20,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Crowood
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Horses may seem to be a challenging subject for an artist, but this book makes equestrian drawing and painting accessible. It explains the fundamental principles of drawing before guiding the reader through the advanced methods of painting a horse. With beautiful illustrations throughout in graphite pencil and oils, this book informs and helps every artist who wants to improve or develop their equestrian work. Topics covered include: an introduction to traditional subjects; drawing materials and methods; working from life; horse anatomy, structure and gaits; exercises in drawing and painting; selecting subjects and using preliminary drawings and sketches.An authoritative and beautiful guide to drawing and painting horses, aimed at all artists particularly equestrian and beautifully illustrated with 224 graphite and oil illustrations.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 412
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Ähnliche
DRAWING AND PAINTING HORSES
ALISON WILSON
Copyright
First published in 2013 by The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2013
© Alison Wilson 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84797 600 0
Frontispiece: Appleby Fair, Two Lads (detail)
Dedication For Jonathan, David, Brian and Rita
CONTENTS
Down the Hill, Easingwold. Detail.
INTRODUCTION
‘All painting is drawing, but all drawing is not painting.’
W. Frank Calderon, Animal Painting and Anatomy
It is my hope that this book will be helpful to artists at many levels, from artists who have done a little work on horses and want to take things further, to experienced artists who are new to the horse as a subject. However, it isn’t a book for complete beginners to drawing and painting; it assumes at least a basic working knowledge of practical techniques on the part of the reader (for example, the capacity to mix colour accurately).
Drawing and painting methods are explained in the specific context of drawing and painting horses, though much of the text should also be helpful to painters of other subjects.
For readers not already familiar with general horse anatomy and terminology, such background information can be found in Chapter 4, including the names of the ‘parts’ of the horse which will be used throughout the book. Explanations or definitions of other technical terms and expressions not in general usage will be found in the Glossary. Where detailed specialist information might be useful, but where space constraints mean it can’t be included in this book, the detailed bibliography will direct readers to other sources of reference.
For brevity, throughout the book the word ‘horse’ is used to include both horses and ponies, and horses are referred to as ‘it’ rather than he or she (except where a specific individual horse or group of horses is being referred to). I have used equestrian terminology for coat colour, i.e. grey instead of white, and skewbald rather than brown-and-white. An explanation of the common colours can be found in the Glossary.
The illustrations are all by the author and are in either graphite pencil or oils unless otherwise indicated. In order to make this book a genuine account of my ideas and working methods, I have used as many drawings as possible from my working sketchbooks, so inevitably some of them will appear worn or otherwise not pristine. The majority of the drawings come from sketchbooks that are between A4 and A3 in size.
The book begins with a short overview of the most common traditional equestrian subjects, and includes examples of the work of some contemporary artists. Context is important in any subject, and we all need to be aware of the work of our contemporaries and those who have gone before us. Other artists have so much to teach us, however different their style may seem to be from our own, that it is foolish to ignore them. (Later, in Chapter 5, there is some direct advice on how we can make use of the work of our predecessors to assist our own development.)
The next section of the book is concerned mostly with drawing. I make no apology for spending a lot of time on drawing. As the artist Walter Sickert said, ‘drawing is the thing’, and no serious artist gets far without it. Even if your own personal interest lies in painting, and your instinct presses you to skip the drawing chapters, I urge you to read all the chapters in order, including the ones on drawing. Drawing is the grammar of art, and even if you don’t enjoy doing it for its own sake (and I hope that you do, or at least that you will, having read this book), regular drawing is as necessary to us as artists as practice is to a musician.
Good drawing is the foundation of good painting, and without sound drawing skills underpinning them an artist’s paintings will eventually reach a ‘glass ceiling’ beyond which they cannot climb to better things. On a purely practical note, there are also some explanations in the drawing chapters that you’ll need to be familiar with when reading the painting chapters. So please trust me – and don’t skip the drawing chapters.
The third section of the book covers colour and paint. I work in oils rather than in acrylics, and only rarely in watercolours, so all the paintings in this book are in oils unless labelled otherwise. Acrylics dry faster than oils, which means that overpainting can be done more quickly, but blending edges etc. can be more difficult. Alkyds’ properties are in-between the two. Other than allowing for the effects of these variable drying times, for the purposes of this particular book the differences between oils, alkyds and acrylics are not significant.
Watercolours are less often used in equestrian painting, and will require rather more adaptation. Their tone range is more restricted, and overpainting and layering in particular are not such straightforward options in watercolours. Nevertheless, most of the points I make about painting are equally applicable to watercolours, with or without body colour, and gouache.
Throughout the book I use the word ‘tone’ to mean lightness or darkness, ‘intensity’ to mean chroma (or saturation) of a colour, and ‘colour’ to mean hue.
SAFETY WHEN WORKING WITH HORSES: A FEW ‘DON’TS’
Don’t feed anything to a horse without the owner’s permission, don’t wear perfume around stallions. If you are taking photographs don’t use flash.
For safety’s sake, never put yourself within biting or kicking range of any horsewhen drawing or painting. This includes all horses present, not only those you are working from. Despite what books may say, some horses can also kick sideways as well as backwards or forwards (for a few years I had the hoof print of a recalcitrant Shetland pony on my leg to testify to this) and, as horses have long legs, their kicking range is large. Horses can, even if held or tied up on a short rope, swing their hindquarters round at considerable speed without warning. If other horses are being led past your subject, be especially watchful. Sometimes horses will lash out at each other as they pass. You don’t want to be in between. If a horse’s ears go flat back along the top of the head, then keep well out of its way; this can be a sign of anger with violent action to follow.
Don’t make sudden movements or noises. Move slowly and deliberately and don’t emerge suddenly from behind them. Horses don’t like surprises. Avoid rooting around in plastic bags and flapping paper about. Horses don’t like the sight or sound of either, and if by some unfortunate chance anything blows away from you towards a horse, it may cause mayhem as the horse shies away from it. If you must use plastic bags, unpack them well away from horses and secure them so that they can’t blow away. This advice applies wherever horses are, and whether they are being ridden or not. They are herd animals, and are prey not predators, so their first reaction in a crisis is to kick/bite/run first and ask questions later. To horses, anything that moves at the edge of their vision or makes a strange noise may be a wolf, so be calm and quiet, and switch off the ringtone on your mobile phone.
Paradoxically, the sleepier a horse seems, the more it may be startled if something unexpected happens.
Working drawings from a sketchbook.
The final chapter of the book offers advice for working professional artists.
This book offers encouragement and practical help to serious artists who want to take the horse as their subject. It doesn’t offer short cuts or formulas. That’s because, for those aiming for real quality in their work, the hard truth is that there aren’t any. You won’t, for example, find any colour recipes for horses here. That’s because a horse doesn’t look the same colour in different light conditions. Early on a sunny winter morning, a black horse will look blue-black out of the sun, but will appear positively brown when led into it. A grey circus horse under pink and blue stage lighting certainly won’t conform to any standard ‘formula’ for the colours of a grey horse. With colour, you have to look at each situation as it is. This is a book about fundamental principles, which can be adapted to any situation, whatever the light, or whichever materials may be available. Mastering fundamentals gives an artist the greatest possible flexibility, and is the route to artistic independence.
I have no wish to interfere with or influence the personal style of any artist – I believe that all artists should find their own style and not imitate that of others. By the same token, I don’t think that imitating photography is a worthy enterprise for artists. I’m concerned about what is now a very common practice, the slavish copying from horses from photographs, sometimes only their heads as if lopped off by an axe. Even the horses in paintings that have bodies and legs are also often left isolated and with no backgrounds, apparently floating in space. (Horses don’t float, they weigh around half a ton, for a start.)
Though for commissioned portraits it may be appropriate to exclude any surroundings, or paint a head only, even then the work should not just be a slavish copy of a photograph, and in their other work artists should be looking to do more than just studies of isolated horses adrift from any surroundings. I want to encourage artists to get out of their limiting comfort zones, and engage with real horses in real environments. It is far more stimulating and rewarding for the artist (and a lot more interesting for viewers too).
Equestrian art has the potential to be so many things – exciting and sporting, contemplative and pastoral, amusing and narrative, dramatic and powerful – but it can’t be any of them without artists who aim high and have a good solid range of technical skills. The aim of this book is to help and encourage artists to acquire those skills and make good use of them whatever their personal style, and to try to help artists avoid some of the common pitfalls that can be particularly associated with working with horses.
It is my hope to see the traditions of equestrian and sporting art revive and thrive in this new century, with artists making drawings and paintings that our descendants will enjoy and treasure, just as we enjoy and treasure the work of our predecessors. If this book can contribute in any way to that, I’ll be delighted.
Artists can never sufficiently repay the artists who taught them. We can only pay those debts back to our own students. This book is part of that debt. I’ll end this Introduction with some words to students from the great Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses: ‘If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labour: nothing is to be obtained without it.’
Chestnut in the Paddock at Rhydygwern. Detail.
CHAPTER 1
EQUESTRIAN SUBJECTS
‘Avoiding any preconceived system, and without prejudice, I have studied the art of the Old Masters and the art of the moderns. I no more wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other, nor, furthermore, was it my intention to achieve the pointless goal of ‘art for art’s sake’. No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, a reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality’
Gustave Courbet, 1855.
Those illustrations in this chapter that are not my own are from contemporary artists, showing a cross section of styles and subjects.
SUBJECTS FROM THE PAST
When the horse was the main mode of transport for humans and goods, and was used extensively in war and agriculture, horses would have been everywhere. Artists would have seen them every day and been completely familiar with them; they would have drawn and painted them as a matter of course. Horses found their way into many paintings where they weren’t the central subject, and artists who were not horse specialists and had no particular interest in horses still had to paint them – admittedly in a few cases with rather strange results. However, on the whole, most artists learned to draw and paint horses competently, just as they would any other common subject.
As a result, horses have appeared in thousands of drawings and paintings: religious paintings, paintings of mythological subjects, military paintings, portraits of important (or self-important) secular leaders (for whom horses were a symbol of power), paintings of contemporary life, and history paintings. Horses even appear in manuscript illumination. However, the horse has now almost completely disappeared from everyday life in most Western countries and, due to changing fashions in art and the advent of photography, paintings containing horses now form only a tiny part of the mainstream of fine art.
The call for many of the traditional equestrian subjects has gone, though it can be fun to attempt them for our own amusement (it certainly makes one appreciate the huge range and great depth of skills our predecessors had to have). Thankfully, however, some traditional equestrian subjects have survived and a few new ones have emerged, as horses continue to be part of the lives of so many humans, whether owners or admirers. In fact, there are more horses in Britain now than in the early days of the combustion engine, they just aren’t as much in the public eye on a day-to-day basis as they were.
Artists from the past whose horse work in general we should look out for include Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, the Tiepolo family, Theodore Géricault, Sawrey Gilpin, George Stubbs, Edgar Degas, Robert Bevan, Alfred Munnings, George Morland, James Ward, Aelbert Cuyp, Abraham van Calraet, Rosa Bonheur, Alfred De Dreux, Frank Calderon, Lucy Kemp-Welch, and Edwin Landseer.
HORSE RACING
Horses have probably been raced for almost as long as they have been domesticated, but in Britain horse racing became a distinct identifiable genre in the artistic sense at about the same time that racing started to develop formal rules; that is in the time of Charles II, himself a keen rider and ‘running horse’ (racehorse) owner. Early depictions of horse racing in Britain were largely painted by artists who trained elsewhere in Europe, but British artists soon caught on to the idea. There are, for example, some very large paintings of Newmarket Heath by John Wootton and James Seymour from the first half of the eighteenth century showing the Heath dotted with horses in training, being watched by owners and spectators all on horseback (sometimes even falling off).
As the genre developed, conventions emerged for the representation of horses in the act of racing. When in motion, horses were shown in the ‘rocking horse gallop’ with all four legs off the floor at full stretch, forelegs forward, hind legs backward. Though some artists were aware that this might not be an accurate depiction of a moving horse, the convention persisted until the late nineteenth century, when photography proved for certain that this position was not part of the normal leg sequence of the gallop. (Leg sequences for the common gaits are described in Chapter 4.)
The Water’s Edge. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 in (51 × 61 cm) by Roy Miller. A very atmospheric painting, precise and elegant.
As fashions changed, the depiction of horses changed to reflect them. Generally this would just involve showing the way manes and tails were plaited, hogged (trimmed very short) or braided at the time, and, rather more unpleasantly to modern eyes, how tails were being docked, and ears cropped to be fashionably small. Sometimes artists went a little further than reflecting current fashions. For example, at times when small heads were fashionable, they were sometimes shown rather smaller than they would actually have been in order to ‘flatter’ the horse and please the client. There is an interesting section in Sally Mitchell’s classic book The Dictionary of British Sporting Artists showing how fashions in the appearance and tack of horses changed over the years from 1700 to the late 1950s.
As racing scenes became more popular, so did portraits of racehorses. The owner of a horse that had won a major race (and often also a very large bet) naturally wanted a painting of his horse to show to his friends; frequently this would include the jockey in the owner’s colours as well. Indeed, the eighteenth-century painter Ben Marshall is often quoted as saying, ‘I discover many a man who will give me fifty guineas for painting his horse, but who thinks ten guineas too much for painting his wife.’ Some of the racing paintings of the time were quite elaborate, including the trainer, his staff and sometimes the owner as well, going substantially beyond horse portraiture to become group portraits, or social narratives, sometimes described as ‘conversation pieces’. Horses were shown on the gallops, in their stables, and before, during and after racing. Some paintings of racing scenes were huge and incredibly complicated, with many figures in the crowd also shown on horseback, for instance William Powell Frith’s famous The Derby Day (Tate Britain, London), painted in the 1850s.
Artists to look out for in the racing subject area include Thomas Spencer (a contemporary of Seymour), Harry Hall, Emil Adam, Ben Marshall, the Herring family, Peter Biegel, the Alken family, Peter Curling, Michael Lyne and Terence Cuneo.
Heading for Home.Oil, 18 × 14 in (46 × 36 cm) by Hannah Merson. A small, informal painting, almost a sketch, in a modern style.
Modern racing subjects tend to be confined to the formal standing horse portrait (now only occasionally with the jockey on board), horses exercising on the gallops, or the on-course scene, usually within the race itself.
Since the advent of photography, a higher proportion of paintings show horses in motion. Artists before that point seldom depicted horses going faster than a trot. (I suspect they were aware of the problems with the conventional ‘rocking horse’ gallop and so avoided the issue altogether wherever possible.)
HUNTING
Hunting has for centuries been a popular pastime, both for participants and spectators. In Britain, the stag was the original quarry, but the fox was later selected as a quarry species, and eventually overtook the stag in popularity for hunting purposes. Early paintings of hunting show a relatively sedate sport, with ladies riding side-saddle (this was before side-saddles were redesigned in the 1800s to be suitable for jumping).
By the mid-Victorian period, due to changes in agriculture, hunting style and hound breeding, fox hunting had become a far faster sport with longer runs and more jumping. It became an increasingly fashionable pastime in the more affluent parts of British society, and the highest-performing horses became stars.
According to contemporary valuation bands by Goubeaux and Barrier, in their book of 1890 The Exterior of the Horse, a top performing English hunter might cost an astonishing 600 to 750 guineas at that time, far more than their estimates for a senior Army officer’s charger, and between eighteen and twenty-two times the annual wage of a British agricultural labourer at the time. The only horses that were worth more were the top racehorses of the day.
It is hardly surprising therefore, that, in addition to wanting paintings and prints of events out hunting and group portraits of hunt meets etc., owners of hunters, just like owners of racehorses, wanted to commemorate and show off their best horses – in this case often with themselves on board.
Examples of artists whose work included hunting subjects are: Heywood Hardy, Lionel Edwards (facsimiles of whose sketchbooks have been printed), George Denholm Armour, Jacques-Laurent Agasse and Thomas Gooch.
Both racing and hunting scenes became popular subjects for prints, which were distributed widely and spread the popularity of racing and hunting paintings amongst people with smaller incomes who didn’t own horses but were still interested in racing and liked to have pictures of rural life on their walls.
LOOKING AT PAINTINGS
If you visit large country houses in Britain you will often find portraits of both racehorses and favourite hunters, though you may have to seek them out – they are not fashionable at present and therefore are not always displayed in the principal rooms. Some of these paintings are by the finest artists, such as Stubbs, Morland, Gilpin and Herring, and would hold their own against the best paintings in any genre. At the other end of things some are almost naïve in style, though often rather charming. A good place to look for the more naïve examples is often the billiard room, or in dark corridors amongst assorted paintings of alarmingly oblong prize pigs, sheep and cattle.
Ploughing. Oil, 20 × 24 in (51 × 61 cm) by Malcolm Coward.
Exuberance. Oil, 10 × 12 in (25 × 30 cm) by Hannah Merson.
The Pytchley–Winwick Grange. Oil, 16 × 20 in (41 × 51 cm) by Robin Furness. This painting is in the tradition of Lionel Edwards, and is of hunting in the English Midlands. It shows a typical open landscape of fields and trees, a winter sky, hedges being jumped, and a canal bridge in the middle ground. The painting tells a story as well as describing a place.
The simple, quaint style of the most primitive examples varies little, despite the changes that were taking place in mainstream painting at the time, and they seldom have more than rudimentary, often local, landscapes in the background; the standard is more that of a liberated pub sign than an escapee from the National Gallery. One useful way of assessing equestrian paintings from any period is to imagine them without the horse – how good would the painting look as a landscape alone, or stable interior? In the case of the best artists, the remainder will still hold up as a decent painting on its own, without the horse.
The more primitive paintings show some very oddly shaped horses, and are usually far less well observed in general than the ‘mainstream’ paintings done by artists who had more access to training and to the work of their peers and predecessors. Systematic training of artists in art schools didn’t become the norm for artists until after the advent of the Royal Academy in 1768. Prior to that time, most artists learned their trade by being a working pupil in the studio of a practising professional artist or engraver.
In 1766 George Stubbs’ book The Anatomy of the Horse was published for the first time. Stubbs drew and engraved the illustrations, dissecting the specimens himself. Though this wasn’t the first book on the subject in Europe, it was a vast improvement on its predecessors, and is still in print and in use around 250 years later. Although it added greatly to the understanding of horse anatomy, at the time it would have been a very expensive book that few artists could have afforded. It is easy to forget, in these days of very fine public collections of paintings and the ready availability of art books with colour plates at comparatively low cost, that the only way artists of the past could study the great masters or their own contemporaries was via the medium of black-and-white engravings (some of which were back-to-front due to the printing process) or by travelling long distances at a time when travelling was slow, difficult and very expensive, to see the paintings themselves in private collections. Travelling is now much cheaper and easier, books are cheaper and there are many more available (most of which will be printed in colour) and we can visit many national and local state-funded art galleries with very fine collections free of charge. With the advent of the Internet, many galleries have also made some or all of their works available to view online. We are very fortunate to have access to all this, and our predecessors would have envied us; we should make the most of it.
Basil and Blue. Oil, by Susie Whitcombe.
Cooling off, Howick.20 × 26 in (51 × 66 cm).
MODERN SUBJECTS
Horses are now mostly used for leisure pursuits, and therefore usually appear in paintings where they form the subject of the painting rather than being incidental to it. Contemporary horse subjects are now broadly confined to racing, ‘drag’ hunting, pastoral subjects (horses in landscapes, whether wild or not), and horse portraits, either privately commissioned by owners, or of famous racehorses for the general market. More recent horse pursuits, such as show jumping, eventing, and the like, do appear in paintings, though the market for those subjects remains comparatively small and specialized. (Paintings and illustrations of polo have a long and distinguished history in other parts of the world, though polo as a sport only became established in Western Europe fairly recently.)
Some artists are happy specializing in only one or two areas of equestrian painting, but I enjoy working across a broad range of subjects, including those outside the horse world, as this helps me avoid staleness and repetition. However, whatever we choose to draw or paint, we need to get on with doing it, which leads us neatly into Chapter 2.
Study in pencil for the paintingIn Bishops Wood.
CHAPTER 2
ABOUT DRAWING
‘You can’t make a line mean anything unless you know what you intend it to mean.’
W. Frank Calderon, Animal Painting and Anatomy
Drawing is the foundation of everything an artist does. We draw to record, to study, to communicate, to help us see. We draw to understand the three-dimensional form of a horse, to plan compositions of paintings, to record details of tack, to study the work of our predecessors, to explain to fellow artists a problem we have, to capture a fleeting movement of a colt in a field. We draw in sketchbooks, on expensive handmade paper, on the backs of envelopes. At the most fundamental level, drawing is our language. When we paint, however freely, we are still drawing, whether we realize it or not. Every decision about where paint goes is drawing.
Traditionally, art schools didn’t allow students to paint until they had demonstrated that they were competent draughtsmen. Though I wouldn’t suggest following quite such an austere policy, I would certainly agree that a good grounding in drawing from life is an absolute necessity for anyone who wishes to learn to paint well. If an artist’s draughtsmanship is weak they may get away with it for a while, though they won’t fool more experienced artists, but eventually their deficiencies will restrict their development as a painter and limit the sort of subjects that they are able to attempt.
Fortunately, just about anyone can learn to draw from life to a reasonable level of competence, though it requires time and hard work. It’s important to remember that even the best draughtsmen struggle with their work at times, but we all have to persevere. None of us can ever afford to stop practising, as there is always more to learn. Luckily, most of the time this is as enjoyable as it is challenging. (For those completely new to drawing horses from life, you will find some guidance in Chapter 3.)
As stated in the Introduction, it is every artist’s responsibility to develop their own style. Within traditional representational drawing there are huge variations not only in style, but in technique, materials, scale, measuring systems and mark making. No methods are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in themselves; they can only be appropriate or inappropriate according to the purpose of the drawing in question. However, what all representational drawings do have in common is this: they are recording a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. If we are to do this effectively, whatever our style or methods of working, then we need to be able to do two things: to observe objectively, and to record accurately. Even if we choose to distort or change what we see, we should be doing this from a point of understanding, rather than one of ignorance. In the words of the artist Harold Speed, ‘If you can’t paint what you see, how can you paint what you imagine?’
OBSERVING OBJECTIVELY (LEARNING TO SEE)
Seeing objectively sounds as though it should be the easiest part of drawing, but it is probably the most difficult thing that an artist has to learn to do, and we never stop having to work at it. It is all too easy to ‘see’ what you assume is there, what your ‘knowledge’ tells you ought to be there, or what your personal taste would rather like to be there, rather than what really is there. Here are some examples of failings in the ‘seeing’ process.
Making Assumptions
Most people know that a horse’s two forelegs are the same length. But they won’t necessarily look the same length. If one leg is further away from you than the other, it will look shorter. This is a manifestation of perspective, and is called foreshortening (perspective and foreshortening will be covered in more detail later). The closer you are to the horse, the bigger that difference in length will be. If, because you assume the legs are the same length, you make them the same length on your drawing, then you will be in trouble; this trouble will get worse as you go on to draw other parts of the horse.
Over-Standardization
If you spend too much time studying anatomy and conformation and not enough on drawing individual horses from life with all their individual quirks, you may subconsciously get into the habit of tidying up every horse to more ‘ideal’ conformation, or to more standard proportions for its type. Doing this consciously because you choose to in a very specific situation may be appropriate. Doing it without thinking (such as when working on a commission of a dearly loved old horse, part of whose charm to his owner is that he’s always had a crooked foreleg and a strange way of standing) is incompetence. The great George Stubbs painted a horse called ‘Bandy’, and the painting clearly shows the bandy leg that gave the horse his name, and his painting of ‘Molly Longlegs’ speaks for itself. Like humans, few horses have perfect proportions and conformation; that’s often what makes them interesting. It is necessary to be able to observe objectively first before you can consider tinkering with reality.
Personal Tastes
Personal preferences can subconsciously distort what we see. If you prefer a Thoroughbred or lighter type of horse, it is all too easy when drawing a cob to subconsciously underestimate its bulk or the thickness of its limbs. To make a horse pulling a gypsy varda (caravan) look like it ought to be running in the Champion Hurdle is, to be polite, a little unconvincing.
TECHNIQUES FOR ACHIEVING OBJECTIVITY
Achieving genuine objectivity in observation requires a lot of practice. There are some specific techniques artists use to help them to avoid the traps mentioned above. Checking verticals and horizontals, comparing proportions, and drawing ‘negative shapes’ are quick and effective. A more complex method that some artists employ to assist them in accurate observation is ‘measurement’. If used correctly, measurement is an excellent objective way of checking observations. All these techniques will be described later in this book.
RECORDING ACCURATELY
Once you have made your observation, you then have to record it. Though in many ways this is the easier part of the two, it still requires skill and practice. I generally recommend that people work in line alone without any shading when learning to draw, when drawing from life, or when dealing with any difficulty other than a specifically tonal one. Line drawing makes it easier to get to grips with proportion, scale, composition, and structure. If corrections need to be made, line drawings are also easier and quicker to correct. A clean line, suitably broken and weighted, suits this purpose better than a scribbled or ‘hairy’ one, which can make a drawing unreadable and flat. Hairy lines tend to average out into one woolly contour, losing any carefully observed subtleties in the lines. Shading over a line drawing, whether done up to lines or across them, can also cause a significant loss of information from the lines.
I don’t encourage the routine use of erasers for making corrections. I was taught to draw without one, and it taught me to think about the marks I made and to place them accurately.
Once you have made your observation, decide where your particular line needs to be, and what its shape should be, and then put it down lightly and cleanly ‘in one go’. If you make a mistake, don’t mess about with it or panic and reach for the eraser. Calm down, work out what has gone wrong, and then just correct the line with a slightly heavier one. Be methodical about it.
As a drawing evolves, you may wish to add some more detail to a line. There is still no need to reach for an eraser, just add your new information with a slightly heavier line. This makes the drawing a record of the ‘seeing’ process, giving it a richness which is pleasing to the viewer; it shares with them your own pleasure in your exploration of your subject. In effect, the drawing is telling a story, saying ‘first I saw this, then I looked again more closely and saw that’. Only if you make a very big mistake, which will continue to confuse your drawing whatever you do, should you give up and rub a line out.
The exception to this is where a drawing has been specially commissioned to be in a style that doesn’t permit any visible corrections, such as a technical illustration, for example.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL FORM
When we draw, it is all too easy to become absorbed in observing edges and to forget that horses aren’t flat. A horse is a substantial animal, wide in the body and around half a ton in weight (if a horse is lying down on its side, you can more easily see how bulky its body is). The overall contour around the horse’s body that is observed from a single viewpoint is not a continuous single edge, it is composed of the outer surfaces of many component parts which are overlapping and crossing over each other. If you draw an outer contour as a single continuous line with no breaks or variation of weight (that is, the thickness and blackness of the line), you are not ‘explaining’ these surfaces and structures, and the horse will look like a cardboard cut-out, or as if it has been made from a wire coat-hanger.
A drawing showing overlapping lines, broken lines and variations of line weight being used to describe the roundness of the form. Where a line has needed correction, a new, heavier line has been added, rather than rubbing earlier lines out. The background has also been taken into account, which gives the drawing some depth, and the horse some space to live in.
Building up lines as we observe more can add substance to a drawing, but making lines ‘woolly’ from the outset tends to obscure subtleties in shape and detail, making the drawing rather flat.
Drawing contours without consideration of how forms overlap and/or blend into each other makes a drawing appear very flat, and can cause confusion later if we wish to work from the drawing.
We need to be able to understand what we are seeing in three dimensions if we are to make structural sense of it when we record it in only two. To develop an understanding of form it is necessary to work from life, where it is possible to walk up to the horse and/or around it to clarify our understanding of the form when we are unsure about what we are seeing. Drawing from a photograph doesn’t help to develop this understanding, as the horse has already been resolved into two dimensions.
In theory, a perfect draughtsman doesn’t need to know any anatomy or conformation to draw accurately; they will observe completely objectively and record exactly what is there. In practice, and provided it is used thoughtfully and with discretion, a knowledge of basic anatomy and conformation can be genuinely helpful when working from life; it can help us see and understand things we might otherwise miss. For example, a contour may not be the result of a single muscle, but of two muscles that overlap each other. Being aware of those muscles may prompt an artist to look more carefully, and therefore see and represent the form more accurately.
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE AND FORESHORTENING
Linear Perspective
Linear perspective is a huge subject, and there are essentially three ways to approach it. You can study it in great detail and apply it rigidly, you can ignore the theory altogether and observe everything you paint purely objectively, or you can find some combination of the two that suits the way you work.
If you draw and paint only from your own observation, provided you observe accurately (and that’s a big proviso) you have little to worry about. If you work a great deal from your imagination, then you may need to make an extensive study of perspective theory in order to ensure that your paintings have spatial coherence. Most of us fall somewhere between the two; we work mostly from observation, but at times wish to add things to, or move things within, our compositions. In such cases, we need to be aware of at least the elementary aspects of linear perspective. For most paintings of horses, the most important things to be aware of concerning perspective are:
Things look smaller the further away from you they are.Things at your eye level will stay at a constant level.Things at a uniform height above your eye level will appear to fall towards your eye level as they recede away from you.Things at a uniform height below your eye level will appear to rise up towards your eye level as they recede away from you.Verticals stay vertical (a big approximation, but it works for most situations the equestrian artist is likely to encounter).In practice, if you and all your horses are standing on level ground, their feet will appear to move up towards your eye level the further away from you they are, and any parts of them that are above your eye level will gradually appear to drop towards your eye level. Any parts of the horses actually at your eye level will stay at that level. This automatically means they will appear to get smaller as they go further away, fulfilling the first rule.
In this detail of a drawing from later in the book, the lines describing the shapes of surfaces cross the outer contour of the horse, establishing the form.
For simple paintings of horses outdoors, remembering the above rules and using a little common sense should carry you through most of the time. However, if you embark on subjects involving special cases, such as where the ground is not flat, or with horses on different levels, a specialized book on perspective (such as Rex Vicat Cole’s book, see Bibliography) can help.
If you wish to add a horse into a composition where there are other horses, a knowledge of perspective should help you to work out how tall it should be wherever you put it. However, if you do decide to do this, not only its size, but also its degree of foreshortening (see below) should be appropriate for its distance from you. Getting both of these things right is not easy. Potential problems that can arise when using mixed source materials in one composition are described in Chapter 7.
One last point: don’t forget that the sky has perspective too. Clouds which are the same size and at the same height will gradually appear smaller and appear to drop down towards the horizon as they recede into the distance (because they are above your eye level).
Foreshortening
Foreshortening could be said to be another manifestation of perspective. When artists talk of foreshortening they usually mean the way perspective operates within an object. Foreshortening is most pronounced in an object’s appearance when we are close to it, because it is determined by the relative distances from us of different parts of that object. If we are a long way from an object, no one part of it is significantly further away from us than any other part as a proportion of our distance from either of them. If we are very close to it, some parts may be as much as twice as far away from us as others, so they will appear half the size of their closer counterparts of the same actual size.
One of the classic cases of perspective – telegraph poles getting smaller and closer together as they recede, their tops dropping towards my eye level.
Excessive foreshortening can easily cause a beautifully proportioned, well-muscled Thoroughbred with a fine, delicate head to appear to have a huge, ill-proportioned head, terrible conformation, the forehand of a carthorse and the hindquarters of a goat. It happens. I have seen plenty of examples of it. No client commissioning a portrait will thank you for that.
There is no law that says you can’t draw (or paint) very foreshortened horses. But if you do decide to, be careful to keep it consistent. Don’t foreshorten one part of a horse and not others; if you do it will look even more like the horse has been assembled from a kit of parts that don’t match. The trouble with extreme foreshortening is that even if you get it ‘right’ it can still look ‘wrong’, ugly, or even comical.
There is another disadvantage to extreme foreshortening. Because it only happens when we are very close to things, when the resulting work is on the wall it makes the viewer feel dragged as close to the subject as the artist was. This is acceptable for a gimmick occasionally, but such paintings can be very difficult to live with; they are unsettling and ‘in your face’, and it is in their nature that the main thing you see when you look at them is the foreshortening as it swamps all other impressions. If that’s your aim, fine. But if you are trying to achieve other things, particularly anything elegant, subtle, restful, or complex, you will be fighting the dominance of the foreshortening all the time, a battle you’re almost certainly doomed to lose.
Very foreshortened subjects can be fun to do for a change, and drawing them can be useful when trying to understand form and anatomy. They are an excellent, though demanding, exercise when learning to measure at an advanced level. But don’t let foreshortening run away with you. In the words of W. Frank Calderon, ‘By purposely adopting some peculiarity of manner, some trick of design or execution, which becomes a sort of trade-mark, an artist does himself no good, for, although it may procure him a certain amount of publicity for a time, as the novelty passes away this soon disappears.’ This is a concept that can be applied to more things in painting and drawing than just excessive foreshortening.
The same head, but from different distances. The example on the right is from so close that the head has become very foreshortened.
100 feet (30m) from nearest leg.
33 feet (10m) from nearest leg.
13 feet (4m) from nearest leg.
The Effects of Foreshortening
The diagrams here show the effects of foreshortening and how its effects vary from different distances. For each pose, Flair’s position didn’t alter as I moved away to photograph her. We were on exactly the same level ground throughout. The distances measured are between me and her closest hoof.
At approximately 100 feet (30 metres) she appears to be broadly in proportion. Even on the back/front views, where any height differences would be most pronounced, the difference in height between fore hoof and withers, and hind hoof and croup (the same height on this horse), is only about 6 per cent – not very much. On the ¾ views the difference is barely noticeable.
At approximately 33 feet (10 metres) proportional changes are emerging in the ¾ poses and there are now clear height differences from the front to the back of the horse in the back and front views; a difference of around 12 per cent. Where her head is closest to us, it is beginning to look rather large, and when furthest away it is looking rather small. However, none of these poses look very strange or unnatural (though some are a trifle unflattering) and some are quite interesting in shape. Here, the foreshortening is interesting without being intrusive.
However, when we get to the closest views, from around 13 feet (4 metres) the foreshortening becomes much more pronounced. The maximum difference in height between her forequarters and hindquarters is around 30 per cent. Her head looks enormous when closest to us, and ridiculously tiny when furthest away. Even the side-on pose is showing significant differences – the legs on her right side are noticeably shorter than those on her left, and her right hind leg also looks shorter than her right foreleg. (I am standing on a line from her shoulder at 90 degrees to her spine, so the hind legs are further away from me than the forelegs. This slight difference is negligible when I am further away.) I’m also looking more down on her hooves. These poses might be interesting to draw or make studies of, but it is difficult to see them working well as part of a broader composition where everything else had to be foreshortened to match, and they would be likely to cause friction and disappointment with most clients wanting portraits.
When it comes to photography, because foreshortening is about relative distances, it is independent of the lens used. To maintain consistency between these poses, I used photography as a basis, but had I made drawings from similar positions, the results would have been the same. The only way to lessen the effects of foreshortening on a pose is to move further from the subject. To make the horse large enough in a photograph, that may also mean using a stronger magnifying lens. But it isn’t the lens that is solving the foreshortening problem, it is the greater distance. Using a long lens too close will cause exactly the same trouble as any other normal lens at the same distance.
100 feet (30m) from nearest leg.
33 feet (10m) from nearest leg.
13 feet (4m) from nearest leg.
Drawing for the painting Reflections, Appleby, showing observations of the way horses and their surroundings are reflected in water (and also the way the horses and figures appear to get smaller as they go further away due to perspective). In this case my eye level was above the horses as I was sitting on the riverbank. Notice how the reflection of each object is as far below the water level as the object itself is above it at the point that the particular object touches the water. This is why, in the reflection, the head of one of the central riders appears to be at the same level as the bridge parapet – the bridge touches the water at a point much higher up the painting than the point at which the rider’s horse’s legs touch the water.
REFLECTIONS AND SHADOWS
In general, when it comes to reflections and shadows, I prefer to work more on observation than theory wherever possible, as it is all too easy to calculate such things incorrectly. Theory is all very well, but there are so many variables in real life that have to be taken into account that accurate observation at the time is always the most straightforward option.
When working from life outdoors there is one essential difference to remember between shadows and reflections – they may both appear and disappear as the light changes, but the shadows will move as well; the sun moves round at the rate of 15 degrees per hour, and also rises in the sky during the morning and falls during the afternoon. Shadows can move and change their shape a great deal in the space of an hour.
If you think you may be doing a lot of work involving reflections and/or shadows, or if you are interested in the optics/geometry involved, then I suggest that you study the relevant chapters in Rex Vicat Cole’s book on perspective listed in the Bibliography, as he explains both reflections and shadows very well.
Reflections
Reflections of an object in water will appear to be the same distance below the water level as the object in the water is directly above it; in effect, the water acts like a plane mirror.
