27 May 2009
Above the shared horizon : Mersea Island cloud studies
Another good day with the very wonderful friday group - drawing in Mersea Island 
I was drawn to the most changing part of this old landscape, trying to record the clouds as they poured through the sky above. Paradoxical and impossible really, with charcoal - how can a linear media keep up with a subject that no only constantly changes but also has no meaningful edges ? In the end the students said the clouds ‘looked like boulders’ - which is one of those comments you really need to think about. 
So in the end I started looking at the crumbling cliffs - layers of beautiful red and yellow earth with a thin crust of life clinging on the top. I found an interesting artist blog, by Vivien Blackburn, which is collecting cloud and weather studies. So it’s not just me then .. which is a relief.
(1) 28 May 2009 at 5:59 am
vivien
Nice lively studies - you’ve caught the windiness of the day :>)
Thanks for joining in - I’m going to publish links on 31st May to the blogs of those who took part
(2) 28 May 2009 at 7:34 am
doug
Thanks Vivien, Look forward to seeing other peoples approaches to this - can any of your links point me at sketchbook sites, ones put up by full time artists who are sharing their daily working processes ?
(3) 29 May 2009 at 8:19 am
vivien
Well ……… I ramble about my sketching/painting - processes, materials, thoughts, artists etc on my blog (link through my name here)
but also have a site with my sketchbooks on at http://www.sitekreator.com/viviensketches
Adebanji Alade shows daily sketches at http://adebanjialade.blogspot.com/
A friend Katherine shows regular sketches and talks about processes and thought here href=”http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/
“>http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/
We have a joint blog (I had the idea and invited Katherine and Lindsay to help set it up - K’s tech knowledge is excellent). We thought about who to invite (artists interested in painting water) and the result is Watermarks - where we all talk about thoughts behind work, gee each other along, crit and provoke each other into further interesting work.
http://watermarks-art.blogspot.com/. It’s been great to be part of it.
There is of course Urban Sketchers as well -a huge site, though they tend to show images but not talk in depth
Tina Mammoser - The Cycling Artist - also has an excellent blog and she’s a fellow member of Watermarks
(4) 29 May 2009 at 3:44 pm
Bill Brody
I love clouds. Every landscape seems to have its unique cloud forms. Even so, my favorites are fairly sharp-edged like the thunderheads of the American Southwest. The ambiguity of fuzzy clouds, fog, veils of rain and so forth puts a poetic strain my need to understand and make decisions. Language and cognition seem to require edges, even when none exist.
I once tried to work out the task of doing edges, not as lines, but as carefully rendered transitions with the change varying somewhat like you might use pressure to distinguish between jazz, rock and classical, etc music as an armchair conductor. I drew all sorts of graphs and played a lot with my set of airbrushes. I really liked the results of the airbrush particularly on crumpled fabric and on rice papers, but the lack of tactility drove me up a wall. Ultimately I went back to the drawing and painting you know.
(5) 29 May 2009 at 5:46 pm
doug
Dear Bill - good to hear from you : “Language and cognition seem to require edges, even when none exist.”
Exactly. I find linear drawing both satisfying and frustrating - I love the decisiveness of a hard line. But I feel that lines are meant to be bent, squished and merged. Just as you can hear Charlie Parker running away with a simple block chord tune like Body and Soul and giving it back transformed and magical. Whenever I make a line drawing I wish for the tonal fields that only a brush can give you. Give me a brush and I want to sharpen it all the time .. might try drawing and painting at the same time.
(6) 29 May 2009 at 5:55 pm
doug
Dear Vivien - thank you very much for the interesting links, which I’ve tried to make more prominent but instead seem to have messed up the formatting completely. Somehow I seem to be rather to good at breaking the internet .. I’ll spend some time over the weekend trying to tidy it up and make the links easier for people to click through. Good to be hooked up.
(7) 31 May 2009 at 9:20 am
dinahmow
Well, first I liked the sketches, then my eye caught “Charlie Parker” and that was that!
Yes, I do like edgy sketches. In fact, I most often use a fibre pen with water colour “slosh” but them I’m not an artist. More of a wordsmith who plays with paint. (and a printmaker when time allows.)
(8) 31 May 2009 at 9:55 am
doug
Hi Diane - thanks very much for the post ! I checked your blog too, looks like you were having fun with watery paynes grey cerulean blue. Words and illustration is what got me started - my story books as a kid. Wind in the Willows, early copies of Mad magazine, Arthur Rackham ..
I really will sort out how to put everybody’s links onto my page but for now it’s head down in the studio to finish a portrait I’m putting in for the Threadneedle prize. So that’s my day planned then - staring onto the middle distance and talking to myself.
(9) 15 June 2009 at 8:55 pm
Steve
Doug - I’ve just realised one of the reasons why your drawing make such a connection with me. I can see it in the bottom of the drawings above and in the work you did at Pointe du Hoc. They remind me of Japanese calligraphy. As you know, in calligraphy, every mark carries significance and is considered on its own merits: at the same time, there is a narrative flow through the marks - and I don’t mean the narrative conveyed by the language but a narrative of the marks themselves.
Drawing is your communication medium: maybe it’s your form of writing. You were the one who opened my eyes to how a drawing reveals its own timeline.
There’s also a connection in the way Japanese calligraphy flows down a column or panel, much as your marks flow in a narrative way across a similarly proportioned space. And the calligraphy masters do that thing of practising their marks so as to internalise them, acquiring a skill so that they can forget it and focus on the work itself.
When making calligraphy with a brush, the classic technique is t keep the wrist rigid and the brush vertical, making all the movement from the elbow and shoulder, much as certain southpawed people I know write.
Anyway, just an observation…
(10) 4 July 2009 at 5:23 am
Bill Brody
The comment about clouds looking like boulders reminds me of T. H. Benton’s practice of making clay models of everything, clouds included preparatory to his monumental paintings.
I can’t wait to see/draw clouds streaming/boiling/roiling through the Cullins…
(11) 4 July 2009 at 8:59 am
doug
Me too - total immersion in a place - the best way to make work ! As for models of clouds - I’ve always sensed a relationship between hand knowledge that is 3D (sculpt) and hand knowledge that is 2D (draw/paint). So much of the drawing I really admire is done by sculptors - Calder, Giacometti, Moore, Tony Cragg and Michaelangelo of course. Drawing has to be based on holding and not just touching, reaching round and behind the subject. Having said that I was told that Gainsborough used 3D models, for his landscapes particularly favouring broccoli for the trees. That clarified one of the things that always pissed me off about his polite landscapes - his trees always look like broccoli.
I guess I assumed that landscape would be a good subject because the model is cheap, sits still and doesn’t criticize after a bad days work. That turned out to be especially wrong in Alaska where the hard landscape is also an earthquake zone. I couldn’t believe a landscape so big could be so fluid. The more I worked there the more I remembered that it’s all in flux : boulders, clouds, grass. mountains .. That fluidity is it, really. The landscape’s timeline is no less violent and unpredictable than ours, it just takes longer. Somebody told me that the Cuillins are among the oldest surface rocks in the world - meeting the volatile weather from the second biggest ocean in the world. Alchemy !