Sunday 25 January 2009

First proper post of the year

Started on this today - “The Broken Boy and The Smooth Girl”.

I was telling Lorna on Friday night, how I liked the freshness of the sketches I’d been doing, letting ideas form directly on the page resulted in some lovely flowing lines…but when I’ve transferred those sketches to paper/canvas for final painting, some of that magic in the lines is lost, the spontaneity is lost…

So, I’ve worked this up today directly onto some watercolour paper. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to paint thematically and an idea for the materials I wanted to use (watercolour and then ink lines over the top), but no plan for the composition.

I’ve spent around 3 hours working up the drawing, building different sections at a time, constantly rotating the paper, reworking and reworking. Then I spent a couple of hours working on the first figure.

As I’ve mentioned before the aim with this is to form a bridge between the watercolour landscapes and the allegorical acrylic pieces I started last year. I’m planning on doing a few of these over the next couple of months and then the one I like the most I’ll enter at the RA…off to an interesting start I think :)

4 comments:

SueC said...

Very intriguing. I shall look forward to seeing how this develops....its very picasso-esque (reminds me of Guernica) but also very Graham too. :-)

Unknown said...

It’s very difficult when you start pulling the human form apart, not to put it back together again in a Picasso ish way… it’s such an iconic style :)...so I'm very glad you're finding it very 'Graham' :)

I’ve tried to distort and pull body parts around in a slightly Dali ish way on this female figure. The male figure will be more cubist ish in style…hard against soft was the thinking…The shapes came together without any conscious planning to take a bit of Picasso and a bit of Dali, so hopefully the final picture will be a ‘Graham’.

I think the forms in the ‘Golden Key’ and the on going ‘Black and Red/Cut’ pictures are sufficiently original to be interesting, hopefully this one can continue along that path…

I don’t know exactly why I felt the need to find ‘My’ way of painting…I have a direction with the landscapes which is my own and worth exploring further. But my passion in painting has always stemmed from storytelling…I need to find a way of engaging the viewer that stops them in their tracks and then draws them in…and I need to do it in a way they’ve never seen before…

…rambling now ;)

Lorna said...

I am with SueC on the 'intriguing' but it reminds me of the frog dissection from school days!

Unknown said...

Lol I see what you’re saying Lorna…hopefully the frog effect will lessen as the rest of the image comes together…lol