Sketch from my Catalunya notebook, made as a background study for The Woman Taken in Adultery.
The drawing was done on the spot, but below is a photograph of the village taken from just about the same viewpoint, to illustrate how I change realities to serve my vision as a painter. In the drawing I’ve made the village appear to be on a steeper mound than it really is, because that’s the shape I need for the part of the composition it’s intended to fill, right at the upper edge of the painting. I want it to loom high, and the roads crossing below will be painted almost as though they’ve been tipped up toward the viewer. I like landscapes that almost feel like maps, and often use flattened perspectives to get that effect.
I never use a photograph at the easel. Drawings made from life are my favoured studio aids, together with notes made at the time. If I use a photograph at all for reference, then that happens at the drawing board-stage, where there’s a process of endless re-drawing to get the image locked in my brain, so that I no longer have to look at any photographic source. Fast, rough little drawings on thin paper, reduced almost to scribbles and full of life. For me photographs as direct reference don’t work. I find them to be deadening. I need to have filtered the shapes, colours, tones and modelling through my own sensibility before I can work them successfully into the stylised world of a painting. I need the alchemy of the drawn line.
Oh, how I love sketches! They can trigger your imagination and invite you to fill in your own colors. Sketches make me long to see the defenitive product and when I see the finished work I would like to see the sketches to make the picture complete. And so, 2 years after making this sketch, long before I even heard of C.H-J, you take me back to one of your trips. And all because of this fabulous blog of yours with links to previous blogs. (found by link in a message over at La Cuina) Sheer and utter admiration Clive!!
Mathijs, thank you for that lovely comment. I’m pleased that you can still find things at the Artlog that please you, and that the drawings… little scraps though they often are… have the power to move you. The little sketch above was so swiftly made, and yet has rewarded over and over because I’ve used it as the springboard to other ideas and ways of working. Sometimes a lot comes out of a little!
Clive I love the way you draw. You seem to have line and abstraction in the blood at the same time. Reminds me of Hockney’s early Eyptian period. So clever! I personally would like see this composition painted not as a background, but as a landscape in it’s own right. Paint as you draw with loose brushwork. Maybe this form of expression doesn’t interest you? Would like to see more of that sketchbook, please.. regards Derek
Derek, you might enjoy the drawings posted HERE.
I probably shall do a painting of Montclar using that drawing as a model. I already had it in mind.
I used to be a lot looser in my brushwork. Things changed when I started making large-scale narrative paintings with a lot of patterning and detail and complex compositions. But perhaps in time I’ll learn how to bring the best of both techniques together. The images HERE show landscapes painted at a time when I was working more gesturally.
Very interesting, Clive, that the physical encounter with a landscape is so essential to your artistic seeing.
Yes. I have to have been there. It has to have been felt.
that makes perfect sense. i like the way you’ve described it, ‘landscape as map.’ and it works well to have the village loom high, as it’s the “civilization” itself causing the fear through its angry judgment. and the roads tipping up toward the viewer brings the viewer right into the scene!
You’ve got it Zoe!