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Posted
Having just had a gentle rant on the last thread re drawing skills , I'm going to bore you all with its continuation. I know we have recently done "anyone can draw". With interesting observations and conclusions.
If the contestants had really stood back and looked as the mentor suggested then they might have actually drawn an elephant. Not the very childlike shapes that most of them achieved .
Sketch books are wonderful as little observation depositories a tap, a cup, a flower......
A group of us are off on our Urban Sketching adventures this week , though we are going where it is warm and dry . Sitting in a botanical greenhouse and drawing , painting , observing plants and flowers....might make a mess , might not. But it's all grist to the mill.
To me it's all part of the creative process.
Posted
If I spent more time painting than commenting here, I'd have a few more pictures to show than I've blooming well got....
But having got that out of my system: yes to the discipline, and pleasure, of the sketch-book. I have many of them, and over the years have lost a few, giving me the comforting feeling that there was some really good stuff in those I lost but, as I've lost them, I can't show you.... oh yes: you don't a bit older without picking up a trick or two. ... The ones I still have though are a treasured resource - they give me ideas, some provide me with a full sketch from which I can plan several paintings, and I've also got a substantial collection of photographs to go with them. If you haven't got that - and I don't know of course if the contestants in the BBC challenge haven't - you're labouring under a huge disadvantage in a competition like this because you don't have anything to fall back on, it all comes as new.
As it happens, I do still have an elephant drawing somewhere, too.... don't think I've got a flamingo. Probably the contestants didn't take their sketch-books with them if they had them, but once you've drawn something you tend to have a pretty good visual memory of it - it might have helped them. Draw everything you can - table lamps, cars, your mother, your mother's best friend's cat, Arthur; not because you're planning to go on TV, but because it trains your eye and hand and gives you confidence that you CAN draw. I was always nervous of drawing buildings, until I had a go at it and discovered it's basically drawing boxes - almost nothing should be beyond our abilities with practice; but without it, most of us wouldn't have a hope. (I do find people who have a natural ability to draw anything without ever really trying flaming annoying though... and they do exist.)
Posted
When I did an A level course, at art college in the 1960's, the first thing that we did was draw cardboard boxes in increasingly complex arrangements. We had weeks of this. We then had to draw a real skeleton! The same disciplines of measuring with your pencil, transposing angles fro reality to paper, finding what is directly below another point, checking the horizontal lines, perspective. How could I not draw after all that. And so I passed my A level in one year, with accurate drawing skills but next to no painting skills! I don't think any art college follows the same discipline any more - they stress originality more than anything else.
These days, I don't do much sketching, unless it is a quick pose in my portraiture or life class. I compromise and paint with pastels pencils or go straight in with the paint that I am still trying to learn to use. Unfortunately the hard discipline of drawing accurately has left me a bit to tight with painting. My sister, however, learnt to draw and paint as an adolescent and her paintings emerge from the canvass, rather that filling in the gaps between the lines. She doesn't think that paintings should have lines longer than one inch! But she does seem to put the paint in the right place, without really drawing it first.
Going back to the Painting challenge, the Zoo keepers voted for the only painting that had any appreciation of the 3 D aspects of the elephant's skull, demonstrated by the shadows around the temple. I would say that the winning artist had really good observational skills of light shade and shadow, not just drawing outlines.
Posted
Let's not loose sight of the fact that T.B.P.C is a TV format; just like the baking, ceramics (and cookery to come I believe). As such the contestants are chosen for good TV as much or even more than abilities. Were you the producer and had interviewed a possible contestant who said that she always uses hair in her painting, would you think "Oh yes. That's exactly what's needed for this ridiculously varied range of subject-matter under pressures no-one normally would experience; what a shame that we don't have someone who always uses gravel in their work". And just like in all the others the contestants know what's coming up—they don't know if it will be an elephant or a kangaroo but they know where they are going; they don't know who they will be painting but they know it's portraits today.
It's TV, nothing more. If anyone seriously believes they can learn anything valid from T.B.P.C. I respectfully suggest that they are looking in the wrong place. Andy Warhol can't possibly have known how right he would be. It annoys me intensely and I'm not going to watch it anymore. But that's what I said last week.
Posted
Well of course it has always been about ratings John and what would get us watching and talking the most. It's entertainment. But I am glad I have carried on watching it because I greatly enjoyed it this week. I suspect also, that you will watch it again because it has become compulsive viewing and, next week, it is possible that some of us will learn something new! Hope you are also watching the Great Pottery Throwdown - very similar format.
Posted
Trouble is John, you can damn just about all TV by saying it's all about ratings - presumably programme makers must have one or two other motives as well.
Difficult though they can be to discern....
I swore I wouldn't watch another episode after the one before last, but there it is - I did. As for learning anything useful about painting or art generally - nah. What would be interesting, and they won't do it of course, is a show about Daphne Todd, Lachlan Goudie, and possibly the two mentors - Todd in particular has interesting opinions and decades of practice. But it wouldn't get the mass audience, so it won't happen. Which is why I'm going to revert (admittedly, after this blessed thing is all over) to buying DVDs by professional artists - maybe Daphne Todd has made one!
Posted
Whilst I don't take issue with anything above, I maintain that it's more than just ratings; there are ways and there are ways to attract the ratings. It's the laziness and cynicism that annoys me. And I really don't mean to sound arrogant or superior but what is it that you feel you have learned? I never produce portraits for example, and would have little idea where to begin, but even there any learning points were of the '…well yes; that makes sense; how else would one do it?' variety I felt.
I'm fairly sure I saw a prog. about Daphne Todd some while back; I think it might have been that What Do Artists do All Day? Her work is extremely well executed but for me it's lacking something; it doesn't have the power to hold me; nor did the programme.
So I'm definitely, definitely not going to watch TBPC next week. Probably.
Posted
I'm going to watch it next week. I love it. I shall pine when it's over. It's the only TV show I can get that deals with practical painting and drawing. There are a few good tips and some highly entertaining disasters and melt-downs (I miss Camilla). It humanises art by showing us people's struggles. When Suman or David or Jimmy or whoever makes something that works we still get to see the process, the errors, the corrections.
For me, there's something off-putting about some great artist showing how they did something that, in spite of their instruction, remains stratospherically out of reach.
It's like visiting the big galleries or watching something by Andrew Graham Dixon. The pictures are amazing but they weren't made by mortal men and women!
On a semi related note, I don't see a 'What Do Artists Do All Day' about Daphne Todd. But here's a link to the one about comic artist Frank Quitely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42f-UNHlYrI
Comic book artists are an under appreciated category of artist. If you want people who can draw, they really can! They have to be able to draw anything and everything, consistently and quickly.
There seem to be quite a few of these 'What Do Artists' documentaries on youTube. Not sure why the BBC aren't stopping them but it's good for the viewer as most of them aren't on iPlayer any more.