Lockdown week three.
For many of us, myself included, our lives have been reduced to a small footprint, a limited routine and wearing the same clothes for days on end. Some of us are lucky, we enjoy being on our own and have something that we are passionate about that is not limited by self-isolation.
My week begins with theory, I continue to study anatomy for drawing. I have an obsession with the pelvis, which stems from my postural work. The pelvis is the foundation/keystone and its position in space impacts on all aspects of our posture.
I discovered that the sphenoid bone inside our skull is the keystone to our facial structure as the pelvis is the keystone to our posture. Its shape has similarities to the pelvis. I love interesting findings.
Being in tune with pelvic tilt in all planes, informs our understanding of the predicted orientation of all other parts of the skeleton. Jac advised that I look at the skeletal works of the Vesalius, a 16th century Flemish Anatomist, I took these as a starting point to draw my own skeletal sketches and then moved on to a life model website, visualising the bones beneath the flesh I created my own skeletal drawings.
Those drawings talk about bony prominences, I needed to think about volume. Sometimes when life drawing I lose a sense of the volume and orientation of limbs, especially in situations where foreshortening occurs. To think in cubed volumes as a primary sketch can improve this skill. Jac suggested I look at the work of Luca Cambiaso a 16thcentury Italian painter. A brilliant idea, he used this technique for preliminary sketches informing his paintings. I started by copying his drawings then back to the life model website to create my own.
Exhausted by theory I spent a few hours panting my half pelvis. I store progressive images in a folder on my laptop. A while ago I had renamed my pelvis, ‘War of the Worlds’, as it reminded me of fighting machines/tripods in HG Wells’s novel. Now in lock down a neighbour listening to a coronavirus playlist repeatedly plays, ‘The eve of the War’… the chances of anything coming from Mars. This painting is now become my response to coronavirus.
The problem with this work for me is that it’s too tight, I am constantly thinking about the end result. Jac reminds me, ‘don’t follow the image, represent my experience. Paint for yourself don’t represent it for others. I need to focus on my love affair with paint not the object. This has led to me loosening up, enjoying the qualities of paint, romancing the experience as I manipulate oil and pigment on canvas, feeling what I am trying to say layer by layer. This has been a huge leap for me as I begin work on two similar compositions, one a humble old crab shell in nature, the other a decadent, wanna be lobster, crab shell served up.
Until next week my friends.