I thought, for a change, that I'd dig out one of my larger, lumpier, drawing tools. These little sketches are all done with thick 6B graphite – 5.6mm leads in a chunky holder. This particular clutch leadholder is plastic, so not as heavy as some of the metal ones, but still feels very different from a pencil.
I had felt that I was getting in a bit of a rut with the Window Work and not concentrating properly on what I was doing, and I was open to approaching things a little differently. The catalyst for change was a gallery visit last month which featured work by Alberto Morocco. He was a highly respected Scottish painter, of the older generation that taught me at college, but I hadn't gone to the gallery specifically to see his work.
What struck me about the show was that it had a lot of functional drawing – there were sketches of musicians, obviously done in situ, and paintings that utilised them. Other drawings included written colour notes, in casual preparation for a potential painting at some later date. There were sketches of everyday things and people - fast, lean, and incomplete, but packed with relevant information. I was mesmerised by one of a donkey. It was in brown Conté crayon, a medium I'd used a lot at one point, and was just a few weighted lines - some doubled over in correction - and fingered smudges to suggest the roundness and weight of the belly. It couldn't have taken more than five or ten minutes, but was a good distillation of what a donkey is.
The experience brought me back very sharply to how I used to work – right down to the colour notes thing – and the casual everyday necessity of looking and drawing in order to find out how the forms of an object work. I was reminded of the distant early paintings I had done purely from sketches and colour notes (still got some – I should really photograph them sometime). I carried my drawing habit into the furniture workshop, and still have some of the job assessment drawings I would do when addressing what had to be repaired. This one is an Irish Chicken Coop Dresser. As usual with pine Irish Dressers chunks of cornice were missing, the bottom was entirely rotted off, and a lot of the glue dissolved after an overnight soak in the caustic tank to strip a couple of centuries-worth of paint off. (I also see from the notes that I was actually starting work at 9.30am, when I should really have been starting at 9am sharp. Oops...) A lot of this activity was swept away by the arrival of cheap digital photography, of course. The sheer convenience of capturing an accurate image in the blink of a shutter was always going to beat the effort of actually drawing for a few minutes.
Anyway, the upshot has been that over the last month or so I've renewed my keenness for Window Work. I increased my sessions from a very reluctant 20/25 minutes (during which I could barely sit still) to around 40/45 minutes and up to an hour - concentrating much harder on the 'looking' while allowing myself a bit more looseness in the mark-making (I quite enjoyed using the angled hatching to help the impression of form). In particular, I've been looking more closely at gait, and trying to work out what's going on with non-stationary legs. Really easy to do with a camera, obviously, but then you end up with a frozen image, which perhaps doesn't increase any understanding of the movements involved.
Which is sort of the whole point of the exercise...
