It is
though hard to make full scale images out there on the streets and most artists
rely on sketchbooks and small sketches to build up their image-banks before working
up larger scale pieces. This is an old
tradition, but one that can still be very rewarding.
I first
came across the drawings of John Virtue back in the 1980s. He had been working
as a postman to make ends meet, and as he walked the streets he made small
drawings. He was at the time working out in a rural area and so what he was
confronting everyday was a landscape of trees and fields, so he developed
hundreds of small drawings documenting the experience of these daily walks. He
then worked on these in the studio after finishing work as a postman. This is a
detail (below) from one of the worked up images, as you can see they are constructed out of small sections, a useful lesson in itself; if you don’t have a big studio space you can still have ambition for your work.
The drawings were mainly pen and ink, but when massed together they had a powerful impact and were a wonderful vechicle for his dark passinate romantic soul. He made his name with these drawings and so he was able to stop working as a postman and become a full-time artist. In 2003 he was appointed as artist in residence at the National Gallery and he continued working as he had always done, by making lots of small drawings and then working these up into much larger images. The drawings (below) are from his sketchbooks and small studies, often done from the rooftop of the National Gallery. As you can see they are fairly traditional in format and mainly concerned with getting basic details down.
However,
once back in the studio, he was able to work these small images up into
wonderful atmospheric landscape views of London, his previous experience of
making dark emotional views of rural landscapes allowing him to control dark
and light in order to orchestrate and open out the information that he had collected in his sketchbooks.
“Drawing is the compost from which painting develops.”
John Virtue
“Drawing is the compost from which painting develops.”
John Virtue
The intense pen and ink cross hatching from this night-time view by Seurat must have influenced Virtue's approach to his early landscape drawings. However one of Seurat's most poignant drawings is for myself his chalk drawn view of the Place de la Concord. The unlit streetlamp becomes a metaphor for the state of loneliness that many find themselves in when coming to a vast metropolis. It is one of those drawings that seem to be about a void or emptiness that we can all at times find in our lives, even in the midst of a bustling city.
Seurat: Place de la Concord
Both drawings above from Creffield's Cathedrals of England series
Creffield lived in Leeds for a while and the drawing above is a view over Leeds. You can see the Town Hall over on the far top left.
Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach were both like Creffield deeply influenced by the teachings of David Bomberg and you will find many fine drawings made by both artists of the city of London.
Kossoff
Auerbach
Claes Oldenburg used to walk the streets of
New York drawing everything whatever seemed to fascinate him. He had different sketchbooks
for the three basic shapes; triangle, circle and square and recorded all the
square things he saw in one and all the triangular things in another, and because
he wasn’t trying to classify things beyond their basic shape, he ended up
drawing everything from drainpipes to cigarette butts. This period of his life
gave him enough imagery to build an entire career on. His drawings can
sometimes be very technical and at other times quite loose, reflecting perhaps
the collision between technology and human life that makes up city living.
Sandwiches,
lollypops, fag butts and office fans, all become subjects for Oldenburg to make images of.
The city is an endless source of information and if you are ever stuck for something to do, just walk out there with your sketchbook. I keep little tiny sketchbooks that fit easily in my pocket, as I walk through Leeds I stop and make notes, they then get either used in larger more complex drawings or simply help me build my visual imagination.
Even bits of earth at the bottom of an
old tree can make for something interesting to draw, gradually your brain
starts to 'see' things much more clearly, simply because you are exercising it.
But what is it about the city that makes it a reality for
you? We live our lives not just embedded into the city; the city is a mental
extension of our embodied minds. We make cities in our own image. The transport
and sewage systems we devise, reflect our own needs to have transported around
our bodies nutrients and waste products. The city’s maze of wiring is a mirror
to our own complex nervous systems. Houses and other architectural features are
based on the measurements of human bodies and our psychological relationship
with the city’s spaces, is one deeply connected to the way the city inhabits
our unconscious as much as it being something we inhabit physically. We grow into a city as much as it grows into
our minds. Our internal map of the city, is built from our day to day
experience of it, each of us possessing a different version of the same city,
some of us experiencing just a thin thread that follows the same route every
day and others weave a complex pattern out of years of following the frayed
edges of broken threads. The city is in your mind as much as it exists as a
geographical entity. This is why it fascinates so many artists and as a student
looking for a subject to make art from, you may find it useful to research significant
places, such as the waste disposal centres, a supermarket or a shopping mall,
but perhaps just as profitable might be your own vision of what it is to you,
how do you fit into it? Are you like an ant, busy doing your bit for the colony
or are you someone who never quite fits in, who sees the city as an alien
environment and all the other inhabitants as potential threats?
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