Saturday 25 July 2015

Airbrushed skys of blue



Who were the first artists that really fired your imagination?  Back about 1971 when I was eleven I found a magazine (I think it was a copy of the Observer, possibly my dad had brought it home) that featured a spread on the artist Michael English (1941 - 2009)

English started using the airbrush, the ubiquitous tool of the seventies commercial artist, to make hyper real images of ordinary household objects such as buckled coke cans and bottle tops, floating glass bottles and various viscous liquids. It was about the first time I had seen this type of thing and it seemed special and modern and glamorous.  Today its part of the modern visual vocabulary.

It was the first time I had seen water with that kind of translucence done in a realist modern way.  I pored over those seven or eight colour images in the magazine and read and re-read the brief article that accompanied them.  I wanted to do that kind of work, but apart from having nowhere near that skill at eleven, I didn't have an airbrush or the money to buy one.

Bottlecap.  Someones generic photograph of a painting by Michael English, digitally once removed from the original by being downloaded from the internet.   Click on the picture to go to the offical Michael English website.
 Ho hum.  The next artist who came along who really caught my eye was Roger Dean (1944 - ).  I was about fifteen then but wasn't really a fan of those big supergroups that he worked for such as Yes, and Uriah Heep so I don't quite remember when I first saw his art.  I certainly owned his book 'Views' and studied it very closely, but didn't attempt to copy the work, a rarity for me at that time.  I think I recognised that his style was too strong, and would influence too strongly, we can see the same effect on those influenced by the work of H R Giger.

Dean's work was intended to compliment the music of those progressive rock groups who vied to get his art on their covers but as I never brought the record albums I was able to look at his work without that connection.  He might argue that it is required, and others might agree, but I'm not so sure. 
 
'Charge' Cover for Paladin album.  Someones generic photo of a painting by Roger Dean.  Click on the picture to go to the official Roger Dean website.

 They cast a certain magic over my early to mid teens with no music needed.  I still have fond memories of his 'Charge' album cover for Paladin, (which I had as a poster on my wall) his Lockheed Blackbird with a birds skull fixed at the front for the 'Squawk'  album by Budgie and the rattlesnakes and the wedding cake castle he designed for the Yes album 'Relayer'.

The last airbrush artist to swim before my eyes in the seventies was Philip Castle (1942 -), the designer most famous for the poster of the Kubrick film 'A Clockwork Orange'.  I saw this poster on the cover of the record album of the soundtrack and spent time studying it, but as with the others I didn't attempt to copy it for the same reasons.  I didn't see much more of his work at that time, but caught up with him later when his paintings were available in book form.  Having been obsessed with aircraft since my early childhood I quickly appreciated Castle's aptitude at shiny surfaces and streamlined shapes.  And the perfect airbrushed blue skies.


A Clockwork Orange by Philip Castle.   Click on the picture and see youtube interview with Philip Castle.
All of these artists had a kind of sunny blue-sky feel about their work which made you feel good when you looked at them; it might possibly have been my youth that helped them along, but I feel that there was something fresh about them that made them perfect for their time.

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Saturday 18 July 2015

A Grave Concern


I was always interested in history.  As a kid in the sixties, I remember at about the age of seven asking for a ‘really good history book’ for Christmas, and my parents did me proud.  I got the complete R J Unstead’s ‘History Of Britain’, which was so good it scarcely left my side for the next five years.  I still have it now though its so basic its scarcely any use except as a picture source..

For me, an interest in art and history go hand in hand.  Every work of art has its own history, and throws up questions about why it was painted, what reasons the artist had for painting it.  Then there are the questions about the times they lived in.  What were the conditions that surrounded the artist as they began work? When they took up that paintbrush or chisel, what exactly was outside the door?

The detail can be extreme; what was the world like that was driving this work of art?  What kind of clothing was the artist wearing, what was the street outside like, how did they make their brushes and paints?  How did Michelangelo actually sculpt the David?  

Looking At History.  This edition about 1966.
And that brings me to Roman Military tombstones.  No, they’re not as good as Michelangelo’s stuff by any stretch of the imagination but in their own modest way just as interesting.  I was brought a book on this subject a while back, and I wasn’t too sure why at first.  The subject seemed very dry and the rather crude little images a little charm less.  But after throwing it aside for a while I went back to it, and perseverance was rewarded.

It has photographs of the tombstones, with translations of the inscriptions and a little about the situation of the deceased soldier, what legion he served with, what rank he had, and a potted history of where the stone was discovered and what period it belonged to.  And I began to look at the sculpture on these stones critically.  It has to be said mostly they weren’t very good.  Except one.

Step forward Marcus Favonius Facilis.  The tombstone of this Roman centurion is the best of the bunch.  Found in England at Colchester in 1868 it’s a fine depiction of a centurion of the mid first century AD.  It’s so good that it has subsequently been used by almost every Roman legionary re-enactment society as the basis for their own reconstructions of a centurion's costume.  And it’s because of the clarity of the sculpture that it’s been so useful on this account.

The grave stele of Marcus Favonius Facilis.  The author.
The sculptor must have had knowledge of classical methods, and either had come from the Mediterranean, or had know someone who had been trained in that culture, this can be inferred from looking at the work and comparing it with the crudity of other stones.  And when we think clearly about that time, for an artist to gain real skill and knowledge would have been incredibly difficult, for as I have tried to show in last weeks blog, you need to see a lot of other work to learn anything useful.

For one, the Facilis sculptor understood about ‘foreshortening’ an important concept for any artist if they wish to represent anything realistically.  He knows that if you depict the hand on the hilt of the sword, then the elbow of that arm will be thrust backwards, and will not be visible.  Another sculptor depicting a standard bearer, named Gnaeus Musius, can only show this by having the entire right arm visible, awkwardly holding the standard out at the soldier’s side.  

Again, the Facilis sculptor understands that when you stand facing someone and look down at the ground, you see the floor seemingly sloping away behind the person.  This gives his work a sense of three dimensions.  The sculptor of the Musius stone doesn’t understand this or thinks it unimportant, and depicts the ground as a single line under the soldier’s feet.

The Gnaeus Musius stele.  Wikipedia commons.
The Facilis sculptor understood the classical form, that a figure can be made to display grace and ease by the simple expedient of giving the torso a slight curve (what the artist Hogarth called the ‘line of beauty and grace’).   The weight of the subject held on the right leg pushes out the opposite hip, which in turn causes the torso to curve over to the right.  The sculptor finishes by either positioning the head centrally or by emphasising the curve still further by depicting it on a slight tilt.

The Musius sculptor is unable to depict the standard bearer in a realistic and convincing posture, he stands stiffly and completely upright as if he really were made of stone, the limbs clumsily realised and the only thing the sculptor is interested in doing is depicting the soldiers armour and decorations in close detail.

There is of course a school of thought that states that the Facilis stele is copied from a statue of the emperor Claudius.  If you study the slightly eroded head of Facilis' figure you see easily that it has quite large sticky out ears.  This was a feature of all portrait busts of Claudius because - well, he had sticky out ears.  So its possible that the sculptor knew a statue of the emperor (now lost) that he used as a model.

The Facilis grave stele is not one of the great sculptures of the world  but it probably is one of the finest military sculptures from the ancient Roman world and it’s odd that its sculptor will only ever be known by this one modest sized work.  I can only admire this man, possibly a soldier, or a freelance artisan who followed the legion, for his ability to gain such knowledge in such difficult circumstances and to use it to honour brave men.  

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Saturday 11 July 2015

Copy everything.

When I was a kid my mom said that you should never copy another’s work, and I know what she meant by that, she meant never claim another’s work as your own.  And she was right. But an artist has to be prepared right from the start to copy other peoples art, because unless they do – and do it thoroughly - they will never get the experience or the enrichment of ideas that are required to learn to ‘see’ as a designer must. 

Yes, copy from nature as well, but only by seeing what another mind has understood about an object or a scene will prime you to fully understand the same object or scene yourself.

Be open about it, let people see you copy the thing and never sign it with your own name, but copying is essential.  The masters of the past knew this simple fact when they ran the old studio/atelier system; forcing their pupils to endlessly copy casts of classical statues, or copy painting or engravings.  It makes you notice the important points that you must pay attention to if you want to achieve the same effects.    I was talking about this with my sister and I remembered when I was about twelve or thirteen trying to copy Michelangelo’s famous chalk preparatory drawing for the Libyan Sibyl of the Sistine Chapel.  If you want to see the full page drawing go here.

I tried to copy this drawing when I was thirteen.  I still have the nervous twitch.
If you know this drawing, you will think I’m probably writing this blog from a padded cell somewhere, but no, I am perfectly sane.  And I was then as well. My parents always took the right attitude, never tell a kid they can’t do something (even if you privately believe so), just let them get on with it.

So nobody told me I shouldn’t try, and I was never told my efforts were foolish and that they would never amount to anything. This is how you learn to draw, no matter what anyone thinks – copy, copy copy. 

And what if you make no money from it and nobody knows your work?  Doesn't matter, you still have the skill you worked hard to aquire and nobody can take it away from you.

So was I a butter wouldn’t melt Little Lord Fauntleroy in a velvet suit, copying the great masters before taking my piano lessons?  Hardly. Most of the copying I did, as a child was from comics and cartoons, and being based in the UK I saw an equal share of British and American publications. I had the velvet suit though!

But of course that's not me.  My hat was much bigger than that.
Frank Bellamy and Frank Hampson were the top comic artists in Britain along with newspaper cartoonists like Carl Giles.   I learned my share from all of them.  Also from US publications like MAD magazine,and Marvel.

I discovered the earlier British artists like Arthur Rackham, Heath-Robinson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) and even further back in time there was the great Hogarth.  I remember seeing the horrible image from Hogarth's quartet of prints, 'The Four Stages of Cruelty' in a school textbook.  The quartet of prints tells the brief story of a Tom Nero who starts as a cruel child torturing animals and progresses through his life to murder.   The prints were a moralistic lesson to the poor about the cruelty they daily handed out to animals.  Hogarth saw that cruelty every day in London, and in the 1750's had made the connection that one kind of cruelty always leads to another, in this case murder.

In the final print we see him after sentence of death has been passed, at the surgeons hall where he is being dissected.  Its a truly disturbing image that still has impact today, and although I didn't copy it I did study it with the morbid fascination that children always bring to such things.

I suppose that Hogarth's example shows what a practically self taught artist can do, copying from his master when apprenticed as a silver smith, and later from the artist who he greatly admired and who later became his father in law Sir James Thornhill.

So Hogarth knew the score - copy, copy copy.















Saturday 4 July 2015

The Party Line


We used to have a book knocking about the house, its subject British early to mid twentieth century newspaper cartoons.  In the book were illustrated several cartoons by Sir Bernard Partridge.

Partridge was an arch conservative, whose natural political stance was reactionary, and who seemed to be against everything.  He didn't want unions, or votes for women, was all for the British Empire and if workers went on strike for tuppence ha'penny more in wages, then they were obviously inspired by the devil.  He worked in cliches, drawing all socialists and trade unionists as Lenin look-alikes who carried suspicious attache cases, the workers were always good souls led astray (you could tell they had integrity by the way they always smoked a pipe) and the businessmen were always shown as tough and uncompromising but misunderstood.  Whatever they did wrong - they were still right.

Bernard Partridge

And his cartoons were also very traditional in approach; they were drawn pretty much in the same way from the 1880's right up to the Second World War, only the costumes changed.  But by god could he draw.  At its best Partridge's style has the same kind of sinewy 'engraved' line  you see in the work of that great Edwardian illustrator Arthur Rackham.  I first saw his cartoons at about the age of thirteen or fourteen and they were probably the first such work I ever studied.  There were two I especially remember.  

I knew a little about the First World War and the politics that led up to it so I came to these cartoons with some understanding, but the thing I really appreciated because it could be seen instantly, was the quality.

The first cartoon showed the Kaiser sitting at a table in full Germanic regalia, cloak, sword and helmet with a spike.  He has before him an hourglass and he is watching it with rapt attention.  On the hourglass is inscribed the word 'Militarism' and the caption is 'The Sands Run Out'.

Partridge really knew his huns!
I told you he was traditional!  But the image has immence visual impact, it is dramatic, dark, threatening, brooding - in short, all the things the press constantly stated the Kaiser to be.  All summed up in one vital drawing.  I don't remember copying this cartoon, but I spent long periods studying it.

The second image, I think dating from just before the First World War is a beautiful drawing showing Germania the Goddess of Germany (Partridge always depicted countries as Grecian, Nordic or Roman Goddesses!  He inherited the idea from Tenniel,) leaning on the ramparts of her coastal defences looking out to sea.

She is looking out at a distant British Dreadnought, a type of early ironclad battleship, and she's saying something like 'I wish I had one of those eagles!'  The quick confident deftness used to draw her figure, the way she gracefully leans against the ramparts shows an expert hand.

I bet Angela Merkel's got a winged helmet, long robe and a fish scale corsalet in her wardrobe.
But Partridge's own opinion of his work was quite low; he thought that his work was 'second rate' and that he was 'little more than a hack draughtsman.'  This only shows the high level of expectation that he had set himself and the high quality that artists tried to attain generally at that time.

Politically I can't stomach the party line he followed, but in all other respects his line was excellent.


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