Art & Perception

Now on Follow the Painting.

Hanneke van Oosterhout started making imaginary still-life in an accidental way, but now she is beginning to focus on it purposefully. Here is one example she drew in about half an hour.

“It’s great to be able to work so freely,” she said while drawing. “I don’t feel stiff. It’s wonderful because you don’t need to look up [at a real still-life], you just keep on drawing . . .”

Hanneke added, “It’s handy, because you don’t have to buy all that stuff!” meaning the objects. But in fact, the objects she draws are ones that she has in her studio (and her memory, of course). This raises the possibility of combining the imaginary image with real-life detail in an oil painting.

I think that still-life would be of little interest as an art-form if it were a pure reflection of inanimate objects. And yet it is precisely the “still” aspect of this genre that makes it of special interest to painters. The artist has the time to study fine details, or subtleties of composition in a still-life that are more challenging when painting a portrait from life, or a cityscape on a crowded street.

Hanneke van Oosterhout was recently “trapped” in a smoky cafe for hours with nothing to do. Fortunately she had her sketch book with her and she made these two drawings from her imagination.

Something about these drawings pleased her. When she was able to return to her studio the next day, she attempted to construct a real still-life that combined aspects of the two drawings.

This still-life drawing is nice, but it lacks something that we can see in the imaginary drawings.

Comparing the real and imaginary drawings, we can easily see the important differences. The real still-life, like most of Hanneke’s still-life pictures, is a centered composition. It has a conventional feel of balance which is somewhat dull. The imaginary still-life drawings are both unbalanced, with the main weight of the objects skewed somewhat to the right side.

Another difference is evident in the perspective. The vessel in all three drawings is seen directly from the side. To achieve this constraint in the real still-life, the fruit on the table top is also seen from the side. But in the imaginary still-life, the table top and fruit are seen from a different perspective, from above. We seem to look down on the table top while looking at the vessel from the side. This merging of different perspective points lends an interesting quality to the imaginary drawings. When drawing more or less literally from a real still-life, this quality is lost.

Does the real still-life need to be drawn from only one viewpoint?

Are there other fundamental differences between real and imaginary drawings that I have missed?

The typical Painting a Day picture will be a still life. If it is, you can be more or less certain that it will be painted “from life,” as opposed to from the mind. Are the members of the Painting a Day movement inherently unimaginative, or is working from the real objects a fundamental aspect of the genre of still-life painting?

. . .

A successful contemporary Dutch still-life painter once told me, “I have no imagination, I’m only a pair of eyeballs.” Indeed, still-life and painting “from life” are so closely linked, it is reasonable to ask, why would you even want to make a still-life from your mind?

Hanneke van Oosterhout recently drew this imaginary still-life while in a smoky cafe. She was dreaming of her studio. Later she tried to construct a real still-life like it (see Follow the Painting.) Hanneke found that her imaginary still-life had aspects that were difficult to recreate with a real still-life. I find this not at all surprising.

Drawing from imagination is a great way to study your feelings about a topic. It makes sense that the still-life of the mind would be something special, something difficult to recreate in the world. Have you ever made an imaginary still-life? Did you find it had something that made it different from any real-world still-life?

Some time ago Hanneke van Oosterhout showed me an old cup that she had bought at an antique market. I thought to myself, “what a piece of junk.”

Hanneke took the cup to her studio and made this drawing. She then transferred it to a panel and painted it. Initially, there was a cloth under the cup (as in the drawing), but she was not satisfied with this, so she painted it over with white and light grays, adding a bit of raw sienna to the grey for warmth in the foreground (a color effect to bring the front part of the table/base forward).

Lately, Hanneke van Oosterhout’s still-life paintings have affected the way I look at things. I notice myself observing fruit and ordinary objects like ceramics in a different way. I see the beauty in them. Hanneke says, “That’s the way it is for me all the time. That’s why I am so eager to paint everything I see!”

Drawing can be done directly on a painting surface, but working on paper, and then transferring has advantages. Most obvious is that one can make many drawings and then select the best to transfer to a clean white canvas or panel. Another advantage is that drawing allows for experimentation with picture dimensions, before committing to a particular painting surface.

To transfer a drawing, without enlarging or reducing the size, tracing paper is useful. Tracing paper goes back at least to the 14th century (Cennino Cennini describes three techniques for making it). After the drawing is traced to the paper, it can be transferred to the painting surface in different ways. One is to rub the back of the tracing paper with charcoal, position the paper on a white grounded panel, then go over the lines with a hard pencil or stylus. This is the original carbon paper. Another technique is to prick holes in the tracing paper and then use a pouncing bag with charcoal dust to bring the design onto the painting surface. This is better for canvases, because it does not require the strong local pressure of using a pencil or stylus. Furthermore, it is easy to make a transfer, wipe of the charcoal dust, and make another, to experiment with different positioning of the design on the canvas.

Once the drawing is transferred (either in charcoal lines or dots), it must be fixed, using black ink or paint. Once this is done, the charcoal can be removed, and the drawing developed further before underpainting.

The experience of sculpting from life, which gave me such a rich way of looking and working, made me question the value of the drawing that I normally do. Now that I am getting over the initial shock of sculpting from life, I begin to appreciate the contribution of drawing to the sculpting process. First, drawing is much faster, so capturing a sudden lively gesture is much easier in drawing. The proportions and details may be all wrong, but if the drawing captures the feeling of the gesture, then it is possible to get the other aspects right in the sculpture with a gradual working process. Second, I’ve realized that my life drawings contain more information that I thought, and the sculpting helps me to interpret the drawings more completely.

I also started working with wax today, which has the advantage that it is lighter lets me make figures that stand without any support.

I’ve been having a lively email discussion with the artist-sculptor who runs the Michelangelo’s Models website. Although the history of Michelangelo’s sculptural models is controversial (I discuss one viewpoint in an essay on the Sistine Chapel), the various proposals about his working methods can be inspirational for artists today. That is not to say one should be casual about evaluating Michelangelo’s methods, of course. It is only to say that even a speculative art-historical idea can be of value in the creative process, if it proves its worth in practice.