30 May 2016

Extended drawing - last week's output

With nearly three hours of class time to fill, working on my Home project, what to do? House plans have fascinated me since childhood, when we had lots of home-building magazines around (my father built his own house three times over). Looking at the layouts in the magazines, I could imagine our family living in those houses - and most important, which would be my room, and how I would furnish it. No surprise, then, that a plan of the house that I currently call home started taking shape -
It's interesting to mentally walk round the house and try to envisage how the doors (red) opened (to the left? to the right?) and where the shelves and cupboards (yellow) are. The windows emanated green ... a bridge to the garden.

To do the upstairs at the same scale I folded the paper and traced the outline, changing as necessary.
Then added text -- the names of the rooms, and some salient features (eg, functional fireplace).

Meanwhile everyone was quietly getting on with things ...

The next bit of creative frippery was based on seeing this collage at Art16; name of artist escapes me. The cutout lines float over the background -
So I had to try cutting out something - words - from scrap paper. The words were written with white chalk on white paper, which could be seen at certain angles to the light, seen well enough to use as a cutting guide -
That was "just playing", though I might use it as a way of doing line drawings of furniture or other objects. Loosely positioned, it starts to be 3d and cast shadows.

There was still some time left to fill (I felt very unfocussed, can you tell?) so I indulged in a bit of smearing with chalky pastel on a big sheet of paper, using crude shapes and then the back of the cut-out words -
This is an offshoot of the rubbed-down charcoal last week, from which a pattern emerged. Ah, lovely serendipity! The artist's job is to notice what's happening, and take it further. So, we can all do the artist's job, now and then.

Today is bank holiday monday - no class this week. I shall try to use the time - 5 hours including travel time, much could be done in that span - following up a few ideas:
- move the birdhouse around the house and take photographs
- do small, quick line drawings of a dozen objects
- large bold line drawings (furniture?) - cut out, hung up, lit to bring out shadows
- 3D objects from the cut-out lines??


1 comment:

Charlton Stitcher said...

Ah ... noticing as the job of the artist. How true, yet how difficult that is!