A new start

A month of disruption has gone by, we moved house from Cape Town to George. The move entailed considerable disruption because we had to put belongings into storage and make the house we were living in ‘saleable’. That is all behind us and we have since then been unpacking – four weeks of unpacking. At last, I have a semblance of order in my art life if nowhere else!

The new house offers a larger workspace, I now have a dedicated art studio to work in any time I like. Here is a photograph of the workspace I am now lucky enough to have to myself. 

 

An aside.

I am reading a small paperback book by Marcus du Sautoy entitled ‘The creativity code’. The book is about artificial intelligence but has some interesting things to say about creativity and art. He discusses art breakthrough works and suggests that they marked a change in artistic fashion or style, or birth of a new genre when they moved to a limited degree away from viewers expectations. The dimensions he mentions are “novelty, unexpectedness, complexity, ambiguity, and the ability to puzzle or confound”. A small departure from the norm in one of these dimensions will take the artwork to the ‘edge’ of acceptability, but heighten its aesthetic value. If the work goes too far it will be disregarded by the viewer. This conceptual movement away from the norm initially arouses interest, but then interest declines as the works become more distant to the norm, the strength of the effect can be mapped as a curve called the ‘Wund curve’.

Drawing – master copies

I have been gifted a course in drawing delivered by an online platform called ‘Domestika’. The assignments so far included drawing a head by copying a drawing by a master. This was the first opportunity I had to ‘do some art’ since the move to George and so I was quite excited. I chose to produce a drawing based on an original silverpoint produced by Leonardo da Vinci in 1480. The result is shown below along with the original it is based on.

 

Silverpoint drawing by da Vinci

Graphite copy of da Vinci silverpoint drawn on A3 paper using Lyra 4B to 8B

Subtractive drawing

I am ‘on a roll’, having produced the drawing above, I thought it would be interesting to try to repeat the exercise using a subtractive method. To this end I first rubbed some 6B graphite shavings into a sheet of drawing paper to create a (kind of) uniform grey foundation to work on. I then began my drawing, based on another silverpoint by Leonardo. I quickly realized that if the base layer is 6B, I would need to use something like an 8B pencil to make a mark I could see.

As the drawing progressed it became apparent that the kneadable putty rubber would be an important drawing instrument. The method forces the artist to work with highlights and then tone them down again once they are created. I found it a challenging approach. The result is quite striking as can be seen in the image below along with the silverpoint image it was based on. 

Silverpoint by da Vinci

My subtractive copy using graphite