Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i Artists & Illustrators

1 VAN GOGH & JAPAN While the artist never visited the country in his lifetime, the influence of Japanese culture on Van Gogh can be seen in many of his artworks. A forthcoming exhibition at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum will explore these links further, but if you can’t make the trip to Holland, look out for this 85-minute film at selected cinemas around the UK from 4 June. As part of Exhibition on Screen series, it offers an exclusive preview of the show alongside footage from a Tokyo print studio, Osaka’s Keitakuen Gardens, and the famous Yellow House in Arles. www.exhibitiononscreen.com 2 CREATE Picture the Heath 2019 Hampstead School of Art’s plein air painting and drawing event returns. Sign up at Kenwood House on 16 June and spend the…

From as early as she can remember, June Arnold was certain that her future lay in the arts. Her determination throughout childhood led her to the West Sussex College of Art after leaving school, where she learnt skills in life drawing, sculpture and painting in gouache which she still leans on to this day. Though her artistic repertoire grew, she remained loyal to her sketchbook which was her constant companion. June was inspired by her tutors but wanted a vocation and so she followed this by studying interior design at Kingston School of Art. She set up her own practice and worked alongside her husband to put together projects for five-star hotels. It wasn’t until three decades later that she felt a pull to get back in the studio and…

When breaking down a brief such as this competition or an illustration commission, what is your first step? I start thinking straight away. Thinking time is underrated. You’re not doing nothing, you’re thinking. I look at reference pictures too, but I never copy photos exactly. The figures are nicely stylised. Were they originally based on reference material or entirely invented? A bit of both. I looked at lots of pictures of the Windrush arrival for historical context and to see what people were wearing. So I got lots of inspiration for the figures, who I then invented as I drew them. When creating a screenprint, how do you settle upon the colour palette? All my colours are mega-planned in advance. I’m totally obsessed by colour and if it’s not right…

THE COLOUR Cadmium colours were first developed in 1817 and this warm, oft-overlooked pigment serves as a transitional step between Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Orange. THE PROPERTIES Even more so than traditional Cadmium Yellow, the Deep variety has a very high opacity and tinting strength, making it a powerful, saturated colour to add to a mix. THE USES Oil paint guru Michael Harding recommends this yellow to “warm the mid-tones and lights of some flesh painting” – when blended with Titanium White, it creates an almost peachy colour. In watercolour, it mixes well with Ultramarine Blue for a surprisingly varied range of autumnal foliage greens.…

With Leo bathed in the morning light, I wanted to jump right in with the inspiration I was feeling, rather than labouring over the composition first. I didn’t do any thumbnail sketches, but I did use a homemade viewfinder – a little rectangle window cut into some card. It’s a useful composition device for impatient artists, as it allows you to eliminate surrounding information and view only the picture plane. You can use the viewfinder to crop the legs, for example, or to expand the frame fully to include more of the room. Once you’ve decided upon the composition, you can discard the viewfinder and trust yourself to locate the figure as you want.…

After the first commercially mined seam of graphite was discovered in Cumbria 500 years ago the slippery, silver-grey mineral quickly found application as a mark-making material, replacing metal-point drawing media and rivalling its far older cousins, charcoal and ink. Despite the misnomer of ‘lead’, modern pencil cores are from a mixture of pure graphite and clay – the higher the ratio of clay, the harder the pencil. This article is intended to expand your graphite horizons beyond the simple pencil, exploring the world of mechanical, clutch and solid graphite pencils. www.jakespicerart.co.uk WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS? Here are the five main forms of graphite – and the pros and cons of using them 1 MECHANICAL PENCIL Mechanical pencils have very fine cores which are typically available in harder grades. Due to…

LONDON Edvard Munch: Love and Angst Until 21 July The Norwegian artist’s most famous prints – guaranteed to be a Scream. British Museum. www.britishmuseum.org Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking 19 June to 8 September Tube journeys and leisure pursuits get the sharp, 1930s linocut treatment. Dulwich Picture Gallery. www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk George Rowlett: Paintings of Sarah Price’s Garden 11 June to 4 August A vibrant series of plein air oil paintings. Garden Museum. www.gardenmuseum.org.uk Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective Until 15 September Overdue overview of the Tamara Drewe illustrator’s career. House of Illustration. www.houseofillustration.org.uk The Art of Persuasion: Wartime Posters by Abram Games Until 24 November Major retrospective of the iconic graphic artist. National Army Museum. www.nam.ac.uk Joaquin Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light Until 7 July Last chance to see the Valencian's sumptuous…

Casper White Cardiff School of Art graduate Casper White’s big break came at the BP Portrait Awards in 2017. A portrait of his nephew Jack was accepted into the prestigious exhibition and, crucially, he also scooped the BP Travel Award, which allowed him to develop a series of paintings of music fans that was shown at the National Portrait Gallery last year. After a failed attempt to paint and draw in clubs and music venues in Spain and Germany, he set about creating a similar environment in his studio. “I felt I could articulate my ideas fully there rather than relying on chance,” he says. “The sketches from the club environment were exciting but did not articulate the intimacy I wanted.” The paintings he has developed for ‘and you danced’,…

What particularly appealed to you about the subject of Dead End? I try to rescue the so-called ‘nonplaces’ that are typical of the urban metropolis: motorways, bypasses, waste transfer stations, abandoned spaces. With Dead End, I aimed to represent the tension that we feel in the presence of the incomprehensible and melancholic beauty of such places. How did you develop the painting? It was a studio-based work that began with multiple reference photos and sketches. I visited in different light and weather conditions until I found the right atmosphere and composition. In the early stages, I look for a strong composition. In Dead End, I liked the reflections, they created an illusion and ambiguity that I found intriguing. How true to life is the finished work? The most important aspect…

Jennifer McRae gazes out of the painting that won her this year’s Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize. Titled Past, Present, Future: Tracing the Female Line, it depicts her at work, painting a portrait of her daughter and granddaughter – three generations on one canvas. She looks intense, focused, her brush poised. Besides being a meditation on motherhood, the piece gives a fascinating insight into an artist at work. The portraits of her daughter and granddaughter are incomplete, layers of colour and detail still to be added, and in the foreground sits a glorious mess of paintbrushes and half-squeezed tubes of oil paint: Old Holland, Charvin and Schmincke, brands she chooses, she says, for their texture and purity of colour. “The idea for this painting had been with me a for couple of…

Staedtler’s new Design Journey range is dedicated to the amateur artist and features everything from watercolour sets to blending stumps. We particularly enjoyed sketching with this Mars Lumograph Aquarelle set, which contains special 4B, 6B and 8B watersoluble graphite pencils, plus a brush for blending. The larger, 3.6mm leads are sturdy and don’t snap easily, while the addition of water lends quick reference sketches an atmospheric quality. www.staedtler.co.uk…

Figure Drawing Atelier by Juliette Aristides Occasional A&I contributor Juliette Aristides is clearly a firm believer in the old adage that practice makes perfect. She is director of her own classical atelier at Seattle’s Gage Academy of Art and presents her latest publication as a sketchbook to be drawn in and annotated. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this book, however, is the sheer wealth of knowledge which you feel is being imparted. Aristides quotes from authors JRR Tolkien and Henry Miller, reworks a classic Da Vinci drawing, and generally builds confidence in your own practice through her structured, methodical approach. Monacelli Press. www.aristidesarts.com…

How do you begin planning and composing a new still life painting? A painting idea begins with inspiration, either from an object or objects that I love or from some flowers that are in my house, or both. I always look out for ceramics wherever I go. These are chosen for their simple shapes and more importantly their colour. Very often I include images of the places where I bought the objects too. Do you have certain requirements or things you are looking for when creating a new still life composition? I like simple, slightly patterned things, nothing too complex. It would only get simplified either when squinting or in my sketch. I spend a lot of time setting up the elements in my studio. Every object fits into a…

Here’s an older oil painting of mine, Graeme with Cello, which I wanted to include to show an alternative composition. Graeme was seated on a platform and so I was looking directly across at him. From this angle, I enjoyed finding the shape of the spaces between the various parts. I enjoyed the composition here, with the cello leading the eye up to the face. And the position of the grey left arm bringing our eye back down to the hand holding the bow. While I valued the capacity to stand back and move my body when I painted Leo, raising up the figure as I did with Graeme makes for more options compositionally. I had painted in acrylic underneath the oils to describe the position of the body. I…

For best results, always keep your pencil or graphite stick sharp. Pick a pencil sharpening approach that gives you the length of point you prefer. As well as a knife or a regular sharpener, you might also try a høvel – an adjustable hand plane that allows you to achieve any angle of point required. Be aware that sharpening solid graphite pencils on a regular pencil sharpener will blunt the blade much faster than it would with a wooden pencil – for solid graphite, try rubbing the tip on sandpaper to achieve a point instead.…

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1 TRY NEW THINGS “I’ve always been interested in pushing paint to the extremes. When I was younger, I’d experiment to see what would work, what I could do with it. I worked with a chemist to create new configurations of paint.” 2 FIND YOUR OWN SPACE “I have a deep sympathy for younger artists working today, it’s a difficult time to start as an artist. At points in my career I’ve been through the wringer, but I’ve never thought of giving up. Keep working, find a space where you can do your work and feel ‘up’. I’m in my studio every day, it’s where I’m happiest.” 3 ALWAYS EXPERIMENT “If there’s something in the work that seems interesting to me, I poke and prod it to see what will…

29 June to 13 October After his London home was bombed in 1940, Ivon Hitchens moved into a caravan in Petworth, West Sussex. The surrounding woodland landscape came to be a great source of inspiration for the painter, whose signature landscapes using block colour are admired internationally. However, less well-known is the artist’s career before the Second World War. As a progressive artist in the 1920s and ‘30s, Hitchens was a member of the Seven and Five Society alongside Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Through 70 works, this exhibition explores Hitchens’ career in its entirety, and how his subject matter and expression were influenced and impacted by the political climate at the time. Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. www.pallant.org.uk…

As a printmaker, drawing is a tool to make my prints, rather than an end result in itself. I make three kinds of drawing when I am developing a print: observational sketches, composition thumbnails and then what I call the ‘design drawing’, which is the final design to transfer onto my block. Here’s how all three methods work for me. Firstly, I see observational drawing as visual note taking and I take a magpie approach to collecting ideas. Sometimes that means an organised sketchbook and special pencils, sometimes I have to beg a biro from a stranger and use the back of a paper bag. The trick is to jot down anything that catches my fancy, even if it is just a couple of lines. Photos are great at documenting,…

“My cancer diagnosis brought me closer to an unguarded form of expression” When did you first gain an interest in music? My parents and grandparents were singers and musicians, so music was always around. I never considered making music until I was about 16 when I stole a book about The Beatles from the school library – the images and the wealth of songs sparked my imagination like nothing before and suddenly songwriting seemed possible. Are there similarities between creating music and art? So much about the creation of music is unconscious and involves chance. The best moments seem to land in your lap and if you start trying to reach for a certain thing it’s always inferior. It’s this slightly mysterious aspect to the process that I love: not…

Welcome to the second in my new series of articles that will focus on painting the portrait and figure from life. In each issue, we will focus on four different aspects in turn: last month we looked at colour (if you missed it, back issues are available via page 3), with articles on textures and lighting to come. This session is all about composition. The common thread running through all four articles is that we will be tackling multiple paintings in one day, as a way of keeping our vision fresh and attitude lively. Making more than one painting in a sitting allows us to experiment and injects a feeling of freedom into the process. It also helps us to lose our preciousness. Our session took place in Jane and…