I am a Drawer - Painter

Luci Eyers runs a ‘Eye to Pencil School’ and talks about being a drawer/painter.

Other artist methods to consider with drawing/painting

Bonnard – daily walks with small sketches, return to studio and work of a few pieces at once, he did not want to be “over whelmed “ by the object/subject.

Neo Rausch makes drawings when he first gets into his studio, his process more informal and throwaway eg using felt tip, he describes ‘getting into the mood’, ‘I let ideas stream through my hands’,2

(unlike Bonnard and Sickert who often used the drawings as starting points for the painting itself)

Ron Kitaj – personal stories and memories combined with sketches and photographs

Daisy Parris – “a painter of psychological space. Direct text-based works and abstract paintings are made up of a vernacular that has developed through experience, relationships and through the depths and peaks of their human existence so far.

William de kooning

https://www.frieze.com/article/willem-de-kooning

Other Inspiration

Keith Vaughn – made many paintings over his life mining his early young adulthood sensations of friendship and sensuality. Like Bacon he was inspired by and used photographs as a starting point or maybe a defining of some areas of the figure but they are relying on the remembrance of sensation to create the power of the image.

Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer RWS Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.

Wider literary context

John Berger Landscapes

“In this brilliant collection of diverse works essays, short stories, poems, translations which spans a lifetime's engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives.

I have been reading The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth Century France by Anthea Callen. “She analyses the self Portraits, portraits of fellow artists, photographs prints and studio images of prominent 19th Century French Impressionist painters, exploring the modern artistic Identity and its relation to creative work. Landscape painting in general, she argues, and the “plein air oil sketch in particular were the key drivers of artistic change in artistic practice in the 19th C – leading to the Impressionist revolution.”

Perspective on Degas by Kathryn Brown could be another important text for me, discussing the ideas of the feminine and production in the 19th C, In what ways can feminist analysis of Degas works continue to yield new results?

Other artists to consider

Alex Katz

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/alex-katzs-life-in-art

https://www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/alex-katz-gathering-press-kit-20221021.pdf

June Leaf June Leaf (b. 1929, Chicago) is known for her very physical studio practice in which she moves agilely among painting, drawing, and sculpture, often made mechanical. Throughout her seven decade career, she has portrayed figures and landscapes, real and imagined. Leaf recently remarked, “I suppose I think like a dancer”; accordingly, the new exhibition renders movement literally and figuratively in many material iterations.

Katherine Bradford is a contemporary American artist known for her luminous paintings which merge abstraction with representational motifs, Katherine says

“Alice Neel painted from observation, and I use formal ideas taken from abstraction. It occurs to me that some people might think including mothers and children is nevertheless sentimental. I’m also struggling with how to represent gender and race and have deliberately made my figures multicoloured and somewhat androgynous.”

Examples of artists who have created 3D work that feeds into the paintings.

Eric Fischl – he modelled clay figures from photographs then ink paintings from the model

Billy childish – painting of still life flowers in vases that his mother made, inspired by Van Gogh

Rosy Lamb painting and clay modelling from life

Being influenced or referencing past paintings or imagery.

“Pictures are made with other pictures in mind.” A history of Pictures by David Hockney and Martin Gayford

Sensation

Peter Doig speaks of trying to achieve a ‘numbness’, and says that he never trys to create real spaces – only painted spaces.” (financial times Jackie Wullschlager March 2023

Current artists working in abstract figuaration

Flora Yukhnovich, Jade Fadojutimi, Jennifer Packer

(As Eliza Bonham Carter head of RA says “They can be said to show the magical quality of painting – the relationship between colour and scale.”) The Observer 24th Oct 2021

Jennifer Packer
The Body has memory
Eric N.Mack 2019
from the exhibition “The eye is not satisfied with seeing”
combine observation, memory and improvisation

footnotes

2. Brett Littman, Drawing Papers 137: Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor (New York: The Drawing Center, 2019), https://issuu.com/drawingcenter/docs/dp137_final_hi-res.

Apr 10 Post 12 - Notes & Thoughts - Painting that Feels Real