridded frame on a stand to capture foreshortening.

My solution was to find a cropping service online, select a circle, and crop my drawing to find the best composition. This is what I’d being trying to draw, and first framed with my fingers, but had slightly lost in the process.

I now have a sketch I can use for my tondo painting.

C) Final Tondo.

I need to sketch in the black triangle but a bigger problem is how to paint it.

Having spent a day preparing my sketch, which is quite detailed, I don’t want to paint a tight realistic ‘window on space’ painting. I’d like to be loose and suggestive, and maybe slightly expressionistic as this definitely suggests living inside my body looking out as well the obvious subject matter.

So, I want to capture both the ‘vehicle’ (an interior) and a ‘meaning’ (the dynamic between being inside my head and the world outside).

I’m not sure how to do this.

I think I’ll launch in and see what happens. If it goes wrong I can abandon it and do another. Having already spent 12 hours in preparation (I could spend a full week painting and re-painting this) I am aiming for 6 hours to paint it up.

18 to 20 hours seems a reasonable time on the Assignment? Given that each part of the unit is supposed to take 80 hours.

Sketched up tondo ready to paint:

60 cm diameter drawing paper, white.

I decided I wasn’t skilful enough just to ‘splash the paint on’ and capture the loose version so started sketching on my tondo.

This ended up being much harder than I anticipated, but a vertical learning curve.

Still no photograph, so I was copying my A4 sketch, using my eye, using all my drawing knowledge and if I got really stuck revisiting my bathroom.

The hardest element was the basin in the foreground, it’s still not quite right but getting there.

Painting up:

 

I’m pleased with this as it achieves both my my conceptual and painterly goals, and works in a tondo. The curve of the basin sweeps the eye to the window, and the heavy perspective works a bit like a dartboard, or reverse telescope, making the tondo the wide end of a tunnel.

And even though it’s contained it’s not tight as copies of photographs can be. It’s a particular style (I din’t know the name) but creatively and visually it has an internal coherence which makes it into a painting.

I loved painting in oil… it was like getting out of a garish acrylic mini and into a purring well oiled Rolls Royce, and even though I’m not yet out of first gear I can see the luxurious possibilities (and the expense).

Technique wise I discovered layering (or glazing?), by mixing oil to a colour to make it more transparent and then building up layers of colour. This is a wonderfully subtle tool. You can also use it to paint glass by glazing the colour coming through. Using a stiff brush gives you brushstrokes which is a whole new dimension. It means you can add energy, direction and texture.

I discovered how difficult it is to about two colours (unless the paint is thinned) which explains why so may oil painters  leave gaps… and why they under-paint, so you don’t get flashes of white. Though letting white backlight transparent colours gives them vibrance.

Having a paper canvas meant my painting surface was smooth it was easy to move paint around, was painted in detail with a small brush and thinned paint and some parts, the bed and jeans, were painted gesturally with a big brush.

This exercise used everything I’ve learned so far: my drawing skills from Drawing 1; all my painting skills from Practice of Painting; and the conceptual freedom from Understanding Painting Media.