Monthly Archives: April 2012

iPad paintings and drawings

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February was an interesting month for me, I was effectively demoted at work through a re-structure, had my workload increased threefold and, due these changes, inherited an iPad.

Fruit Bowl

Fruit Bowl

Very soon afterwards I bought a copy of Brushes and downloaded the free version of Autodesk’s Sketchbook software. Like everyone else I’ve been interested by Hockney’s iPad and iPhone drawings and wanted to see what I could do. The ‘Fruit Bowl’ is my first Brushes drawing.

The drawback to Brushes, along with getting used to drawing with your finger, is that there is a complete absence of texture.

Daffodils

Daffodils

Layering is useful, a background in Illustrator or Photoshop helps, but fundamentally it’s a new medium. I have kept up with Brushes, but these limitations led me to look for other software. I bought ArtRage in March and had a go with that. Daffodils is my first ArtRage painting. I think I was still thinking in computer generated mode and didn’t exploit the variety of mark and texture available.

I had been playing around with Sketchbook Express for a while, but it seemed to be like a more precise version of Brushes, so I left it alone as far as image making went.

 

After a while I tried to look at what the programs appeared to be set up to do. Brushes is, to me, a traditional computer drawing program. Sketchbook is very much a designer’s program, ArtRage is a painting program. I went for shiny stuff!

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kettle

Kettle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The left hand image is a Brushes painting of my stainless steel kettle, the right hand image is a Sketchbook Express version of the same subject.

All of these images have been made since the end of February.  There are more, you can see them here. My favourite so far is this ArtRage painting, it combines watercolour wash with impasto in a way you’d never do on a canvas.

Tea Mug

Tea Mug

But really I think it’s simply because the iPad lends itself to sitting with a cup of tea, bored, when nothing is happening in T’art Club.
 

Woman Walking with Hand to Mouth

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Four views of a work in progress.  This is four views of a single figure, about one metre tall, made from hardboard and fixed with a glue gun.  The figure is from Muybridge– ‘Woman walking with hand to her mouth’

Woman Walking Downstairs

The desire here is to get the kind of movement you find in Duchamp into the single figure, or to simply have the movement apparent in the static representation, so it’s very much a first version, and very much unfinished.

That may be a characteristic of my work on reflection, the ‘unfinished’ quality. I won’t claim it as deliberate, but then I do stop.

Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase

The process I try to follow when I work is to work without reference, to try to let the object dictate it’s own result.  There are some other examples here

Acknowledgements:

wikimedia commons Eadweard Muybridge

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 – wikipedia 21/04/12

Garden painting 2009-2012(unfinished)

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A painting I’ve been working on since 2009, one of those that got away. There is a value in continuing in the face of failure perhaps, even if only for the freedom you get when you step aside and do something else. Without this painting, perhaps this one
would not have been done.  It’s very easy to get very frustrated with failures, and to batter something into submission, but the end result is usually horribly prosaic when it’s overworked.  Without wishing to get carried away with myself I find I think of the film ‘A Bigger Splash’ and the production of a painting after, and partly as a result of, the destruction of another. I don’t do the destruction thing myself, I’ve got plan chests full of old work, rolled up canvasses, and an incredible range of opportunities to look back in embarrassment.