Went to see the Watteau drawings at the Royal Academy this afternoon.

Such economy of line to evoke posture and clothing. They're quite small too, so how did he make such fine work with chalk? Interesting to read how he used firstly red chalk, then later added black and white chalk.The results seem to produce blues and greens as well...not sure how.

Also at the RA was a small room of  Frank Bowling works on paper.

How colourful is that? And he works in acrylics. Interesting textures from gel combed out from the centre line. Indeed all these works had a strong central line.

Art in Islington

As I'll miss Ray Atkins' show at ArtSpace Gallery in Islington next month, I wanted to go to the current exhibition to see what was there. And this is what I found (below). As usual, it is huge, and animated by such lively strokes of colour. I never cease to be enthralled and inspired by Ray's work.

The show of his work opens on 24 June. For a taster, the catalogue is reproduced online here, but his work really needs to be seen in the flesh. Photos just cannot do it justice.

In the same gallery there was also a painting by George Rowlett - paint so thick it looked like icecream, and I wanted to lick the colours.  This is titled Poppy Fields in Wind and Rain 2007

Then down the road at the Parasol Unit was Yinka Shonibare's  installation Jardin d’amour, originally shown in Paris. We walked through maze-like passages created by high, ivy covered trellis panels to find clearings with headless figures in scenes straight out of Fragonard or Watteau, dressed in elaborate costumes unsing Shonibare's trademark textiles, right down to ribbons on their shoes. It was beautiful, thought-provoking, exquisitely crafted work.

And somehow the fact that they didn't have heads only made you appreciate how much the gestures of the bodies made the story. Heads, and therefore facial features,would have been a distraction.

Chelsea Art Fair

Thanks to to Helen for the suggestion and Helen's Mum for tickets to this show last weekend, selling works for people to take home and live with. So there were many fewer conceptual pieces than in many London galleries, and quite a lot of rather mundane portraits and landscapes and still lives, but among them a few artists I wanted to note:

Ellen Bell: thoughtful and delicately created pieces using strips of printed paper from specific books or with specific words. Often they wrinkle or curl up from the surface giving a further texture to the piece. 

 

Heidi Koenig for stunning colour. Her website has other different tones, but how could I resist the red one?

Next to Heidi Koenig was Byron Gin - layers of paint stripped back and peeled away.

Andrew Hood for figures and landscapes that are kind of there, kind of melting into a lively ground of layers and splatters of paint.

I laughed out loud at this: Lisa Swerling's Glass Cathedral series, boxes full of sparkle and miniscule figures. The message above this one reads: 'The World is a scary place, but I have Armbands'. Fabulous - gives us all hope!

Window No 1 evolves

My last post had the ghost tree meshed with a misty ground. But they were too much the same.

Strips of paper torn and glued over the tree shape gave a smoother form to the tree, and differentiated it from the rest of the woven support. Next I tried burnt siena on it, with some ultramarine and burnt umber to cool it down:

But now it's too dark, and still orangy hints creeping through, so lets go grey instead:

And that's where it stays...for the moment.

Inspired by Nicholas de Stael

I've got a book about Nicholas de Stael from the library. I love his contrasts of colour - passages of very saturated in your face colour and  very neutral, subtle greys, flattened shapes, texture around each block of colour, like hedges round fields.




Nicholas de Stael 'The Fort at Antibes'

A quick mess in my sketchbook with just two colours got me inspired

I enjoyed the contrasts, how the colours overlapped, the small blocks of colour against their contrasting ground. So get a canvas out and get going:

I'm going to get a different hue of grey and cover alot of the RHS, and maybe the LHS as well.


Outside the window no 2

Another version of the same view. This one started with some dribbles on canvas as somewhere to start from. Messing with a cold and a warm colour.

But the tree just wanted to make a reappearance, and the block behind it.

I liked the links that seem to form between the tree and the dribbles underneath. Like kind of dancing shadows. So I wanted to preserve the transparence of the layers to let them continue to show through. The block looked too vague. I wanted it more angular. Adding the felt tip pen made it more urban and added another style of marks.

The colours (watered down gouache mostly) had rather gone their own way. I wanted greater definition of the block, and by contrast the tree was too brown and tree-like...so this came next:

Losing some of the pen marks, but enjoying the lines of the block, and the flat tree shape, but the yellow lower section bothers me. Thinking of unifying the non-tree ground so it all gets a layer of blue:

And the tree got a tinge of pink as contrast.

Outside the window - painting No 1

I've been working (very slowly and intermittently) on a 'painting'. It started back in November with some eco-friendly packing material which caught my eye, especially since it had that kind of grid quality from the cuts that had been made in the cardboard.

To make it even more textural, I glued some scrunched up tissue onto it  and gave it a coat of PVA, hence the shine. And then out came the bright colours! I was reading a biography of Gillian Ayres at the time. Her work is so fresh and vibrant. Here's an example. It's not the one I was looking at (in a library book, which has since been returned), but you get the idea....

I loved the show last year at the Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork Street, for her 80th birthday! I hope I'll still be painting if I get to that age. See their website for more of her work. So I thought I'd try and understand her complex juxtapositions of colours by using similar colours.

The composition was based on the view from the window: a mis-shapen tree in winter against a block of flats, the binary opposition of nature and the man-made environment which always crops up in my work. I had thought to place a window frame around and through the whole thing for another layer of contrast, but I think that would be over the top.
I was also trying to get a tonal range in each colour block; exagerated aerial perspective, if you will. For sure, I don't have Gillian Ayres eye or skill, so this was too much a jumble of brights with no rhyme or reason, trying too hard to do too many things.

What I thought I needed was separation between colours, and to take the tone of everything lighter, so I added lots more white paint:

I got very excited by the layers of overlapping colour, particularly in the top right hand corner, where blue and pink merged. But overall as a whole picture it wasn't working, so I covered the lot in a veil of white, and because the surface is so uneven, the colours below are still peeping through. I like the texture, the layers of colours, and the ghostliness. But I think I preferred the first, bright version, which is gone forever!

I've lost all the gradations in tone across the colour blocks, and the tree has almost disappeared. Indeed, the tree needs a different treatment from the building to differentiate the two.  I've redefined the tree as the strongest, whitest figure and it looks better already.

I think the tree needs to go even more opaque, but maybe not completely white...but then again, it still has a certain ephemeral quality because it isn't dead flat white. But being white, it is a non-colour against the still-coloured building. I'm going to leave it a bit nw, to see where it wants to go next.