margaret-cooter: Art holiday, part 1

It's been more than a week since I've been back from my art-holiday (Dynamic Drawing at West Dean) and surely time to take a deep breath, open the portfolio and unroll the work, and assess how I feel about what went on.

The value of the course was shown, I thought, when I felt a tremendous urge the day after getting home, to go to the Natural History Museum in search of a sheep to check out how/where their ears are attached. This was after modelling sheep in the swapover session and feeling very attached to my third attempt, who sits inscrutably among the computer gubbins. And after walking through a flock of sheep and looking hard at their ears, on my morning walk to the arboretum at West Dean. But I thought a stuffed sheep would be the better source of information, and went to the museum - only to find they have antelopes, but no sheep. So antelopes it was ...

The museum was busy, and space was tight, but I was in my own world and the images flowed onto the page. I'd not drawn animals before, not to speak of, and the entire experience was rather astonishing. I feel that the time spent mark-making and sloshing ink around and "being in nature" was responsible for the freedom and responsiveness and focus during that museum drawing session.

Now to the mark-making and sloshing itself. We worked on big sheets of paper. I used my giant charcoal stick often, and made brushes out of branches, and used big brushes with ink, and did a couple of BIG gestural drawings (got that out of my system ... maybe...).

Thick ink, wet on wet

Gestural splashings of inks

Gestural use of ink on floor

Gestural use of charcoal on the wall
(making circles with each arm, at all possible distances from the paper
- stepping forward and stepping back)

Nature's brushes and their marks
(bundles of redwood, douglas fir, pine, redwood bark, grass
- some on longer sticks, and the grass is double-ended)

Collection, on surfaces made by flicking household gloss paint from a big brush

Polyfilla with ink

Yet more ink!! - sketchbook pages - much bolder than usual

Thick and thin charcoal

Small and large marks (on graph paper)

Drawing with a big stick

The long sticks got a lot of use. Outdoors I used one for tracing the shadows of trees, three pines and a beech -

By the time you get to the other side of the paper, the sun has moved...

... or else the breeze has been sending the leaves every which way

The sequence - a beech and 2.5 pines

One exercise was to take a mark and use it as the basis of a large drawing. You can probably see this mark in the photo above, near bottom right -

And this is how it grew, with ever-larger repetitions -

The marker pen seeped through the paper, making interesting tones -

Back outdoors, I was happy with these two trees (charcoal rubbing of bark; ink plus dabs with the corner of a sponge), quickly made -

and this one got a lot of work but never did amount to much -

My favourite work - a largeish brush loaded with ink, which pooled at the top but quickly ran out as the brush moved across the paper towards the bottom. I tipped the paper to move the mass of ink a bit, and some escaped into fine lines -