Assignment One

For assignment one there was pretty much a free choice of subject matter- the only specification was that the painting should be at least A3 in size and should be representational rather than abstract. 

I decided that as this painting does not count towards the assessment result I would give myself permission to play about a bit with the 'stuff' of the paint. I particularly wanted to apply paint in a variety of ways. I also decided to do a landscape painting as this was the section of the drawing 1 course that I was weakest and least confident with. It might seem an odd choice to go with my least-favourite type of subject matter but there were two reasons for this. The first was that I had been inspired by the changes happening in the landscape in the local area in this season. The second was that it afforded an opportunity for me to practice an area of weakness without it adversely affecting my final marks for the course.

I started with a few sketchbook pages. First some rapid sketches of the plane trees with autumn foliage still attached which I see when I drop my son at the station every morning for school. I was also attracted by the uniform planting of a group of birch (I think - or maybe poplar) trees on the road to my Son's school. They are very regimented in tight rows like rows of soldiers - planted with military precision. This gives rise to a repeating pattern. 

In one of these plantations there is a small bent gnarly tree at the very edge of the rows. This made me think about the contrast of 'one among many' - an individual amongst all this uniformity or the triumph of nature over man's intervention.

At this time of year, the vines are also without leaves. I love their gnarly, twisting - almost black shapes. Because of the lack of foliage you can easily see the posts and wires that support them and they again create a regular repeating pattern on the landscape. Many of the vineyards around here use light coloured concrete posts and en masse these started to remind me of military cemeteries. I wondered why these military analogies kept coming to mind. I realised that I had been exposed to lots of media interest in WWI recently because of its centenary. I had also visited the installation of poppies in the moat of the Tower of London. An art installation which had thoroughly captured the public's imagination with its symbolism of one poppy for every British soldier killed in the war. 
I had also visited Exhibitions of the work of Anselm Keifer and Sigmar Polke. Both German artists made work commenting on WW2. In particular the vines reminded me of Anselm Keifer's 'Black Flakes' - a desolate and snowy landscape which has symbolism representing the landscape of the holocaust.

Because of the way my mind was working, I decided to visit the military cemeteries at Cassino which is only about 1 hour's drive away from where we live. This served two purposes. A well as allowing me to sketch the uniformity of the gravestones it also acted as an eye opener for my son who is 14 years old and desperately wants to become a pilot - so he is considering entering the air force when he is old enough. We first went to the commonwealth graveyard. It is well kept with manicured grass and pruned trees. The stones are all uniform but large numbers of them have pictures of the soldiers attached or floral tributes and many are engraved with individual messages from their family. my son got quite emotional reading one of the messages which read "Sleep well daddy - from George" and he also went quite pale when he saw that some of the dead were only 17 years old. The rows upon rows upon down of the stones really brought home to him the implications of war.

We also visited the Polish cemetery which is up near the monastery of Montecassino. This is a much starker memorial. there is very little green here. Most of the cemetery is clad with a light coloured stone and the grave-stones are cross-shaped. I only identified one grave which had a photograph here. An there was only one grave which had any flowers. I found the image of this single decorated grave among all this uniformity quite poignant. There were also occasional stones on which were draped cheap plastic rosaries or crucifixes in lurid colours. I made several thumbnail drawings in my sketchbook. 

At a certain point - I realised that I had come a long way away from what had been my original intention for this assignment. I think this was when I started to draw triangles and measure where I thought the flowers for the focal point should be placed on the page. I realised I'd got too caught up in the symbolism of it all and in the process of 'making a picture'. It was perhaps getting all a bit too contrived. I remembered that often during the drawing 1 course pieces where I had been over thinking had been less successful than those that were more instinctive. I went round in a complete circle and decided to go back to whet had interested me in the first place - the uniformity of the planting of the trees. When in doubt "keep it simple stupid"

I was seriously running out of time to complete this assignment so I made a very rapid colour study in acrylics before proceeding with the final painting which is approximately A2 in size.

I started on a ground of a pale wash of yellow ochre. I then applied a graded wash of cerulean over the sky and I under painted the darker areas of the grass and forest with alizarin crimson (mainly because I'd seen one of my fellow students do this in a landscape via our Facebook group and I thought it had worked well with hints of the crimson showing through the green).  I used a lot of titanium white for the trees but overlaid washes to dull down the trunks as they receded into the background. I used a palette knife and sharp contact of light and dark to paint the tree which is the furthest forward to try to make it the focal point. In order to represent the fine branches of the trees further back I applied scrapings of alizarin crimson and burnt umber using an almost dry bottle brush. For the undergrowth in the foreground I created some texture by applying paint quite thickly and then working back into it using colour shapers.

Overall, I'm quite disappointed with the end result of this painting and think that if I had the time to rework it I would probably go in a different direction. I think my main problem with it is my handling of the colour. The greens in the foreground are too lurid and this combined with the cerulean of the sky combine to put me in mind of a technicolour film or a kitsch and overly coloured landscape photograph such as you might find on a box of chocolates from the 1970s. 

However, on the plus side I did do what I set out to do in playing with palette knives and colour shapers and I do think I've communicated something about the repetition and uniformity of the tree planting. 

The good news is that the next section of the course is all about the handling of colour so I'm sure my skills in this area will improve.

From this section of the course I have learnt that I still need to work on my time management. I spent quite a lot of time on individual exercises and was left with very little time in which to complete the assignment. I must address this in part two because it is imperative that I stick to schedule with this course in order to be able to complete a degree within the time limit because I really spent far too much time on drawing 1.

References:

(1) http://www.apollo-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/kiefer-76.jpg