Saturday 12 November 2011

Going, Going, Gone...

I took a small group of students drawing and painting at the Lickey Hills yesterday. It was shrouded in damp mist that wrapped itself around everything and created a great mysterious atmosphere. The students really enjoyed it and made some great studies with little intervention from me. I think they had a better teacher this week in David Hockney, whose video of him painting outdoors we had watched earlier in the week. It had really inspired them, and they dealt confidently with depicting the outdoor space in colour and tone, working from the back of the picture plane to the surface. I’m going to make a display of their work back in the college studio and will try and share some of their work.

In the meantime, here is one of my photos above of the foggy trees and another of the view from the hill where you can normally observe great views of the Birmingham, but today could barely only vaguely make the shapes of the trees. I like this ‘barely there’ quality and might explore this in a study. The trees reminded me of this next M5 drawing below which depicts the concrete motorway supports.

'Stolen Car', charcoal and pastel on paper, A2 size

I like this drawing. It seemed to suddenly take the drawings into another, slightly unexpected, formal place that I really like . This only emerged as I made the drawing, despite using a photographic reference.

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