Painting and Reinterpreting the Masters E-Book

Sara Lee Roberts

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

For centuries, artists have learnt from the art that came before them. This book explains how to make paint meaningful and imaginative responses to the works of the masters. There are step by step examples to illustrate how to get started and how to use thumbnail pencil sketches. Advice is given on how to make larger and slower drawings, and then oil-sketch copies of the masters' work. The author studies the composition, rhythms and colours of the masters and uses their work as a source to practise and understand paintings, and as a springboard for your own discovery and invention. This book explores how a brave and imaginative use of colour can reinterpret paintings to achieve a greater and more expressive effect. Images from the earliest art to the twentieth century are included to feed your creative imagination, and examples of contemporary interpretations to show you the way. With over two hundred inspiring images, it is a unique guide to developing your own artistic voice while studying and enjoying some of the art world's greatest treasures.

Leseprobe

PAINTINGAND REINTERPRETINGTHE MASTERS

PAINTING ANDREINTERPRETINGTHE MASTERS

SARA LEE ROBERTS

First published in 2020 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2020

© Sara Lee Roberts 2020

Frontispiece: Fig. 1Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1848, oil on canvas, 44 × 36cm. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 674 6

AcknowledgementsPhotography of author’s paintings by Justin Piperger (www.justinpip.com) and Richard Ivey.

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1  How the Masters learnt from earlier Masters

CHAPTER 2  Why is drawing so important?

CHAPTER 3  Making thumbnail sketches

CHAPTER 4  Making larger and slower drawings

CHAPTER 5  Making quick oil sketch copies

CHAPTER 6  Forgery and copying – what’s the difference?

CHAPTER 7  Using masterpieces as a resource

CHAPTER 8  Moving on from copying to making an imaginative response

CHAPTER 9  Moving on further

CHAPTER 10  Engaging with colour

CHAPTER 11  Seeing what paint can do

Further information

Index

Preface

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new as new offers of old.

JASPER JOHNS, B. 1930

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

HENRI MATISSE, 1869–1954

For many years I have looked at the work of the Masters, both in reproductions and in museums, have worked from them to develop my practice, and have devised and taught courses on the subject. I believe that it is both healthy and helpful to work in the full knowledge of what has already been made.

This book approaches the study of the Masters systematically. Starting with making drawings, then oil copies and then responses rather than copies, the artist travels through a process that facilitates the development of their skill and personal style. If you have an open mind and are prepared to put in the work, the approach laid out in this book will be effective for you.

Fig. 2 Roman wall painting: Perseus and Andromeda in Landscape, from the imperial villa at Boscotrecase, Augustan Period: last decade of the first century BC, fresco, 159.39 × 118.75cm. This wall painting has the look of a Surrealist painting even though it was painted almost 2,000 years earlier than the beginning of the Surrealist movement. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

I have written each chapter after making the work for the illustrations. Thus, I share my own journey with you, with its moments of discovery. I have been honest and have included the moments of disappointment that every artist has. In fact, these moments are often the most illuminating, teaching us more than the moments of success do.

As this journey is a personal one, and you are necessarily a different artist from me, the works that you will make will lead you to different discoveries from mine. You should think of each chapter as an illustration of the principles to follow rather than as a strict manual of instructions.

There are step-by-step examples, but much of the process involves you working out for yourself how to proceed with the help of the book’s guidelines. In the later chapters about making responses rather than copies, I do not show step-by-step examples because I do not think it is helpful to you if I remove the necessity of your own invention. Henri Matisse wrote that an artist is an explorer. Think of this book as a guide on how to travel, to have with you on your journey. Each reader’s journey will lead to a different place.

How long you spend making work from each chapter depends partly on how experienced you are. As drawing underpins all art, I suggest that you follow the order of the book and start with thumbnail sketches. Once you have mastered making them, move on to making larger, slower drawings, but from then on, return to making thumbnails throughout your journey as they are an invaluable resource, surprisingly so given how small they are and how quickly they can be made. You can make work from the master works that are illustrated in this book, or from examples that you find yourself from books, in museums and on the internet.

At the end of the book there is a reading list. The books on this list have all helped me on my journey. They are mostly written by artists – the ones who write straightforwardly about their process and their approach, rather than about theories. Reading is an important supplement to making work. Painting is a non-verbal form of communication but thinking about why you want to make paintings and about how others have made them is essential if you want to be an original artist. Painting is a solitary pursuit. Reading can put you in touch with other artists’ minds and so make you feel less alone.

The paintings from the past referred to in this book are from all periods, ranging from ancient Egyptian times up to the twentieth century. I have taken the view that there is something to learn from every period and that it is not necessary to work in chronological order. I have included some art historical information in the text, and throughout the book there are quotes from artists, all of which have been taken from the books listed in the bibliography.

I would like to thank the various museums that allow free reproduction of their open access images that I have used in this book. They are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art Washington, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, the Rijksmuseum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Without their generosity this book would not have been possible. When I have referred to images that I am unable to show you for copyright reasons, I suggest that you go online to look at them.

The great French writer Marcel Proust spent some time writing in the style of other writers before he embarked on his epic twelve-volume novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. He wrote, in his essay ‘Contre Sainte Beuve’, that ‘It is necessary to make voluntary pastiche in order to avoid making involuntary pastiche.’ That sentiment is a reminder of an important strand to this book: that it is essential to see and understand what has already been made. If you work in an ivory tower, you may be convinced that what you are making is brilliantly original, but it might not be. For the same reason, it is as important to go to see exhibitions of contemporary work as it is to see those of the Old Masters. You do not have to like everything you see, but you do need to know what has been done.

The Jasper Johns quote at the beginning of this preface sums up the notion that all good art exists outside of its time once it has been made. Old art offers us insight and understanding that we can use to make new art, just as much as making new art helps us appreciate and assimilate the lessons that are to be found by working from the Masters. There is a conversation between all art that we can be part of.

Fig. 3 Detail from Fig. 2.

CHAPTER 1

How the Masters learnt from earlier Masters

What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

EUGÈNE DELACROIX, 1798–1863

The lithograph by Delacroix in Fig. 5, made in 1833, shows an image from which he made a series of paintings. Over a hundred years later Picasso and Matisse shared a great love of Delacroix’s work. In 1954, when Matisse died, partly to honour his friend, Picasso made fifteen versions of Women of Algiers. They are a fine and startling reinvention of Delacroix’s image, a perfect example of an artist taking ideas and inspiration from art of the past.

Fig. 4 Self-portrait with Two Pupils by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1785, oil on canvas, 210.8 × 151.1cm. Lablille-Guiard was admitted to the French Académie Royale at a time when only four women were allowed to be members. This painting is thought to have been a propaganda piece, arguing for the place of women in the Academy (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Fig. 5 The Women of Algiers by Eugène Delacroix, 1833, lithograph. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

For centuries, artists have learnt from the Masters and taken ideas from their work. In this chapter I will give you examples.

Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art – if a work cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

PABLO PICASSO, 1881–1973

The quote from Picasso at the top of this page is worth examining. Picasso was a gifted artist who could paint in any style from a very young age. In 1947, at the height of his fame, he was given the opportunity to have some of his paintings hung in the main galleries of the Louvre, placed alongside any of the great Spanish and French Masters that he chose. Apparently, he was nervous and apprehensive, concerned as to whether his work would stand up to the works of the artists that he so admired. Once his paintings had been hung, he became more confident and exclaimed, ‘You see – it’s the same thing! It’s the same thing!’

The notion that works made in the past by the Masters are not intrinsically different from good work made later appears to be obvious, yet the very fact that we refer to ‘Masters’ suggests that we should place these artists and their work on a pedestal; that we should not have the presumption to think of our own work as being related to their work. Indeed, there is often a hushed reverence in museums. And yet in researching this book, I have found numerous examples of celebrated artists both blatantly and subtly stealing or taking ideas from other artists. Even Rembrandt, as I will discuss later, took ideas from earlier works.

Picasso explained to André Malraux that he had an imaginary ‘Museum without walls’ in his mind where he lived with the painters who mattered to him, as much as he lived with the people with whom he shared his life. He said, ‘I paint against the canvases that are important to me – you’ve got to make what doesn’t exist, what has never been made before. That’s painting: for a painter it means wrestling with painting.’

Fig. 6 Portrait of a Youth with a Surgical Cut in One Eye, AD190–210. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Fig. 6 shows an Egyptian portrait of a young man, made 1,800 years ago, and yet it could easily be a portrait of a contemporary young man. As Picasso said, it is still alive. The art of the past does not need to be treated as separate from the art we make today. It is a rich source of ideas and inspiration that we can turn to and use.

Fig. 7 Copy after Delacroix’s Bark of Dante by Edouard Manet, 1850, oil on canvas, 33 × 41cm. Delacroix painted the original work in 1822 when he was twenty-two. Manet made this copy thirty-seven years later. Manet’s colours are less vibrant and the handling of the paint less confident than Delacroix’s. Manet was copying in order to learn, whereas Delacroix was painting in order to, as he wrote to his sister, ‘gain a little recognition’. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The term ‘Old Master ‘ is usually taken to refer to any painter of skill who worked in Europe before 1800. For the purposes of this book, I will go beyond this date and include artists working up to 1960 (and drop the ‘Old’). Until this time, students in art schools had always been expected to learn observational drawing, first in the ‘Cast Room’ from statues and then in the ‘Life Room’ from drawing naked models. After widespread unrest in art schools in the late 1960s the syllabus (and in many cases the teaching staff) was changed. Emphasis was placed on originality and shock value. In the 1980s and 1990s, with the cult of the celebrity artist and a celebrity status that could be won almost overnight after a degree show – different from the fame of artists such as Michelangelo, which was won after many years of building a reputation – the link with the past was broken.

This change in how artists are judged by society and the art market was a radical shift. Life drawing was no longer routinely taught in art schools, the next generation of teachers themselves had not been taught observational drawing, and some art schools moved physically away from the museums they had been part of: the Ruskin moved out of the Ashmolean Museum into a building on Oxford High Street and the Royal College of Art moved out of the V&A into a brand new building at the other end of the Exhibition Road. Clearly these moves were partly in response to a need for more space, but being separate from those museums must have consolidated the idea that new art should be unaffected by art of the past. However, recently there has been a return to learning from the past and exhibitions linking contemporary art to earlier art have become fashionable.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, 1821–67

Fig. 8 Detail from a wall painting from Room H of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Incorporating the past into the present

Charles Baudelaire, a poet and art critic who was a contemporary and great admirer of Eugène Delacroix, coined the term ‘modernity’. His notion that a work of art is made up equally of ideas from the past and the ideas, fashions and influences of the present seems to me to make sense. He points out that every age has its own ‘gait, glance, gesture’ and that we derive particular pleasure from recognizing what he calls ‘the essential quality of being in the present’. Artists who wish that they were living in the past and who feel that the contemporary art world has nothing to offer them, tend to make poor and sentimental imitations of the Old Masters. On the other hand, contemporary artists who are completely uninterested in the art of the past tend to make fashionable but rather banal images. Neither are making art that combines both the eternal and the modern. This book will encourage you to.

The images that I have worked from for this book have had to be those which are in ‘the public domain’. That is, they have been deemed out of copyright. There is not currently an agreement across the whole museum world as to which paintings should be in the public domain. Sadly for me, none of the museums in the UK currently allow free reproduction of images, even if the artist has been dead for hundreds of years. Luckily, several great museums, mostly in America, have recently decided to allow free reproduction of many of their paintings. For copyright reasons, I am not able to show reproductions of the many contemporary paintings which have been made in response to works of the Masters. There are interesting reinterpretations of the Masters’ work being made by contemporary artists now and it is good to look at them so that you see the breadth of what is possible. In Chapter 8 I will give you suggestions that you can look up on the internet.

Fig. 9 Christ Expelling the Money Lenders, from The Small Passion by Albrecht Dürer, 1508, woodcut, 12.6 × 9.8cm. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Fig. 10 Detail from Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1635, etching, 13.6 × 17.7cm. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

An early example of a great artist copying and responding to the work of an earlier Master is Rembrandt’s use of the works of Dürer. Figs 9 and 10 were made 127 years apart. Fig. 9 is a woodcut by Dürer, who lived from 1471 to 1528. Rembrandt, who lived from 1606 to 1669, made the image in Fig. 10, a detail from an etching made in 1635.

Rembrandt is known to have owned a large collection of prints, which included many by Dürer. The figure of Christ holding up a whip, which is mirrored in the Rembrandt print, appears to be directly inspired by the Dürer figure. The folds and shaded areas of cloth, the angle of the raised arm are startlingly similar. Rembrandt is thought to have made over 2,000 drawings and nearly 300 prints. He was perfectly capable of drawing Christ in any position he chose, and yet he took his inspiration for Christ’s stance directly from Dürer. The lines in Rembrandt’s etching are more fluid than those in the Dürer. The technique for making a woodcut may partly explain the difference, but contained within the difference between Dürer and Rembrandt’s Christs is also an expression of their different styles.

If you look carefully, Dürer’s Christ figure is slightly more upright and the lines are firmer and clearer than in the Rembrandt etching. The Rembrandt figure is more suggestive and expressive. Dürer’s works generally have a strong clarity and separation of forms, whereas in Rembrandt’s there is an expressive interweaving of space and form.

Fig. 11 Detail from Fig. 9.

Fig. 12 Ecce Homo by Jacques Callot, etching, 1618. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Fig. 13 Christ Presented to the People by Rembrandt van Rijn, drypoint print, 1655. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Rembrandt is also known to have owned a large number of prints by the then celebrated artist Jacques Callot, who was fourteen years older than him. Look at Figs 12 and 13. Fig. 12 is Jacques Callot’s etching titled Ecce Homo. Fig. 13 is Rembrandt’s etching of the same subject, made thirty-seven years later. In this case, Rembrandt has not directly copied any of the figures. He has, however, taken the ideas about the setting – the elevated platform in front of a large open doorway, the large courtyard setting with people hanging out of windows to have a look at Christ, and the strong diagonal shadows with the sun clearly on the right. It is reasonable to suggest that if it were not for the Callot print, he would not have composed his etching the way he did. Here you see another example of how Rembrandt took ideas from an older artist and presented them in his own style.

Fig. 14 Reclining Female Nude by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1658, etching, drypoint and engraving, 8.1 × 15.9cm. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Fig. 15 Study of a Woman, Viewed from the Back by Eugène Delacroix, etching, 1833. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Figs 14 and 15 are both etchings. Fig. 14 is by Rembrandt, and Fig. 15 is by Delacroix, made 175 years later. It is reasonable to think that Delacroix was inspired by Rembrandt’s etching when he made this. We know that he was a great admirer of Rembrandt and owned a large collection of etchings and drawings. In his journal he says, ‘The further I go on in life, the more I feel within me that truth is what is most beautiful, and most rare. This is to be found again in Rembrandt’s mysterious conception of his subjects, in the deep naturalness of expressions and gestures.’ Again, we see that contained within the difference between these two quite similar etchings (in this case one is not the direct copy of the other) is a clear sense of style, Delacroix being the more overtly sensual artist.

Fig. 16 Reclining Venus by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, oil on canvas, 116 × 168cm. (The Walters Art Museum)

Fig. 17 Olympia by Edouard Manet, 1867, etching, 12.4 × 20.3cm. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Figs 16 and 17 also show a link across time between paintings. Fig. 16 is a copy of a painting made by Titian Vecelli, known as Titian, in 1538, called The Venus of Urbino. For copyright reasons I cannot show the original. This extremely faithful copy was made by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1822 and is the same size as the original painting by Titian in Rome. Fig. 16 is an etching by Edouard Manet made after his famous painting Olympia, which he painted in 1863. You can see an image of this painting on the Musée d’Orsay website. It caused a scandal when it was exhibited in Paris, as it showed what seemed to be a prostitute, brazenly engaging the viewer with an unapologetic gaze. Critics at the time referred to her ‘shamelessly flexed hand’.

Every age has its own carriage, its own expressions, its gestures.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being in the present.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Manet based his composition for Olympia on that of Titian’s Venus of Urbino as well as on a painting by Goya, Nude Maja, which hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. This painting had also caused a scandal as it depicted the model’s very confrontational gaze towards the viewer and showed her pubic hair. The woman in Manet’s painting is slimmer than Titian’s Venus. The dog (which symbolized fidelity) is replaced with a cat (which symbolized prostitution) and her head is more upright, the gaze more confrontational than in the Titian, more like the gaze in the Goya.

The brushstrokes are much more visible in Manet’s work than in Titian’s. Altogether Manet’s painting is very much of its own time: it pays homage to both Titian and Goya’s paintings, while also taking ideas from them.

Fig. 18 Fishing by Edouard Manet, 1862–3, oil on canvas 76.8 × 123.2cm. (The Metropolitan Museum, New York)

In an earlier painting by Manet shown in Fig. 18, he quite openly took elements from works by Rubens. Manet visited Delacroix in his studio in 1855. Delacroix advised him to ‘Look at Rubens, draw inspiration from Rubens, copy Rubens.’ This painting was made in the year that Manet married his fiancée Suzanne Leenhoff. He painted himself and Suzanne in the same clothes and pose as the couple in Rubens’ landscape Park of the Chateau de Steen, which is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, placing the figures on the right-hand side of the composition rather than in the centre as in the original by Rubens.

The rainbow and the dog are taken from another Rubens landscape, Landscape with a Rainbow, which is in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Manet’s dog is a mirror image of Rubens’ so it is possible that he traced it from a reproduction. The figures in a boat are reminiscent of the figures in one of Raphael’s cartoons The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.

This painting is arguably a bit crude. The couple in the foreground are not quite believably in the landscape. It is as if they are standing in front of a painted backdrop. However, Manet was an accomplished and experienced painter by this time, so it is possible that he deliberately made this painting look artificial and that he wanted the viewer to partake of his enjoyment at playing around with the images of the old masters.

Fig. 19 Copy of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, oil on wooden panel, 57 × 42cm.

In the same year, Manet went on to paint one of his now most celebrated compositions, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. This painting hangs now in the Louvre in Paris. We have not been able to reproduce an image for copyright reasons, but you can look at it online. I have made a small copy of it, which you can see in Fig. 19.

Manet submitted Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe to the Salon in 1863, but it was rejected. He then exhibited in the Salon des Refusés where it caused quite a stir. It is a large painting at 2.08 x 2.64 metres, which is a size that in those days was normally reserved for religious or historical subjects. The scene is of a picnic in a landscape similar to the woods near the Seine just outside Paris. The two men are dressed in thoroughly contemporary clothing. The right-hand man is wearing a type of hat that would normally be worn indoors. The naked woman’s gaze is both outward towards the viewer and yet also an inward gaze, which gives her an independent and unashamed look. Critics at the time disparaged Manet’s painting technique, calling it flabby. They were puzzled by the seeming lack of interaction between the foreground figures and the woman in the stream and thought it vulgar to paint a naked woman in such a prosaic setting. Many viewers laughed openly at the painting.

Fig. 20 Marcantonio Raimondi, engraving after Raphael’s The Judgement of Paris, 1510–20, 29.2 × 43.7cm. Marcantonio Raimondi was considered the foremost engraver at the time. Raphael made many compositions for him to engrave. (The Metropolitan Museum, New York)

In making this composition, Manet had once again borrowed from the art of the masters before him. He had taken the exact pose of the three foreground figures from Mercantonio Raimondi’s well known engraving The Judgement of Paris, which was itself made from a drawing by Raphael. Look at Fig. 20 and you can see how closely Manet copied the disposition of the three figures. The placing of their feet, the relationships between their knees and angles of their legs are almost identical. And yet the Raphael composition is of a mythical scene in which everyone is naked. The two figures on the right are river gods and the woman is a naiad or water nymph. Manet, by taking these acceptably naked mythical deities and placing them in his own composition in modern clothes for the men and in a nakedness suggestive of prostitution for the woman, was provoking a shocked response, whilst at the same time communicating his belief that he was an equal to the great artists of the past.

Fig. 21 La Toilette by Edouard Manet, 1862, etching, 28.6 × 21.4cm. (The Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Fig. 22 Diana at the Bath by Rembrandt, 1631, etching. (The National Gallery of Art, Washington)

The semi-naked woman in the stream in Manet’s painting is close in style and atmosphere to the very many etchings that Rembrandt made of semi-naked women bathing in streams. Fig. 21 is of an etching made by Manet in 1862, so possibly done in preparation for his Déjeuner painting, of a woman clutching a robe and looking directly at the viewer. Fig. 22 shows an etching by Rembrandt of the same subject, but with a different body type. Interestingly, the gaze of the woman is very like that in the Manet painting; a combination of an outward gaze that confronts the viewer and a wistful inward gaze.

In the following chapters I will show you how to understand, absorb and use for yourselves the essential properties that are in the paintings that we can see in the great museums. I will show you how to make quick oil sketches from the Masters and how to then move away from copying. At no point in the book am I suggesting that you should make work that is like mine. In the later chapters the work that I suggest you do will not be easy. It is painful and difficult to think about making work that is true to yourself and not like others. It is especially painful when confronted with the quality of the great Masters.

Fig. 23 Detail from Fig. 20 showing the three seated figures that Manet copied.

Final thoughts

For many centuries, artists learnt their trade by copying from the earlier Masters. It was understood that they would go on to make their own contribution to the story of art, but not until they had studied and learnt from the past. There is no reason why we should not do the same now.

We have an incredible array of images to choose to work from. Our museums are full of great art. Reproductions in books and images on the internet are also available to us as sources of inspiration. As long as we are not wanting to make weak imitations, we can set about using these to improve our skill level and give us ideas.

Do not be shy about engaging with the art of the so-called Masters. They were just people making art who also took ideas from others. Spend some time looking at the images on the websites of the museums that allow free reproduction. They all provide a link to download high resolution images that you can print at home and then work from.

Time spent looking at art is as important as time spent making it. If you can, go to galleries and museums and do not feel guilty about not being in your studio. We all need our store of images and ideas to be replenished from time to time. We cannot expect to make work that is original if we work in a vacuum.

CHAPTER 2

Why is drawing so important?

Drawing satisfies our sense of definition, even if we cannot define ‘drawing’ itself. Drawing is a racing yacht, cutting through the ocean. Painting is the ocean itself.

ROBERT MOTHERWELL, 1915–91

Drawing sharpens your sensitivity to painting.

HENRI MATISSE, 1869–1954

Drawing does not consist merely of line; drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modelling.

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES, 1780–1867

This chapter is about why drawing has always been central to artists’ practices, what makes some drawings better than others, and how drawing is embedded in good painting.

Writing about drawing is not easy as it is so hard to define. Some people think that a drawing is a design made with pencil, pen or crayon rather than with paint. Others would add that a drawing is made on paper, that the same design made on canvas would not be a drawing. On the other hand, Henri Matisse said, ‘Drawing, after all, is concentrated painting. You paint when you draw and draw when you paint.’

If you look at the dictionary to see the many different ways in which we use the verb ‘to draw’, there is an interesting link between the various usages. We ‘draw’ a conclusion, we ‘draw’ water from a well. We ‘draw’ out a wire from a piece of metal, we ‘draw’ in a breath of fresh air, and so on. The link between these and many more expressions is that they all involve taking what is needed from a larger amount. That notion of ‘need’ is helpful when thinking about drawing as an art form.

When we draw a landscape, or a person, whether it is from life or from our imagination, we make marks according to what we need in order to express not only how the thing looks, but also how we feel about it. We do not take reality and literally squish it onto our paper. We have to make choices about what is necessary to express our vision. Often drawing is made without colour, and yet we are describing coloured things. So, we have to find an equivalent to the relationships between the colours, but made from blacks, whites and greys. This inability of drawing to be exactly like reality is what makes it such a fascinating discipline. It means that we can use it to show ourselves, our emotions and our feelings about the world as well as what the world looks like.

Different styles of drawing

Drawings can be made as quick sketches, as diagrams, as reminders or jottings down of information, or as presentation pieces intended as works of art in their own right. Most great artists from the past spent as much time drawing as they did painting.

Fig. 24 Study of a Head and Left Shoulder of a Woman by Raphael, 1519–20, chalk on paper, 33 × 24.2cm. (Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)