writings

Working with the still-life: A three stage assignment - drawing / painting / collage

In this assignment, you will make a very thorough examination of the still-life utilizing three different approaches: drawing, painting, & collage.

Etching by Giorgio Morandi

You will begin by looking at masterworks by 20th century artists Giorgio Morandi, Pablo Picasso, and George Braque, all of whom worked extensively with the still-life, exploring the wealth of possibilities for representation and abstraction inherent in the genre.

The Drawings

Using the still-life stations set up in the studio, you will first make a series of three drawings on A3 cartridge paper, the first utilizing contour line only, the second, cross-hatched line as a means of obtaining light/shadow relationships, and the third, in which you attempt to utilize colored conte pastels and smudging, and erasure to produce mass, volume, shadows, and highlights.

After completing these drawings, we’ll pin them up and conduct a group critique session. We’ll look closely now at works by artists such as Pierre Chardin, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cezanne in order to learn how these artists used paint and its unique properties to explore the still-life in color.

Maggie Li - conte pastel

The Painting

You’ll then begin a study of several selected still-life objects on an A3 size MDF panel in acrylic paint. In this painting, you will first produce a structural pencil drawing over a pre-colored ground and then begin to create forms by building up washes of tonality which will establish basic value contrasts.

Once you have established this basic tonal structure, you’ll lay in mid-tones and then highlights, while attempting to be aware of warm and cool color relationships and thick and thin paint application. You’ll also be utilizing rags and fingers as well as your flat, round, and filbert brushes to achieve “painterly” effects!

This painting should be completed at the end of five class periods, at which point, we’ll conduct another group critique. You’ll also write up a process reflection in your sketchbook, tracing the development of the painting, and commenting on the technical problems and compositional challenges posed by this study and the ways you attempted to deal effectively with them as the painting developed.

The Collage

The final stage of your assignment involves using your experiential knowledge of the still-life and your visual imagination to create a new way of looking at the subject—to abstract it, based on the cubist ideas you encountered in the works of Picasso and Braque.

To create this piece, you will produce a series of “thumbnail” drawings in your sketchbook, in which you experiment with “flattening” pictorial space and possibly depicting objects from more than one angle simultaneously. You’ll also begin to emphasize repeating patterns and lively textural surfaces, while all the while attempting to “keep it simple”. You may think this will be easier than painting the still-life in acrylics—rest assured—it isn’t!!

Poppy Wilkinson - mixed media collage

You’ll use pencil, gouache, scissors, colored tissue and Japanese rice paper, corrugated cardboard, and newspaper/magazine clippings to construct a composition on heavyweight watercolor paper. You may want to make more than one collage, since once you start, you’ll find it addictive! A Final group critique will be held when the works are complete. GOOD LUCK and enjoy THE PROCESS!!