Art Renewal Centre and Recent Work

I love the internet. How amazing for an artist to have such a wealth of historical material to trawl through, particularly from here in Australia where good old master works are few and far between.
And links lead to links lead to links. That is how I have recently discovered the Art Renewal Centre.

http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/mission.php

If you read through some of my earlier blogs you will find similar sentiments expressed to some of those on the Art Renewal Centre website. Where have they been all my life?

The following quote is lifted from their site


"If you studied art history anytime between 1945 and 1980, you were told that there were great old masters that existed from the early Renaissance to the time of David, Constable and Turner in the early 1800's. Then you were taught about Corot and Courbet and the Pre-Impressionists and then finally the Impressionists themselves who led the way into Modernism. Most of the period from 1850 to 1910 was described as a terrible cesspool of official art where petty academic artists painted inane silly paintings that cared only for technique, that were devoid of emotion and who didn't recognize the genius of the Impressionists. Maybe one paragraph about that long was all you read. Possibly they mentioned the leaders of this rogue's gallery and so they might have said once the names of Meissonier, Bouguereau, Cabanel, Gérôme, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton or Burne-Jones, and never showed you any of their works. If they did show anything it was always a bad example. "

It is as if they have been reading my mail! This struck such a chord with me! As soon as I read the opening words I was saying yes, yes, yes, this is totally true of my art history studies! In lectures at Queensland University we were shown images by Gerome, Cabanel, and Bougereau and told they were the "bad guys". I remember thinking. They look pretty clever to me, but of course I never voiced this out loud. One thing I have been saying out loud, very loudly to my family and peers is, -  whenever someone goes on about Impressionism etc I say THAT'S NOT ALL THERE IS! Another thing people have heard me say ad nauseum is - "The pendulum has swung too far away from skills."
And I will die of boredom if I have to walk into another darkened room with an "art" video showing. I would far, far, rather watch paint dry...

For anyone interested in art I recommend reading some stuff on the website above and making up your own mind. Some of the articles are quite brave and provocative but there is a lot of bandwagon jumping among the posted letters. Meanwhile I am continuing with my private study year of anatomy, life drawing, portraiture and my secret project.

Here are a few drawings from the past week.

This was about two hours of work. I just concentrated on the face which was mostly in shadow from where I was standing. She does look a bit bored and droopy and she was poor girl. I am happy that I have captured something of that feeling. Pastel on prepared paper.

This beautiful model is one I have drawn once before. The earlier image is on my last blog post. This time I had a full profile view. Again about two and a half hours. No time to finish the traditional African costume she is wearing or her arm.

 

This is a sketchbook study from one of the life drawing sessions. I am still going to about three per week. It is done in black, white and sanguine conte in about 20 minutes on prepared paper.

Pastel Studies - Seriously!

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I am really enjoying a change of medium at the moment and am exploring pastels seriously. I always thought they were such a messy medium and they can be but I have decided that the mess is worth it. I am giving myself time and space to really experiment. I have been feeling for a while that although oil is such a beautiful and seductive medium so much has already been said with it. I am discovering the versatility of pastel. The soft dreamy blurring effects that have given pastel such a bad name have meant that the medium has been unfairly dismissed, by me as much as anyone. I am becoming its new advocate!

 I am continuing with my anatomy and life studies, but if the pose is long enough (an hour or more) I whip out the pastels and do a portrait. This one was from a two and a half  hour pose.

This model I have drawn before from a different angle. Again it is about two and a half hours of drawing.
I have been preparing my own paper with acrylic paint and pastel primer as I really dislike the mechanical nature of the dots in tradition pastel papers. I prefer to have complete control and the dots are so distracting to the viewer that they interfere.

As always I turn to books to glean any information I can about the medium I am using. I found quite an array of pastel books in the Brisbane Municipal Library and also the Royal Queensland Art Society library. Here is a selection below.

These two books were probably the oldest but the best, with lots of insights into techniques. Reading technical information can save you a lot of time in the long run.

Even the books that seem extremely basic will often have some little nugget of information that can help your own methods. It also helps to be aware of possible pitfalls.

Don't laugh but I found the "Dummies" one very informative. I read the entire text. It is tempting to just read the images and their captions but this just gives a dumbed down version. You have to work your way through the text to really get it.

The centre book here shows pastels from  the Metropolitan in New York. The beautiful work of Mary Cassatt and a surprising Georgia O'Keeffe.

Here is a quote from Georgia.

" It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language - charcoal, pencil, pen, and ink, watercolour, pastel and oil. I had become fluent with them when I was so young that they were simply another language that I handled easily. But what to say with them?... I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any colour until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June 1916 before I needed blue."