Scrolls and the Language of Water
I’ll start this week with probably the longest format I’ve worked in so far; a tall, scroll-like format I was encouraged to use this week in Enduring Images.
Gouache painting in Scroll Format
I actually worked on this piece for most of the day; using a repeated cylce of poses from the model to influence the composition and figurative elements. A luminous oil painting I’m working on at the moment influenced some of the acid yellow brushwork, but once again I tried to pay attention to varying the size of the marks to give more clarity to the space. Towards the end of the day I had a break and went into my sketchbook to go back into an interior I had been working on earlier in the week, and painting from a drawing I did in a previous class:
Gouache in Moleskine Sketchbook
Kicked out of The British Museum
I apologise for the exaggerated subtitle, but our experience at The British Museum this week was a rather fragmented one. We started off in the African section, veering left to avoid massive crowds of school children drawing from the bronze installations and for the morning, I slowly worked on two drawings; one of a vessel in the shape of a mosque, and the other a rather water-like sword.
Studies at the British Museum in the African section
The afternoon was a bit frustrating. As we returned from lunch, we were soon asked to leave the African section as they were closing it down early due to being short-staffed. We ended up heading to the mesopotamian section where we continued drawing vessels and other objects of interest. There was a particular sculpture that had caught my eye in a previous week, and this time I decided to draw it:
Mesopotamian/Antolia Studies at The British Museum
I actually had to finish the drawing from a picture on my phone due to (once again) an early closure of the section. As I moved on to recording patterns on pots, tutor Lindsay Sekulowicz gave me a fantastic resource to use (https://publicdomainreview.org). On Public Domain Review, she suggested I have a look at “Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1903)” to study the different patterns used to depict water and other natural forms.
Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1903)
I apologise for the slightly shorter blog post this week, I wasn’t able to go to a couple of classes earlier in the week, but next post should be back to normal! I’m also full of energy at the moment, I feel a lot of paintings brewing in my brain after closely studying some wonderful Chinese paintings from the Qing dynasty. I’ll leave you with some ink studies (with some added elements of my own) in my sketchbook:
Ink Drawings in Sketchbook
