Exactitude is not truth - Henri Matisse
In my June newsletter I wrote about the sketching materials I take out with me when I'm out in the field - you can catch up here. But what to take is the easy bit!
I’ve long pondered about how to translate a landscape into an image. So this month I’ve pulled together a few thoughts about my sketching practice and how it informs my painting.
For me sketching or painting the landscape is about more than rendering the view. I want to gather the 360 experience of being amongst all the elements.
Our instant access to photography as we carry our phones everywhere with us has lead to a fairly uniform shared view of our world and reality.
Creating a drawing that looks like a photograph certainly requires skill, precision and measured judgement. But it can lack the human touch, personality and experience of a place and time. Similarly I can lose a certain something when I draw directly from a photograph.
If you think about it what we are actually drawing is the photograph as an object. We are creating a 2D image, of a 2D image, of our multi-D world!
I think it’s fair to say that an average photo has a hard job to impart the full sense of a place - it’s sounds, smells, energy! For me a photograph cannot be all the landscape.
This is not to say that photos do not have their part - for me trigger a remembrance and create a record of a place and time. I use ‘live ‘ photos and create video loops to help me recall my experience of a place.
But visual information is only part of the picture! I also gather the sounds around me through mark making- eyes closed, pencil or charcoal in hand, I sketch the sound scape. The sporadic thumps as apples fall to the orchard floor in October. Or gulls screeching over head, their sound curving and whirling as they ride the wind. Sounds yield some amazing marks to use in my paintings.
I make notes as I sketch, recording what’s happening about me. I often put names to nature’s colours that are personal to me- like Granny’s rhubarb tart pink and Rigsby cardigan brown (if you know, you know!)
Renaming them creates an association that helps make colour mixing back in the studio more nuanced. I got this from Emily Ball and find it amazingly useful and fun!
Collecting lost and discarded items - papers, wire, coins, beads etc helps trigger memories, provides motifs and collates the sense of place.
Rather than rely just on a photograph which directs me narrowly to recreate a ‘view’, I don't attempt to render a likeness, but capture textures, colours and motifs to inform a visual language that may appear as obvious marks or more subtle detail in my paintings.
Observing and gathering elements of the 360 of landscape disrupts what we traditional consider to be landscape painting. Sometimes what I see takes precedence, other times it’s what I hear or feel, it could even be a smell!
To realise that the sky does not start at the horizon but starts at my feet and fills the space between us, is liberating. How wonderful to know I am standing in sky!
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