When thinking about texture and drawing the majority of people will I'm sure think of those drawing exercises many of us encountered when we first began going to art classes. You were often set off to look at how to make 'actual' textures. Usually by making rubbings or frottage, then to create textural surfaces using the various materials at hand, scratching into paint surfaces, dabbing watercolour or ink with natural sponges, making your own applicators from old paint brushes or spiky teasels, laying paper over a still wet paint surface and rubbing your hand over the back of it, then peeling it off to reveal your surprise texture, crumpling your paper etc etc. We were asked both to make freeform surfaces of these textures and to tape out very clearly measured out rectangles, that we had to place our textures into. These were arranged in rows and targets were set such as a minimum of 50 different textures, and then once our tutors had decided enough was enough, they stopped all the frantic textural invention, and then asked us to think about what these surfaces might communicate. Did they look like other things? Did they have any emotional associations? Besides making a few notes in a sketchbook, I don't remember doing anything else with all those sheets of textural information. We would then very quickly move on and the next exercise would usually be about observed texture or how to create the illusion of a textured surface by making changes in tone. The one I particularly remember was to create the illusion of texture wrapping itself around a curved surface. We made marks that got smaller as the surface moved away from us and then had to think about the way the marks got closer and closer to each other as they created the illusion of a moving surface. Then we had to adjust the marks tonally to create an added illusion of atmospheric perspective, sharp edged darker marks in the foreground and softer lighter marks in the background. Finally as texture followed the shape of the surface beneath, we had to look at how tonality changed in relation to light direction and how we could account for this at the same time as atmospheric perspective. It's an exercise still worth doing if you want to think about how to build up your ability to draw objects in space, in particular I remember the penny dropping that what I was actually drawing was light and how it operated in the world. Once you realised this, suddenly Impressionism began to make sense.
Typical sheet of drawing textures
In these exercises, you were looking at the relationship between invented and simulated textures, and in both cases it was 'illusion' that was the key issue. Did your invented texture look like something else, or did your simulated texture actually look like the surface you had been looking at or touching. (We were encouraged to feel the surfaces we were drawing to get a better understanding or 'feel' for them). However my personal relationship with this textural exploration was always that of the daydreamer, these surfaces became my hallucinogenic tab, and I would find myself visiting landscapes of mountains or forests, as I rediscovered what many artists had before me, that imagined images can easily be provoked into being by gazing at the splots and blotches of surface textures. This ability to see images in surface texture was even given a variety of names by the Surrealists, such as decalcomania, grattage and frottage.*
Typical texture exercise showing how textures change as they respond to light and form
Thinking back at that time, we were never asked to then really explore the implications of texture, the experience of looking was seen as something that was more about seeking out where edges were, or thinking about tone, light and atmospheric perspective. It was as if conceptual thinking was much easier when you had stripped your looking down to basic elements; for instance 'giron and fesspoint' drawing never included any reference to surface texture and the still-life setups tended to consist of various objects painted white, so that you could assess tonal values. Textural conjecture was often left alone, or was something you came to last, and in the classical drawing texts at the time, such as Kandinsky's 'Point and line to plane' texture came after all the other elements in a progression through point, line, plane, form, tone and colour. However, I'm not sure this was right. After having to think about the role of texture mapping in CGI, and how it 'authenticates' certain types of experiences and makes you much more aware of touch, I'm wondering how to bring textural thinking back. Point to line to plane, suggests the primacy of not just vision, but a certain atomistic attitude, that is about breaking things down into their primary parts, rather like looking for the atom inside an everyday material. But what if what I really want to do is immerse myself in the heady sensations of textural surfaces?
I did like this quote from Ashley Hurst the virtual drawing instructor, "Think of texture as icing on a cake and think of the cake as form. Icing makes a cake look great but even without the icing it is still a cake. Without the cake, however, the icing is just a pile of goop".
Hurst sums up what most of my drawing teachers had to say. I can see the problem, my references to Plato and CGI texture mapping in the last post, reinforce the idea of texture being about some sort of deceit or attempt to fool the eye and when I come to think about it texture was at the root of my early art education experience, the greats I was told were the Italians, such as Michelangelo and it was only later that the Northern Europeans such as Van Eyck were discussed, and in many ways as an afterthought, or as the “Flemish Primitives”. I was taught that the Italians like Michelangelo had stripped form down to essentials, and if you compare the simple solidity of Michelangelo's figures with Van Eyck's almost hyper-real surfaces, you can see the argument as was set out at the time; an argument whereby Michelangelo had achieved greatness by stripping away the inessential and giving us a monumental, weighty image that had real gravitas, whilst Van Eyck was demonstrating his undoubted ability to render surfaces with conviction, but it was argued he failed to see the deeper 'classical' ideal of forms that were Platonic in nature and which didn't depend on 'cheap' surface gleam to get over an idea.
Van Eyck
Michelangelo
In each case texture seemed to be associated with illusion and illusion with deceit. I gradually though as I got older began to seek out Northern European paintings and as I went around various national collections or visited the churches of major European cities would always look for Van Eyck in particular. I was stunned by his ability to render surface detail, the illusion sucked me in and rather than keep my distance or remain cool, I allowed myself the luxury of immercing myself in the enticement in the illusion. It was if I had discovered a guilty pleasure. So what's going on here?Intellectually I have been educated to think of the painting or drawing of things, in such as way that their physical presence is heightened, as being to do with the rise of Capitalism. As Julia Fiore put it when referring to the textual realism of Dutch still-life painting, "it’s no coincidence that the still life arose as an independent genre of Europe parallel to the birth of early market capitalism and the world’s first consumer society". From Artsy.net Fiore goes on the remind us that if we focus on things that we want to own, we also need to ask questions such as, "Who consumes what, and at whose expense?" Any theoretical focus of course cuts one understanding off from other readings, a Marxist focus on commodity fetishism can underplay the importance of colonial history, a focus on formalism can ignore the fact that all art objects are always part of a process of some sort and that they never can in reality be read in isolation.
However when I look at Van Eyck, it is as if the surfaces in his paintings are transcendent, the humans that inhabit his paintings seem almost insubstantial in relation to the various surrounding textured objects and their surfaces, a reminder that in a material world no one thing is more important than another, all are in fact interconnected and their existence is part of a commingled set of processes and events. I wasn't around in the early 15th century and understand that all works of art are open to the interpretative needs of their own times. The early 21st century it would seem to me needs a dose of spirituality to help us get over a sense of ennui, so perhaps a rereading of textural surface is due, one that celebrates the equality of everything under the light of the sun, one that makes us value things as well as people, one that makes us realise that everything has value, not just the life of human beings; one that reminds us that everything is interconnected. In order to do this perhaps we need to return to that hallucinogenic aspects of texture. Its dual nature, as both a way of giving realism to objects and of being a doorway into the imagination, suggests an idea of texture behaving as a hinge, something that can dissolve or shape-shift and move between the worlds of matter and energy, between reality and the imagination. There is an everyday experience of looking at a surface from a distance and thinking it is a quality belonging to an object such as a carpet or a table, and then as you get up really close to it, you lose focus on the object and the texture becomes another something, a world totally disassociated from the object, a landscape of dreams. This mutability reminds us that nothing is fixed, and that the universe is a dance of ever changing relationships.
Surrealist definitions
Frottage is the activity of taking a rubbing from a textured surface, by laying a thin sheet of paper over it and rubbing chalks, wax crayons or graphite over the back of the paper, so that a textural image is created. Max Ernst introduced the word into the surrealist lexicon, he had been inspired by the exposed grain of a well worn wooden floor that suggested images to him. It's not enough just to make the rubbings, in order for it to be true 'frottage' the surfaces that have been brought out of their located position in the world, also need to be represented as the visions that they have inspired.
Max Ernst: Frottage
Grattage or the use of scraping techniques to reveal textures, is a way of layering stiff paint over a canvas that can then be laid over a heavily textured object. Then you scrape the paint off, which will collect more in the indentations and be removed from high points. Ernst liked to use organic surfaces like fish skeletons or plant forms to stimulate his imagination.
Max Ernst: Grattage
Decalcomania was the technique of placing a clean sheet of paper over another one that had just been painted over and then peeling that surface off to reveal the resultant texture. Sometimes thick paint would be used and sometimes watered down pigments, as long as the paint was capable of being transferred from one surface to another the technique would work. Sometimes the paper surfaces would be moved so that the paint was pulled in one direction or another, to further increase the possibility of unexpected imagery.
Oscar Dominguez: Decalcomania
The Surrealists were re-discovering a very old tradition that goes back as far as you can go back in the history of art. For instance Cozens's 'blot' technique was an 18th century version. His 'A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape' was focused on the blot, which as he stated was a 'production of chance' , which generated 'forms without lines from which ideas are presented to the mind'. You can find images of animals painted in caves 40,000 years ago that were made using the same process.
Alexander Cozens: A Blot: Landscape Composition
"You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine." Leonardo da Vinci
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