Making models to work from

Ken Ragsdale SKETCH FOR THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD

THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD

The artist Ken Ragsdale makes drawings from memory. He then develops paper models of the drawings and photographs them. By using selective lighting techniques he can create various moods and after the scenes are photographed computer enhancement can be used to edit and sharpen before printing.

Basic Ken Ragsdale model ready for a photoshoot

There are several very interesting processes going on here. Drawing from memory is very hard. You need to practice being able to hold an image in your head and visualising it. Even so, once you begin drawing what you think you are remembering, the drawing itself will tend to take over. Every drawing has a moment when it wants to become itself, and working with this, will enable the drawer to establish a look or feel to a body of drawings done from memory. The next thing about memory is that only significant details are detained. Therefore a car drawn from memory is more like an idea of a 'car'.  Plato believed that there existed some sort of universal perfection of all the imperfect things that we deal with in the everyday world, perhaps he was thinking about memory and how it can give a 'golden glow' to the past. Ragsdale makes his models out of paper by creating flat templates that are then folded into shapes. I'm not sure if you get these now but when I was young in the 1950s, we were given a lot of cut out things to make by folding into shape and perhaps Ragsdale did too. He then goes on to photograph his models. 

Typical sheet of flat drawings made to be cut out, folded and stuck together to make 3D objects.

At the core of my fascination with this is the movement between 2D and 3D thinking. It's as if we could cut and fold Abbott's Flatland in order to create new dimensions. Flatland is about to become a film; watch this.

It's interesting to compare Ragsdale with Thomas Demand who also makes paper models of scenes but this time directly from photographs.  Ragsdale's memory I would argue is one suffused with nostalgia, his memories of America feel very 'filmic' too. It is almost as if he is building film sets. 

Ken Ragsdale

Demand begins with an image, often taken from media sources and frequently dealing with traumatic or politically important events, and creates a replica of the image using paper and cardboard. He is much more academically interested than Ragsdale in the idea of the model. For instance he has researched the American architect John Lautner’s physical models, which have been used since 1960 by Lautner and Partners to develop their architectural projects. Demand focuses on the sculptural quality of Lautner’s architecture and how the model itself helps shape this. He produced the book, 'Model Studies' in response to this research. 

Demand has worked for a long time by making card and paper models of interiors and photographing them. In doing so he highlights issues about both the nature of photography and the model. For instance, photography is concerned with point of view. Only from the one position that the photograph is taken do Demand's models look 'real', move to the left or right and you will be able to see how this world is fitted together with tape and string. The other issue is how the model simplifies reality. Demand's images have no flaws, the interiors are too 'nice', the complexities of real life have been ironed out. 

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand: From Model Studies

In my own work I often need to make models to work out what I'm doing, these are often very crude but they allow me to visualise things easily. 

Cardboard model of terraced house

Card model of an out building

I used cardboard models like the ones above in order to get and idea of how buildings would look as I put together the large drawing of a street above. 

The main point I'm making is that making models can be a wonderful way of not only generating new ideas, but as an aid to figurative drawing and as a philosophical concept. This is a very old concept, the British artist Thomas Gainsborough sometimes sketched from nature but based many of his landscape paintings on models made from cork, moss and broccoli, '[I have] seen him make models, or rather thoughts, for landscape scenery, on a little, old-fashioned folding oak table […] He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds, and set up distant woods of broccoli… W. H. Pyne, Somerset House Gazette, 6 March 1824

Jointed doll in the form of a woodman: Gainsborough's studio

Gainsborough drawing done from a tabletop model

Gainsborough: landscape

I'll leave you with an image by Tintoretto and an actual example of how to do it by Poussin. Tintoretto sometimes made little wax figures to use as models for his paintings. He would clothe them like dolls, then put them inside a box, arrange them like miniature actors in a toy theatre, and shine light on them to examine how shadows fall. He would make studies from these models and from the studies make his paintings. His fantastic lighting effects are really convincing, paradoxically their very conviction is based on his study of models. In the model we find a heightened reality.

Tintoretto: Study of action in an interior

Tintoretto: The Last Supper

Poussin was obsessed by composition. How could a composed complexity of figures be made both readable and meaningful? His answer was to make models. In Poussin's case we are very lucky, because the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has an example on display of one of his composition boxes. When I was last there I photographed his model scene through the viewing hole on the side of the beautifully constructed wooden box that it had been built within. As you peer into the box, you really do feel as if you are witnessing a moment of heightened reality. 

See also:

Cecile B Evans 

Working with models

How to work with cardboard to make detailed models