Showing posts with label artist's materials. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 March 2019

Drawing using wax resist

Henry Moore: wax resist with ink underground shelter drawing

I was at school when I first discovered drawing using wax resist techniques and perhaps because it is often introduced as a way of adding texture to a drawing as part of a school art room exercise, it is rarely used again. However like any process it has rich possibilities and in this case a long history.

My interest in wax resist techniques as a way of working was rekindled a few years ago when I put on an exhibition of work that was being produced in my local area of Chapeltown in Leeds. One of the artists I made contact with was Oluseyi Ogunjobi, a storyteller, musician, painter, textile artist and translator. Seyi’s images try to capture the universal essence of spirituality and tap into traditional life and stories found in Yoruba culture. He paints as well as makes images using resist techniques and the images he supplied for the exhibition both used wax resist.

Oluseyi Ogunjobi

Resist techniques are common in Yoruba imagery, originally using starch and more recently wax, the Yoruba tradition is one that Oluseyi continues, converting stories originally designed to be passed on via oral traditions, into visual patterns. Like the sand drawings I looked at from the New Hebrides a while ago, these images would have been made as part of a holistic tradition, and when Seyi (Oluseyi) showed his images he also came and told stories about them. The more I become aware of these traditions, the more I believe as artists we need to think about a more holistic approach to art.

Yoruba textile using starch resist

Wax resist as a technique is thousands of years old and its unique visual quality means that it is constantly being rediscovered as a way of making images that tap into mythic pasts. For instance Susanne Wenger has revisited Yoruba culture and brought it back into contact with a German tradition of expressionist woodcuts, the results being powerful images that cross over several cultural boundaries.

Susanne Wenger: Wax resist

Wax resist or 'Batik' traditions of image making have been found in the Far East, Middle East, Central Asia and India from over 2000 years ago. The craft spread from Asia to the islands of the Malay Archipelago and west to the Middle East via caravan routes. Batik, from the Javanese word 'tin' to dot, is usually produced by painting in hot wax onto cloth and then when the cloth is dyed the resist areas remain uncoloured. Finally the wax is removed once the various layers of wax painting and dying have been completed. As you can see from the image of a detail from an Indonesian sarong below, the process can lead to very complex images and because many motifs need to be repeated, batik is often associated with wood block printing techniques, the blocks can be used to print both wax for resist purposes and to ink areas of cloth.

Contemporary batik Indonesian sarong design

This film made by Anna Gifford shows how you can transfer a paper design to cloth.
It's an old film but it shows how you can use charcoal dust and a small star-wheel to draw through paper onto a cloth beneath, by pricking holes using a rolling star-wheel following along previously drawn lines. It demonstrates how the techniques of making cartoons and transferring them for fresco, were very closely modelled on techniques that would have been used to transfer designs onto cloth. I've also got a very personal reason for making a link to the film, Anna was a fellow student on the DipAd Fine Art course I studied at Newport College of Art and she has sadly now passed away.
Henry Moore used wax crayons for his resist technique and users of watercolour and ink make use of a variety of resist techniques, in the image below you can see John Singer Sargent using wax scribbles as a resist technique.

John Singer Sargent

An artist such as Bernadette Madden who is also a printmaker uses batik techniques to work in a territory that sort of sits halfway between painting, printmaking and drawing and she is well worth investigating if you are wanting to explore colour and surface resist techniques.

Bernadette Madden

Resist techniques are many and various, try painting an image loosely in gouache and then when dry going over it in black ink. When the ink is dry wash out the gouache. The gouache colours will stain the paper and the black ink will seep in around the edges of each shape in unpredictable ways. It is often the unpredictability of using resists that makes for those unexpected moments of wonder.

Picasso: Etching

The one area of print making that allows you to really develop your thinking via resist techniques is etching. Every time you have to put the plate in the acid you stop out or resist one or other areas of the plate. White is the only non bitten area left when etching away various parts of the plate, i. e. it is the area that has always had some sort of resist on it, through the whole time that plate has been worked on. (Except of course any area that has been burnished and re-polished). In my day you could use almost straight nitric acid on a zinc plate, but health and safety precautions now mean you would probably have to use ferric chloride, but even so, very similar results can be obtained. Working in this way can help you be more dramatic in your decision making and bolder in your design work. A combination of aquatint and open bite can be used alongside sugar lift and line work scratched through a hard ground to give you a very rich textural range.

George Rouault: Etching

He might not be very popular at the moment, but if you ever get a chance to view any George Rouault etchings have a good look at how he achieves a wonderful feeling of both richness and solidity, whilst still keeping his forms mobile by using gestural strokes. He often does this using sugar lift techniques, but he also mixes photographic transfer processes with hand applied aquatints to get the desired intensity of surface texture and sooty darks. When used in the hands of a master like Rouault or Goya, resist techniques can lead to a surface richness and an intensity that can be used to carry deep emotional impact.

Goya: Etching

This tradition is carried on by artists such as Paula Rego, the resist techniques of etching ensuring that the images that arrive are never over controlled, but emerge out of a sort of half guess as to what might happen if. The first pull of an etching plate is rather like that first moment that you brush ink over your wax resist, the image is always slightly unexpected, and in that unexpectedness lies its freshness and directness.

Paula Rego: Etching

Sunday, 21 October 2018

Oak Gall ink

I was reminded a few weeks ago of how important oak gall ink was to the history of drawing. I bumped into Jonnie Turpie who I had last seen at the opening of the 'You and I are Discontinuous Beings' exhibition in Birmingham and he informed me of his summer visit to Santander in Spain and in passing told me about printing on sandy beaches using squid ink and that while over in Spain he had been introduced to oak gall ink for the first time, all of which can be read about on his blog.
I use ink all the time and have in the past made oak gall ink (also known as iron gall ink) myself. I use dip-in pens almost every day and for the past thousand years oak gall ink was the dip-in pen liquid of choice. It was only with the introduction of fountain pens that the use declined, mainly because oak gall ink deposits silt and corrodes metals which makes it totally unsuitable for modern pens.
I have posted several times about media specificity and that I like to think of this in two ways. On the one hand there is a purely physical set of issues surrounding what you can do with the material. In this case how does it flow, what is its covering power, how does it stick to other surfaces, what is its colour range? etc. On the other hand there is the what I have called 'ur' history of things. How was it made, who made it, from what and how does this effect other things, such as a local economy, sustainability or other wider impacts. However in the case of oak gall ink, there is also a very powerful cultural set of associations because so many famous drawings were made using it. It is 'hot' with art historical interest, as are other materials such as oil paint, marble or charcoal and it is embedded deeply into the narratives surrounding art practice. Most of the artists that we would regard as 'canonical' at one time or another used oak gall ink; often using pen and ink for linear qualities, together with brushwork for tonality. Unlike other drawing materials such as charcoal and chalk, you can't rub out what you have done afterwards, therefore in many ways pen and ink drawings are seen as much more direct records of an artist's thought and therefore could be read as being closer to the centre of certain Romantic ideas about art and artists, especially those concerned with the spontaneity of an artist's vision.
Oak gall ink has four ingredients: dried oak galls, ferrous sulphate, gum arabic and water. Each of which can be thought of as carrying a series of associations potentially just as potent as those linked to images of past oak gall ink drawings.

Goya

Rembrandt

Oak galls are formed when a gall wasp lays an egg into a puncture on the underside of an oak leaf. As the larva develops, the tree secretes tannic and gallic acids, creating a round formation known as a gall nut or oak apple. These are what you need to harvest.

Oak gall with hole formed by escaping wasp

This is a basic recipe for oak gall ink:

Collect as many oak galls as you can or buy them on line. Put them somewhere warm to dry out. After drying, wrap in a cloth and hit with a hammer to break the galls down into manageable sizes and then finely crush the oak gall fragments using a mortar and pestle.
Using four ounces of crushed oak galls, pour over two pints of water and soak for 24 hours. Strain the oak gall/water mixture through cheesecloth to remove surplus bits of crushed oak galls. Add two onces of ferrous sulphate to the oak gall solution. Mix well. Add one once of powdered gum arabic and continue to stir. Leave for 24 hours. Because the pigment in iron gall ink does not go fully dark until it is exposed to air for a while, it is rather light when applied to paper immediately after preparation. Therefore artists sometimes added other ingredients into the mix and everything from red wine to natural wood dyes have been added to the basic solution in the past. Bear in mind that iron gall ink is corrosive. As the ink ages, it will release acidic materials which can damage writing instruments and preparation equipment over time. Be sure to rinse pens, brushes, cooking and mixing tools immediately after use.

Piranesi

Because oak gall ink corrodes metals it was often used with quills or in Van Gogh's case the reed pen. It is perhaps with Van Gogh that we find the relationship between writing and drawing at its most intimate, his letters move between writing, drawing and painting, at times a colour is simply inserted as a word, bleu for the sky in the case below, and the rhythm of his writing becomes set off alongside the rhythm of his drawing strokes. I saw Van Gogh's letters alongside his drawings for the first time at a wonderful exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1968. The letters in many ways brought home to me the democratic nature of his art, it was something I could do, something for all of us to aspire to. The most profound art could be made out of the communication between two human beings, in this case Van Gogh and his brother Theo.

Van Gogh

If you do get interested in this sort of drawing it is really worthwhile to make your own pens. See how to make a reed pen and how to make a quill pen. You may even go on to make your own brushes.

Watch this video to see what oak galls look like and how to operate in the wild.

Those of you interested in sustainability and wanting to make a point about how we ought to be co-existing with nature may want to make your own materials. If so make sure you document the process, it may be that the artwork that you are producing needs to include the various activities that are brought together in the creation of inks, nibs, brushes etc. and that these can be regarded as special types of journeys both into craft and into various ideas of nature. My own interest lies in trying to listen to other 'voices', how do I begin to understand the language of my materials if I have never thought about how they come into being. As you draw with this ink, you are in many ways extending a conversation that begins with a tree and a wasp.

I must however end this post with a warning. It has been suggested that oak gall ink corrosion is a serious threat to the cultural heritage of western society. It is very corrosive and so thousands of manuscripts and drawings in libraries and museums are in danger of being lost because over time it eats away into the paper it was drawn on. Personally I think this is another very interesting story, one about the excessive pride of human beings and a story that resonates more and more as we enter the age of the anthropocene.

If it all sounds too hard to do, here are a couple of other ways to think about making inks:

Stuff like onion skins, black walnuts, coffee, tea etc. don’t need mordants, so just boil up these things with water and try them out. N.b. A mordant is an inorganic oxide that will combine with a dye or stain and thereby fix it. Other stuff does need a mordant, usually soda ash or rusty iron, so try anything and see if either of these works. Again try different organic materials.

For lamp black collect soot from a burning candle or ask if someone has a chimney that still needs sweeping. Bind by mixing together egg yolk, gum arabic, and honey and stir in the lamp black. To use the ink, mix this paste with a small amount of water to achieve the desired consistency.

Add thyme oil to stop mould forming.

Chinese ink drawing

Drawing in pen and ink

Saturday, 29 July 2017

Silverpoint drawing

My occasional posts on drawing materials always make me think of their specificity, of the way their very particularity shapes and forms the type of drawings that can be done. Silverpoint is a case in point. Each mark is very delicate and fine and you can't rub it out. You also have to prepare the surface, so that it has enough roughness to ensure the metal is deposited on the ground or surface as the point moves over it.
These restrictions make for a certain type of concentration and focus, as well as a fragility that comes from the way tones need to be built up by the gradual massing together of many fine lines.

Left: ‘Portrait of an unknown young woman’, c.1435, by Rogier van der Weyden

Right: ‘The Virgin and the Child’, c.1509, by Raphael

There was an exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago called Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, which brought together examples of metal point from a wide range of artists and times. Both Northern European and Southern European artists during the time of the Renaissance used silverpoint as it lent itself to the sharp delineation of details such as the folds of a cloth or the subtle variation of tone across the surface of a face. The at the time 'new' naturalism was ideal for the harnessing of a technique that would support close looking and fine details.

Durer

In this drawing of a dog by Durer you can easily see the sharp, distinct mark that is characteristic of a silverpoint line made on a drawing surface coated with an abrasive ground.

Des Lawrence Obituary portrait: Jimmy Stewart: Silverpoint

Des Lawrence is a contemporary artist that has taken to silverpoint to make obituary portraits. In this case the delicate, precision of the medium and the way it changes with age as the silver tarnishes, create a perfect mesh between chosen medium and subject matter. Not simply an allusion to the 'silver screen' but a recognition of the historical precedence of the medium, used in the past to depict saints, and now portraying a faded star; the medium of silverpoint becoming a way of preserving a celluloid 'ghost'.

The most common recipe for making an abrasive surface was to apply a liquid made of burnt and pulverised animal bones or cuttlefish bound together with glue or gum. This could be applied in layers to a variety of surfaces from prepared wooden panels to paper and parchment. You could also add pigment whilst making the ground, this could act as a mid tone onto which you could add white highlights with a very fine brush.

Jasper Johns: Silverpoint drawing

Jasper Johns is an artist that is always trying to play with the way a material can shift the meaning of an image, so it is to be expected that he would have used silverpoint at some time. The delicate etherial nature of the material produces an almost ghostlike image of one of his variations on a theme, making me think that in some ways for Johns the image is at times incidental. Compare an image using a different technique.

Jasper Johns: Painting in encaustic

You can just about see the faucet to the bottom right of his silverpoint drawing and one of his Rubin vases in the centre, these re-occur in the encaustic painting above. Johns shuffles the image pack every time he approaches making an art work and over the years gradually adds new ones. The Rubin vase occurs yet again in the etching below, the aquatint providing a tonal richness that once again changes the visual read of the image.

Jasper Johns etching

Taking an image through as many different ways of making it as possible is a direct consequence of Johns' often quoted maxim, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that", an approach to art making that often seems to work and is a great way of making a next step when you are unsure as to what to do next.

The artist Susan Schwalb has focused on silver and other metal point drawings for some time and has an extensive body of work devoted to the subtlety of this technique. In her case she restricts her images to tightly controlled abstract constructions, this allows you to concentrate more on the effect that the process has on the visual quality attained and stops you getting distracted by the narrative of the image.

Susan Schwalb: silverpoint

Susan Schwalb: Madrigal: aluminum/copper/silverpoint on grey gessoed paper

Susan Schwalb also uses the effect a toned ground can give. As you can see with the drawing on grey gessoed paper above, she has been able to sit the soft warm tones of copperpoint in amongst the cooler tones of aluminium and silverpoint, using the grey colour of the ground to help blend them all together.

Cynthia Lin

Cynthia Lin depicts scraps of hair, bits of dust and those things that you usually want to wipe off the surface of a drawing when its been left out in the studio for a few days. She uses the delicacy of silverpoint on gesso to remind us that it is often the tiny insignificant things that we never notice that hold important messages about the way we move through life. Dust and hair the products of our own body gradually flaking off and leaving a faint delicate trail behind us.

Roy Eastland is an artist that has used silverpoint on gesso to suggest an image coming into focus. He works on and into thick layers of gesso which allows him to scratch and sand back into his drawings, he revises and redraws until the image arrives out of a haze of marks.

Roy Eastland

Eastland's drawings above were done from toys found in a museum, the process reimagines them, and uses silverpoint's sharp delicacy alongside sanding and scratching to suggest a dreamlike nostalgia for the forgotten toys of the past. I particularly like the drawings of a red Indian dancing, turning a small plastic toy back into a shamanistic dream image.

As always there is a scientific principle at work here, the mohs scale of hardness reminds us that the ability of a harder material to scratch a softer material allows us to think about how to use selected materials to shape and form others. As one surface rubs against another there is an intimation of geological forces at work, the drawing's surface working as a miniature landscape, being eroded and cut into by the forces of metals and minerals dancing in tune to hand gestures and a changing mind as the artist searches for an image in the ground.

You can easily make your own drawing tools if you want to work using metal points, or if you need to you can still buy both metalpoint drawing tools and prepared grounds from art suppliers such as Jacksons. I would personally recommend making your own but see this link if you want to just buy stuff and get on with trying things out.

You can buy silver wire for less that £1.50.

Find here a link to an exhibition that brought together several contemporary artists using silverpoint.

References

Burns, T (2012) The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint Archetype Publications

Still, S (2015) Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns Princeton Press

Drawing