Leonardo
One of the first drawings that I ever made where I realised I had been able to put something down on paper that I had actually seen, was of a flower. I can still remember the concentration it took and how I had to make its shape appear and disappear as the edges of a leaf moved behind each other. I had to move my head to 'see' what had happened and then make a decision how to show this. The realisation that by 'disappearing' the leaf plane and letting it reappear but now from beneath, would visually describe the way a leaf dipped through space was at the time magical. I suspect this is quite a common experience.
Flowers are such beautiful things, designed to attract other living things so that pollen can be distributed, they have had millions of years of evolution to get those colours and shapes just right, no wonder we find them so fascinating.
I'm once again having to go on about the art and science divide, so bare with me. In the last post I put a hyperlink in to a poem by Goethe. He wrote this about plants:
None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;
Therefore, a mystical law is by the chorus proclaim'd;
Yes, a sacred enigma!
He recognised the mystical in the difference between each plant form. Each plant had a certain degree of similarity because of a set of features that are designed to do certain things, such as draw up water from the ground, photosynthesise and have sexual needs. But each plant was also very different because there are as many different niches for plants as there are possible differences in environments. Each leaf form designed to act slightly differently, roots that dig deep or hold on tight to stones in thin soils, yellow flowers that may be small, or red flowers that may be smaller or a similar size but only blossoming on late summer days. Stems are segmented or ridged, covered in hairs or smooth, tall or low lying, each designed by time and evolution to survive right here, right now. This is science, this is art, this is mystical knowledge that we all should know. So lets not dismiss those wonderful botanical artists who spend their days visualising plants. Celebrate them as creative artists of the highest order and bring them back into the fold of fine art. They should be shown alongside our Turner prize winners and not be relegated to dark dusty museum cupboards and seen as some sort of low grade artists who don't do 'real' art. For them art and science are one and in that fusion they continue to see the magic in reality.
To draw a plant well you need to have a good grasp of its structure and to understand its structure you need to understand the plant's life. Make the plant a friend, listen to it, be with it and care about it. All simple things but once again it is about dissolving the differences between humans and other things. If we are to change our ways in order to not totally despoil the Earth, we need to begin somewhere, and this could be by simply making friends with that plant that we used to call a weed.
Raymond Booth
Living in Leeds I have gradually became more and more aware of the work of Raymond Booth. Occasionally I would come across one of his studies of flowers, I immediately realised that they held within them a record of enormous feats of extended concentration. They were when you saw the originals very large drawings, sometimes four or five feet high, these were not schoolboy drawings, these were serious scientific studies made by someone with an artist's eye. His drawing above of a man holding flowers, is evocative of what his whole life was concerned with. The human figure in the drawing is Booth himself concentrating on the flowers he holds, his body gradually dissolving back into the field of marks that also operates as a sign for the vegetation that surrounds him. The tradition of intense close observation of nature goes back to Durer, and it could be argued that no one has ever captured a small piece of the earth with such intensity.
Durer: Clod of earth
Raymond Booth: Iris study
Perhaps using an over 'designed' layout, Booth's study still operates to inform us and show us what he has seen. So much more understandable than a photograph, the drawing has a clear visual narrative that takes us under the ground as well as showing us the full glory of the plant in flower.
Going back to John Dewey, Booth gives us a way of connecting with his own experience. An experience so common that we can overlook it. But when a well known fine artist did something similar, for instance when Michael Landy after completing his epic work of destruction in 'Break Down' made his etchings of weeds, he was praised for his bravery and refreshing take on art. The Tate Gallery buying a set of these prints and on its website tells us that "Landy collected a number of these plants and took them back to his studio where he potted and tended them, making studies of their structures including detailed renderings of roots, leaves and flowers". That's wonderful and very praiseworthy but I would argue that is what any botanical artist worth their salt would have to do on a daily basis.
Michael Landy
We forget that most of the activities that make sense are done over and over again. We discover that it is wonderful to lie back in the grass and gaze at slowly moving clouds as they shape change in the sky. We look at a clump of weeds and as we stare at it we realise that there is a whole world there to discover. Millions upon millions of human beings will have done those things, but that doesn't take away from the richness of each individual experience. Unfortunately we live in a society that wants to celebrate individuality, we focus on the fact that each one of us is different, when we ought to be looking far more closely at how we are similar.
It was the work of Chinese artists that first of all set out the interrelationship between looking and understanding the world, not as a way of being separate from it, but as a way of commingling with it.
If you look at this brush drawing of a pine tree and chrysanthemums by Chen Shu you can see that she understands the six principles of Chinese brush drawing very well.
Pine tree and chrysanthemums by Chen Shu
I haven't referred to the six principles before and as they were set out as early as the year 550 it is worth looking at them in some depth. They have an almost mythic status and yet you could use them as a manifesto for the depiction of nature today.
The Six principles of Chinese brush drawing were established by Xie He and first set out in the book ‘The Record of the Classification of Old Painters’.
The first and most important principle was ‘spirit resonance’ or vitality. The life energy of the maker should be transmitted from the artist into the work. The very heartbeat of the artist should exist in the rhythm of the marks that go to make up the work. There should be a total transmission of life force from the living being of the maker into the material structure of what is made. Xie He stated that without 'spirit resonance', there was no need to look further at a work.
The second principle the "Bone Method" or ‘way of the brush’, establishes the method of establishing ‘spirit resonance’. The language of the brush stroke is linked to the textural qualities it can command. This is also to do with the ‘handwriting’ or personal signature of the artist, which can be read like graphology, a set of marks that can reveal the personality of the maker. It is important to remember that the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting in Chinese art at this time.
The third principle, "Correspondence to the Object," concerns the depiction of form, or how mark, shape and line are used in correspondence with what is being depicted. This again relates to the first principle. The chosen mark quality should be in sympathy with the qualities found in the object depicted by the maker. A link is established between the life force of the maker and the ‘spirit’ of what is to be represented. This ‘resonance’ goes both ways and can only work if the maker is ‘attuned’ to what is both seen and what is being understood in that seeing through a sensitivity to the materials of depiction.
The forth principle, "Suitability to Type," refers to the overall colour or tone of the image. This includes the layering or the building up of textures when an image is worked on in order to refine differences or pick out qualities that refer to the particular nature of the subject. This is sometimes thought of as a type of refinement or fine tuning, but may also be to do with the overall atmosphere or feeling tone of an image.
The fifth principle "Division and Planning," concerns both composition and the way that the image deals with space and depth. The placement of the various elements within an overall composition can either enhance or hinder an understanding of the overall spatial positioning of the pictorial elements. This together with an understanding of atmospheric perspective, size constancy, mark energy, formal relationship, such as whether or not objects overlap each other or whether they have a certain consistency of relationship, such as regular or irregular spacing between marks or shapes; will determine the overall spatial conviction of the image.
The final principle "Transmission by Copying," concerns the amount of understanding the maker has of tradition. Every artist builds up their understanding of the principles of image construction by looking at the work of other artists and comparing the languages of art their predecessors have developed with their own experiences of the world. Therefore a good artist will reveal thoughtful study of past masters in the way they make their own work and at the same time reveal how well they study nature by the building of new visual ideas because of the need to record what they have observed that others may not have witnessed before. Thus tradition is preserved and art is refreshed again by each new generation of makers.
Chen Shu's drawing of a pine tree and chrysanthemums echoes these principles and hopefully you can see how a simple depiction of plant life can embed within it a set of principles that could be applied to the depiction of anything.
Dandelion Face
I have been drawing flowers a lot over the last few months, and gradually another aspect is beginning to emerge. As I draw them they begin to inhabit my subconscious, coming through that dark unknown internal space as slightly changed hybrids often with human features.
From a floral narrative
When I was a small boy the puppet programme 'Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men' was on children's hour, I watched it avidly even though I found the fact that houses and simple garden objects could be sentient rather disturbing. I suspect the character 'little weed' went much deeper down into my psyche than I realised.
Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men
See also:
The evolution of an idea: how drawing plants can help evolve visual thoughts
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