Some actual talking about art

I have always intended to use this blog as a platform for artworks, and as a way or recording my progress as I strive to increase my art prowess. Thus I set myself a task - that I will write about art at least once a week and do a bit on a piece of my own also at least once a week.

This week, I'm going to do Landseer, because I picked an artist at random.

Just a brief look at his Wikipedia page will give you the bare bones of his biography and a couple of his more famous paintings. A little more Google-fu and you can see his less famous ones. I like these better. Olga's Gallery has a selection of more of them, my favourites of these being The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which just about brought tears to my eyes, such is the pathos of the subject, and Jocko With A Hedgehog, which cheered me up again. The man was a really good observer of animals, and they way they move and sit. Discussion below the link.

The Representatives of God and Cartoons

On the way to the train station that I go to to get to work, there is a church nearby. It's a baptist church (which seems invariably to mean that it's a depressing-looking broken-down cowshed) and it's tucked away down a side street. Every now and then there is a little old lady who stands on the confluence of the main street that leads to the station and that side street, and she seems to have taken it into her head to convert passers-by with dreary pamphlets about religion.

Today was one of those days.

Normally when this happens, I ignore her. I don't want what she's selling. But today, she stopped me, and not being in much of a rush, I let her. She seemed flustered, poor thing, that someone actually ceased to perambulate. She tried to save my soul.

She presented me with a badly-thought-out, badly-rehearsed, utterly predictable speech about how modern life was drawing me to Satan, and that that was a bad thing because I would surely burn in hell as a result unless I admitted Christ into my heart on the spot.

I'm not used to being proselytised at, nor preached to: it's rare in Glasgow for someone to harangue you in the street. I didn't have a snappy answer, or anything snarky or clever to say. I listened to her.

More Darwin:In which, unsatisfied with my first study of Charles Darwin, I try again.

Hullo reader!

My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.

However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.

The Underdrawing - soft pencil on watercolour paper

 Rookie mistake here - I got carried away with drawing him and didn't measure it out properly - now he has an unnecessarily large beard. I always make this mistake out of sheer enthusiasm.

More after the jump!

Darwin, Rationality and Renaissance

I've been away from keyboard for a few days. I actually felt guilty about neglecting this blog.  In the time I've been able to snatch inbetween doing gainful employment, I've managed to produce a portrait of Charles Darwin.

One of the sites I love to  visit and revisit is Freethought Blogs, and my favourites there, Pharyngula, En Tequila Es Verdad and Blue Collar Atheist (this is not to suggest that these are the only blogs there, or the objectively best, or that the others are somehow unworthy. These are just my favourite three of a large group that I like immensely. I strongly suggest that anyone go to see if there's anything that catches their eye there). I wanted to show them how much I appreciate their words, which entertain and inform me so well and the idea came to me all of a sudden. A long term project was born (and I'm really going to stick to it this time) . It might take me a while, but I'm going to do them each a painting.

I thought I'd start with Charles Darwin. Central to a lot of debate, he's a famous figure in science politics, as the Theory of Evolution that he proposed was received poorly in his own time (and it still seems to have some resistance even today) and is pretty fundamental to basically every biological discipline.

So, taking up some peculiarly dense watercolour paper I had found, I got stuck right in doing some pencils for a study for it. The image is taken from an old photo, rather a famous one I think, and I basically mentally cropped it. I must say that the intense tonal contrasts in his face are extraordinary - Darwin was a craggy-looking fellow. I found it really interesting to work on all his myriad crevices and wrinkles. What a life of thinking and pondering and worrying he had - no wonder! 

I agonized long and hard about whether or not to do it in monochrome, like the old photo was, or whether it should be a colour study. As you can see, this is after the first couple of layers of watercolour, and it is indeed in colour. I thought that since the reference material was in monochrome, it would be an interesting challenge to try to render it in colour. It sure was.

 More pictures of my progress on this one after the fold.

Lanarkshire Sky

This is the final version of the painting. I'm calling it Lanarkshire Sky, for incredibly obvious reasons.

I've really learned some things from this painting:
1) That one must have a plan for the stages of the painting, so that you don't get awkward-looking segments that you then need to spend ages fixing.

2) That a warm, tonal underpainting would really have helped to give life and variation and depth to the final version.

3) Not to get hung about technicality and have some damn fun.

If you're interested in purchasing this piece, or any other, please see the Gallery page of my website, and feel free to contact me at my email address, hbartgallery@yahoo.co.uk