Amanda Williams - Portfolio

Alla Prima by Richard Schmid is one of my favourite art instruction books. But before I go on about it - the reason for the post in fact - is that this book is very much still in print and not readily available secondhand. It’s not listed on Amazon as a new book - only a few secondhand copies and those are priced high. There aren’t many secondhand ones because it’s a keeper! Perceived rareness means high prices - in this case anything from $70 from an Amazon reseller to $750 for an ex-library copy advertised at Abebooks… (the word soundrel just came to mind.)

Bottom line - Alla Prima is available from Stove Prairie Press for about $50. They are easy to deal with and prompt - my copy arrived in Western Australia without fuss or delay. Urban rumour has that Richard self published Alla Prima because several publishers knocked him back when he presented his first manuscript. It’s now in it’s seventh printing…

OK, a brief opinion because I absolutely have to get up to the studio and get some work done.

This is not a book for the rank beginner. Actually it might be if you’re a serious beginner. Where it really comes in is for those who have been painting for a bit and are frustrated with both their own efforts and the myriad of conflicting advice from books, workshops and artists who insist that their way is the only way. That’s the biggest thing I took away from this book back when I was dizzy-headed with exactly that.

His offering by way of instruction is more of a good sound discussion with an experienced artist blessed with commonsense and a sense of humour. He encourages you to work - with a clear indication of what work you need to do. There are no promises of instant anything.

Like this on composition after a discussion that sorts out nomenclature; separating harmony, pattern, balance, lines of direction, movement etc etc…

How do you make judgements about your own designs? My advice is to learn all you can about what has already been done. There are many books available that present design theory with helpful graphics and in more detail than this book. Some books are worthwhile, but others, because they are so rigidly dogmatic, or even written in vague terms, should not be taken seriously. Make sure that the ideas and explanations in them are written in plain everyday English instead of arty gobbledygook such as this: “Unity is harmony in balance with objective rhythmic dynamics.” That kind of drivel is simply ostentation concealing ignorance, and it leads nowhere.

And, no, I ain’t getting a free copy of the new book to say any of that. I just got mad that there are rip-off merchants out to get any anyone who goes looking for a copy of a book they’ve heard good things about.

Amanda

I “wasted” yesterday relaxing in Fremantle eating fish and chips by the ocean, sipping tea at Dome and cruising the secondhand bookshops. I should have been painting.

Brought home two books: one on Velazquez (which only almost satisfies the itch over the one in my Amazoncart) and another on Alan Fearnley’s paintings of classic cars. Will review that one another day ‘cos it made the day off worth it even if it didn’t ease the guilt. Well that one and another book, which I didn’t buy, on American artists. Liked it because it had a few pages on Andrew Wyeth but didn’t like it because it only had a few pages on Andrew Wyeth. Thus the book on Velazquez in the Amazon cart has been joined by two books on Andrew Wyeth. (I’m thinking Memory and Magic and Autobiography. Comments anyone?*). Those joining a book about the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia which was already there. Oh crumbs.

What do Wyeth and Garcia have in common (along with my other idols Alex Colville and Edward Hopper)? They are all sometimes classed amongst the “magical realists”. The what? If you want to know know more there’s a pretty good article at Ten Dreams.

And Antonio Lopez Garcia? Try this:

Have fun,
a

*Too late too wait for comments on the Wyeth books they’re on their way… The others will have to stay there for quite a bit longer so opinion on their merit would be much appreciated.

The Technique of Modelling in Clay by Eric Griffiths (1987) is essentially a book about just that but Eric also has opinions on art in general and isn’t afraid to say so. In his own words “this book is full of my opinions …remember it is only another artists approach” and the “only duty you have is to accept or reject this book’s contents as it suits your need and fancy”.

In the introduction he talks about the role of the teacher, expressing a preference for being considered an expert. He sees a teacher as someone with access to specialized knowledge which may be taught, examined and rewarded with meaningful qualifications. He believes this approach has little to do with the practice of art because it’s a course of study without an end, for which the exams are the models made and for which the most important skill is the “ability to rely on your own self judgement”.

Craft skill is a commodity that one person can hand on to another whereas art is a much more indistinct thing – more difficult to define – and is not something that can be passed from hand to hand. It is a mysterious quality that is either part of your personality or not. Art is a combination of ego or individuality with a quality of creative imagination. Whether you have art within you can only be resolved by you.

Eric Griffiths’ first lesson is that we must travel our own road accepting responsibility for our art and then learn to make our own evaluations of what is right .

Copies of The Technique of Modelling in Clay are available secondhand from Advanced Book Exchange. I found the one I’m reading at my local library. I’ll continue this next time with his thoughts on craft…

Have fun
a

Some of the classic art books are just that: classic! There are, however, some real gems amongst them.

Of the several online libraries that have titles available for download my favourite is the Internet Archive because they offer books in PDF format among others and don’t tease with a bunch of books that are just “snippet view” as do Google Books.

A mere tempter of what’s out there:

Internet Archive

Sketching and rendering in pencil (1922) by Arthur Guptill

French Art Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture
by W. C. (William Crary) Brownell (1851-1928)

Landscape painting (1909) by Birge Harrison

Modern painting by George Moore (1852-1933)

A Text-Book of the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke (1856-1932)

A treatise on painting by Cennino Cennini (15th century)

On drawing and painting by Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935)

The practice of oil painting and of drawing as associated with it (1911)
by Solomon J Solomon

Sir Joshua Reynolds’s discourses on art (1891) edited by Edward Gilpin Johnson

Google Books

When you go to Google Books do a search but don’t get too excited with the list that comes up. At the top left of the results of your search there will be a drop-down box “Books showing”. Select “Full View” - to get the ones worth bothering with. Once you have the book you wanted you can read online or look to the top right for ways to save the file - eg PDF…

An Analysis of Beauty by William Hogarth (1810)

Lectures on Painting Delivered at the Royal Academy by Henry Fuseli

The art of drawing in perspective by James Ferguson (1778) - definitely a classic…

Project Gutenburg

Line and Form by Walter Crane

Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures by Henry Rankin Poore

Outdoor Sketching by Francis Hopkinson Smith

The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed

The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art
edited by Cicely Margaret Powell Binyon

Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) translated by Michael Sadleir (1888-1957)

Lectures on Landscape delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 by John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Heard of them? They’re the artists behind a film called The Way Things Go. I will explain but I’m supposed to be up the hill finishing a painting (it’s not going that well which is why I’m down here - I’m procrastinating…) so I’ll make this quick by quoting You Tube:

In 1987 Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss built a enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long out of common items. Using fire, water, gravity, and chemistry they create a mind-blowing chain reaction of physical and chemical interactions and precisely crafted chaos.

And while I was grabbing that I borrowed a teaser of the animation - about 4 minutes worth - the real thing goes for half an hour. (Yeah, yeah, I know about the Honda advert - these guys did it first.)

So why am I telling you about a 20+ year old video now? I first saw it 3 years ago and, quite simply, had never forgotten it. It was in class - I only saw it once. Grrr… This past year I’ve done pretty nothing but animation. (Now doing pretty much nothing but paint.) Then just a month ago I stumbled on a little book about the film - tell you about that in a minute - and for the hell of it went hunting. Sure enough, it’s now out on DVD and available from Amazon. I wasn’t sure if it would work in our clunky old DVD player but intrepid I am. And it does. Yes!

In the same package came a copy of a book put out by the Tate on F&W’s retrospective called Flowers & Questions. Cut to the point here - it’s a good book - lots of pictures interspersed between articles/critiques/reviews by different writers. OK, so a few of them are dull and academic, but most are an easy and interesting read. Each is followed by a bunch of pictures of the particular work they were talking about. It’s one of those books that you can dip into when you have a few minutes. Good with coffee.

The big surprise was that F&W have done so much other work using materials as varied as plaster, unfired clay, photos, more films and, best of all, sculptures of everyday objects made with polyurethane. The objects are convincingly real - imagine a workman’s bench in a small room in a gallery looking exactly like that - no didactic - yet everything in there is fake. People stick their head in to look and suffer the uncomfortable feeling that they’ve intruded on a someone’s workspace. A delightful twist on Brillo boxes… And craftsmanship ain’t always such a bad thing. I (and no doubt every other self-respecting sculptor), having seen this, am curious as to what the material actually is - a quick Google says there are lots of kinds of polyurethane.

The other book, the one that prompted all of this search, was The Way Things Go by Jeremy Millar, is OK but not as easy to get along with. It’s smaller but then it’s only looking at that one work. One for die-hard enthusiasts or fellow academia. Good selection of pictures of the the film though. And not too expensive - sooooo - if you have a parcel on the way maybe do F&W justice and read both.

Have fun,
Amanda

I expect I’m entirely normal having to struggle with questions as to the right and wrong ways to make art. The early part of the muddle was the worst, when it was all new and the edicts many. The time when it was simply a lot to remember: colour theory, perspective, how to mix plaster, why not to use a favourite brush to apply latex… Then the moments of undisputed nitwitism, for example, a country-living history meant that I had mixed copious loads of concrete for 2 chook sheds, a bike shed and countless step footings –reckoning on fact that I knew a thing or two about cement and said so - not thinking that it was agro to bare skin because I’d always used a mixer and garden gloves without issue. Eek! Red face in addition to red hands. Anyways, add to that a seemingly endless array of mediums and thinking it necessary or possible to be expert in everything and one has a recipe for issues, more so while noticing that some artists appeared to be master of none and revered for it.

Then the dawning realization that much of the advice was conflicting! It took me a while to notice… It would have helped enormously to know that the Impressionists really were in battle with the realists who came before them, and that most practitioners speak authoritatively on their niche without a nod to the existence or legitimacy of others. Yeah, that’s an argument for getting a bit of history before launching into the how-to books. No, I never have disagreed with that. My irritation with art education - argued at length here - is on the relevance of what is included in the curriculum and consequently what is left out. Understanding the “timelineliness” of art would have been more useful than the ways in which the Gothic cathedral was as much a civic building as a religious one.

But then I came into art by accident – wanting to make sculpture for a garden. Nothing flash: elegantly simple bird baths would have done. I thought real art was Titian, ugly modern stuff and overpriced minimalist excuses for not wanting a proper job… Another reason as to why art history needs to be relevant and touched on in earlier schooling (before we get channeled off into mathematics or some such…)

The next conundrum was that some artists are famous early on, without the benefit of solid skills or even the yen to get any (usually the ugly modern and lazy minimalist) while others took a life time to get solid craft behind their art often dying poor and unrecognized. Me? I figured I wanted both – fast skills to make great bird baths. Then realized to my surprise that I had a knack for this stuff – I could draw after all, had an eye for form and so much creativity bottled up, that it was that which had been slowly driving me crazy. Get it out or go under. Clearly, the bird baths hadn’t been enough. The evidence was there all along, I was just slow in coming to the party. OK, so I ended up knowing I fit. (Well, sort of.) It was then the confusion became really overwhelming.

All that is simply to explain (the long way) why reading Old Master and Young Geniusesby David Galenson has felt like one of those hit over the head moments. A turning point that has changed not so much what I do but that it’s OK that I do it. I came out of it with a sure sense of the validity of my process, no less. Heady stuff that plonked me on firmer ground as why I want to work the way I do.

David is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago which means he has cred. He also has a fair bit of education and interest in art and art history which seems an odd mix of the prosaic and the fanciful. Needless to say, this gives him the means to look at art from an entirely different vantage point, or in other words, he ran some stats on artists… gasp.

He asked a bunch of questions. What’s the relationship between stage of life and quality of art? What is quality anyway and how do we measure it? He decided that importance couldn’t be evaluated by the hoopla of short term popularity or economic success. He decided that real worth belonged to those artists who made innovations that a have had a lasting impact on other artists; and the value of that influence be decided by experts such as critics, scholars and curators. He chose to measure by counting things like the outcomes of auctions, the number of illustrations in textbooks and which works from various stages of careers were included in retrospectives. Interesting method and numbers, maybe, but what’s more enthralling are his conclusions.

Old Masters and Young Geniuses convincingly argues that there are two types of artists: either experimental or conceptual. The experimental artists have careers which tend to be dominated by single ill-defined objectives which are achieved in a tentative and incremental fashion. They often work without preliminary drawing or planning, effectively discovering the image within the process. Typically such artists rarely feel they have succeeded and are seen as perfectionists plagued by frustration and unfinished works. Notable examples would be Cezanne and Pollock. Conceptual artists, however, work to communicate specific ideas or emotions by systematically executing a clear vision. Much of their work is in the planning and detailed studies which leave the completion of the work itself to be something of a formality, often so much so, that it may even be delegated to others. Clear members of this group would be Warhol, Chuck Close and Robert Smithson.

Where this distinction between two creative methods becomes useful to us is in the recognition that experimental and conceptual are styles are at either end of a spectrum. Most artists lie somewhere in between these opposites, with a leaning toward one, balanced with a little of the other. Do you need pedantic accuracy achieved by repeatedly painting over an image? Or have evidence in the form of piles of meticulous studies to prove a more conceptual inclination? It’s also possible to change that position over the course of a career, as Picasso did. Knowing that there is a spectrum offers not just an understanding of where we fit in, and permission to experiment looking for that which feels right, all the while knowing that all possibilities are valid. It’s comforting to know that we don’t have to try to emulate both Rembrandt (experimental) and Bridget Riley (conceptual). Not all at once, anyhow…

David continues to explore the meaning of the polarity of creativity by looking at scholars, writers, film makers and sculptors in addition to painters showing that his thesis pans out to artists and thinkers of many disciplines. He looks at the cyclical nature of the two styles and the reactions and roles of critics and dealers. He also looks at our current position as a conceptual art world postulating that we may well be ready for an experimental backlash. A reassuring thought for those who like to see a good dollop of craft as the basis for a work of art. Now that’s an odd thought.

Well worth a read!

I haven’t reviewed a book in ages - quite simply because I haven’t read one. Swamped with study unfortunately, and as enlightening as it may be, it has it’s downside, in what I get to read. That’s not to say that required reading is bad or boring (did I imply that…), no, no, no. It’s just acknowledging that you don’t want to hear about text books. Today’s waffle is about a book that has been mentioned here before. This time, however, since I’m finally getting near the end of it, I can say something more complete. Three months to read a book is something of a record for me - it used to be like three each week…

So here we go with Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era. The author, William V. Dunning, is a professor in fine arts at Central Washington University and his book is published by Syracuse University Press. Now normally, as you may know, I don’t bother with that sort of formality, I just give you a link to Amazon or somewhere, so you can go find the boring bits yourself if you’re interested. OK, I have still gaven you a link to it but that’s only because if anyone buys a copy I get a 6 cents credit or something like that. Which I then put toward the books I buy which keeps me supplied with things to write about. I promise I won’t spend it all at once. Alright, don’t let that stop you buying a copy - I’ll keep writing anyway - just to spite you. Oh, I forgot, my point in giving you the dull details was to say that the guy has cred.

You can, in fact, be grateful the commission is so small because it stops me reviewing books that are no good. Can you imagine the rant? That’s because I don’t bother to finish reading books that are no good (unless the lecturer makes me…) and thus I have nothing to say on them. So there.

I also don’t do proper book reviews, there are lots of those out there. I just tell you what I think and then ramble on about irrelevant stuff. If you’re looking for a normal book review - try Google. I promise you there’s nothing normal on this site because… OK, we won’t go down that side track either because that one was covered last week…

A few posts back, I praised Mr Dunning for bagging writers who re-hash stuff they’ve read without bothering to check their facts. It happens a lot, especially in rose books - I know a lot about books on heritage roses. I also grow a lot of heritage roses (mostly hidden under weeds at the moment…sniff) but in growing them I know about them. Some things become darned obvious when you grow a particular rose: like how big it is and whether or not it has a scent. An author might make a mistake and say that Monsieur Tillier is a puny thing that struggles to make three feet and the Dark Lady doesn’t smell good. Shame on you on both counts. Monsieur Tillier in my garden makes a good 12ft in all directions and The Dark Lady will perfume a entire room - no need to stick your nose in that one. What’s criminal, however, is all the other authors who come along and repeating it! Where’s their credibility? What does all that have to do with art books? Aside from “not much”, of course. I’m getting to that.

The similarity between rose books and art books is in all in the description. A with roses you can find out an awful lot about a painting by standing in front of it and looking. One thing you may learn when standing there looking is that what you see may not be the same as stuff that has been written and copied ad infinitum by writers who didn’t go and stand in front of the paintings they wrote about…

Mr Dunning blew the whistle on lots of books that describe Seurat’s work… I could kiss him. Colour theory is a pet interest. Seurat’s work likewise. The difference between what Seurat did and what we are often told he did is, well… amazing. Go back and read what I wrote on that or better still go find a copy of Advice to Young Artiststo read for yourself, check the library. Or, even better still, if you’re really lucky go look at La Grande Jatte with a fresh eye. It’s in the museum at the Chicago Institute of Art. Look for the red, yellow and blue dots that are supposed to mingle in the eye…

OK, so what else does he write about? Mostly about how to get the most out of being an art student. He also has a fair bit to say to and about being an art teacher. Or how to be a better teacher. He doesn’t bag teachers, not good ones anyway, but he does point out interesting things that might raise a collection of eyebrows. Things like: good teachers are those that spend more time learning about their subject area rather than learning about how to teach. In fact he thinks that too much education theory makes them worse. Oo wah.

He also reckons that crap is a technical term. I might just use that in an essay some time seeing as I can quote an authoritative source.

On art students too he has radical thoughts. There’s one where he tells the story of a guy going off to art school already a pretty accomplished realist painter. (I think, I can’t find the page, details don’t matter, the message is the same). The school wasn’t teaching much that he could learn. Ignoring the cries of his fellow students that he was selling out, he thought about it long and hard, picked up his brushes and knuckled under to study the abstract painting being taught. What the… At the end of doing his time (yeah, I’m well aware that makes study sound like a sentence…) at that school he was able to combine what he had learned with what he’d already known to make something entirely new. He didn’t sell out. Nor did he waste his time. An interesting thought for any student faced with a seemingly irrelevant class. (OK I could learn from that.)

For me however, William Dunning’s most important message was right up front in the first few pages of the book. He talks about what makes it likely that an art student will make it as an artist. It’s not the ability to solve problems - as we are often told - it’s in the rare ability to ask questions and find problems worth solving. That’s the difference between good and great.

And that’s something worth thinking about.
Amanda

The bulk of this post is more or less a copy of an email to an artist friend a few days ago, slightly edited to suit a blog post. My feeble excuse for such a shortcut is that the pressure of study is such that I’m lucky to be able to do this much!

What has me so excited is partly the new light on Seurat’s work, partly a new way to think of colour usage but most importantly a fine example of writers writing what they have read, not what they know. Enough to make me rant…

Another words, it’s about the perpetuation of fiction peddled as facts. For students the continuous regeneration of errors in book after book is a serious disservice to their learning and that of the students some of them will go on to teach. I don’t for a minute blame those teaching, now or past, they too have been hoodwinked by books written by those claiming to be expert. It’s simply of matter of those who would be published making reasonable effort to check their facts. Please.

Rant over. The story begins (quoting directly from my email, as stated above):

Right now I’m reading (for myself - not uni - in between the crippling loads of required reading…) a book called Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era by Williams Dunning. Don’t let the title put you off - no way is this book for truly young artists. It would be completely wasted on them. Besides which, we are all young artists - if not might as well give up.

I’ll quote, rather rather than paraphrase, in case I miss something (aren’t scanners wonderful!)

Context:

Studies of students from all fields consistently indicate that art students in general have read less than those in most other disciplines. But when successful people in all fields are compared to successful artists, the artists register as among the best and the broadest read of all the professionals. The implication for artists here is quite clear: don’t read, don’t succeed.
Gilmore also argues convincingly that “the higher the level of creative activity involved, the more compelling the need for a cohesion of studio practice, awareness of art history, and critical analysis, as well as [a] general education” (Gilmore i991,37)•
Furthermore, those who read little can seldom discuss art intelligently, and an ability to discuss the ideas in your field is indispensable…

Now, the good bit:

But never allow what you read or what you know to blind you to your own vision, and never allow what you have read or heard shape what you see or experience. During my years in art school I read in several books, and I heard from several art history instructors, that the pointillists, especially Seurat, mixed their pigments additively. I was told that when Seurat and the pointillists wanted a green, they did not use green out of a tube; instead, they placed small dots of blue and small dots of yellow next to each other and let the color fuse additively in the eye to create a green that was livelier than any that could be mixed subtractively.
Josef Albers, the patron saint of color, wrote an inspired book, Interaction of Color; I believe this to be the best method ever devised to teach color empirically rather than theoretically. But on the mixing of green in pointillism, he made the same mistake everyone else was making. He tells us what he has read rather than what he has seen, and noting what he has seen is usually his strong point. About the impressionists (pointilists were originally called impressionists) he wrote: “Instead of using green paint mixed mechanically from yellow and blue, they applied yellow and blue unmixed in small dots, so that they became mixed only in our perception-as an impression” (Albers 1963, 339). Albers has just reiterated the classic misconception about retinal (actually partitive) color mixing.
When I was working on an M.EA at the University of Illinois, I visited the museum at Chicago Art Institute. I specifically wanted to see Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, the painting that is usually named as exemplary of the theorizing mentioned above. I stood in front of that painting and looked carefully for tiny intermingled dots of blue and yellow that would mix additively in the retina to make green.
There were none!
There was no place on that canvas that I read as green where I could find blue and yellow dots intermingling. Seurat had used dots of several different shades of green to depict the lawn and the foliage and those areas he wanted green (which generated a more vibrant green). Among these different shades and colors of green dots, he placed here and there a dot of red, which tends to make the green seem even brighter and more vibrant.
He chose red because the impressionists and the pointillists still used Brewster’s by then outdated red, yellow, and blue primary colors to construct their color wheel; hence they believed red was the complement to green, and they had learned correctly from M. E. Chevreul’s Laws of Simultaneous Contrast that adjacent complements create supersaturated color that is perceived as brighter (more saturate) than any pure color alone.
In the bright sunlit areas on the lawn, Seurat interspersed dots of yellow to make those areas yellower (lighter and warmer); and in areas of deep shadow he interspersed dots of blue, which made the shadows darker and cooler.
This came as a shock to me. I wondered if those writers and art historians had ever looked at pointillist paintings.

A bit of an eye opener? The guy who wrote this is professor of fine arts at Central Washington University. The book is published by Syracuse University Press. Another words: he has cred. It is certainly enough to have me off looking for decent reproductions of Seurat’s work.

Amanda

I already knew of notan or rather I thought I did, when I picked up this book. If asked I would have said that notan was used in Japanese art and that it’s about creating balance between dark and light.

Having now read Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield’s book Notan, the Dark-Light Principle of Design I realise that my explanation, while correct, was rather short of the mark. Notan is in fact far more interesting and more powerful.

Bothwell and Mayfield’s book was originally published in 1968, and has seen a number of editions since, none of which are particularly expensive. Even better, for the modern art student of insatiable curiosity, struggling under a limited book budget, this classic has been republished by the ever affordable Dover, making it is easy to find and in my opinion well worth the effort.

The first surprise for me was that it’s more of a workbook than a reader since each chapter finishes with an exercise in cutting and gluing. I was also surprised at it’s stature - after ploughing through some hefty books on colour theory I was expecting something bigger and more boring. This one however packs an impressive mind shift into a small format, running to just 79 pages, which makes it an easy weekend project at a leisurely pace. Don’t rush it mind, this is one to play with. Be warned too that you’ll be needing a few sheets each of black paper, white paper and then toward the end a couple of mid grey. I wasn’t unaware and was caught out, an hour from a likely store and had to manage with blue and brown and… thankfully it still worked.

Each chapter builds on the previous and as with many such books it’s real worth is in the doing rather than the reading. It looks simple and the principles are simple, to be sure, but understanding comes from doing the exercises not just reading and thinking “yeah, I got that”. It’s about stretching the imagination just a little. It’s fun too!

(That point about doing the exercises reminds me of an episode in class one time. Michael Wilcox’s book Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Greenwas mentioned and someone said that it was good book but it didn’t help her much. I was surprised and curious. I asked if she had done the exercises. Her answer: “Oh, no.” with a note of surprise implying that something like that would be far too much work. Right then. One more time, just for Shirley, it’s all in the doing! One doesn’t get fit looking at the pictures of the push-ups in the book.)

Ok, back to nitty gritty on notan. First up are some interesting exercises on symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, which are then combined with a look at positive and negative spaces and how they might be used together. The first exercise was to design a simple symmetrical image based on a square. The only method involved cutting shapes and flipping them to create mirrored positive and negative shapes. Below is one of mine. Very simple design. (The examples in the book are more complex than this but you get the idea?)

Taking the same process further we then try an asymmetric design. I know - it would look more punchy in black on white. but blue was on hand. (I’ll fix the rest of the images in Photoshop!)

Next came the exciting part which is creating a sense of movement and tension.Have you noticed that some images have an uncanny ability to be two pictures in one - a sense of flipping from the positive to the negative depending on how you look the picture.

I’ll use one of mine as an example (I had fun with this and did a few…). If you focus first on the white (ok it looks grey here… but the paper was white) the image appears to be a series of wiggly white bands on a black background. If you then focus on the black instead, the image becomes a black square with wiggly cut-outs. Then you can go backwards and forwards flipping the image by focusing on one colour or the other - thereby creating said tension and movement.

When a design has a balance of dark and light that achieves this effect of movement, then it has notan. Cool, yes?

Next is a slightly more difficult example using an extra colour. In this instance the aim is to design in such away that the grey bands always stay with the black as the image focus is flipped back and forth from the black to the white. Not so easy - the balance really needs to be right to get what Bothwell and Mayfield refer to as “predominance and subordination”.

Here’s mine: focus first on the grey/black shapes and then on the white, making each come forward in turn to create a different image.

That is pretty much the end of the notan exercises and the book then covers some design principles (with a few more opportunities to play with the scissors and glue) then a bunch of examples from different art styles.

I have found since working through this project that I look at things differently. The variations on these themes are endless and the application to many types of art limited only by the imagination of the artist. The question would be how to apply these principles to colour… worth pondering.

Amanda

I’ve talked before about my ongoing interest in anatomy study. A quest pursued through books and life drawing. In general, I’m comfortable with self directed study - actually more than comfortable - it’s probably my preferred way to learn. I can go as fast or as slow as need be and work through as many different books as I feel I need to until whatever-it-is clicks. And I like books. A lot.

Anatomy however has been something of a hurdle for me - sitting staring at the intricate pictures in Stephen Peck’s Atlas of Human Anatomysimply made me feel overwhelmed. Even trying to draw them didn’t help much. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a great book - probably the best book on the topic for artists. However it’s a *reference* book not a learning tool.

I also tried Bridgman, Loomis and Vanderpoel. I read them, copied the drawings and followed the suggested exercises. Sometimes several times. Until I thought I got it. My drawing improved a bit but I still didn’t feel I understood the nuts and bolts. I haven’t actually given up on any of these books, in fact, I’ll be returning to them as follow up exercises.

Follow up to what? I decided that what I needed was a course. College level, several semesters, intensive, directed study. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one in Perth… certainly not one I could get to or afford the time for - since I’m studying full time already.

The answer for me has been videos. I get to play them over and over (try doing that to a class!), I get to fit them in to the only dead time in my day - the time I spend on the exercise bike trying to get the better of the Hashimoto’s thyroiditis which is trying to make me fat. In fact it has made the exercise thing - which I hate because it’s boring - into something pretty positive. In the past 6 weeks I’ve lost 5kg and made real progress on the anatomy study. (Now that’s kicking butt…)

I looked around the net. Read reviews. Asked friends. The result was a fairly even division of fans between two teachers - Hal Reed and Glenn Vilppu. Both have produced a series of videos - each about 14 or so - covering everything from the head to the feet. Now any set of 14 videos isn’t going to be cheap - so buying both was not an option. Certainly not all at once. (Thinking about it - they’re less than a course or workshop… and in my humble opinion better.)

The decision was made for me by finding I could borrow the Vilppu set from a friend and then buy the Hal Reed set myself - I get to return the favour too. Now after the fact, I’m thinking that I’ll be saving up for the Vilppu set too because they are so different. (And… I’m going to be on that rotten exercise bike for years.)

Glenn draws everything - fluidly and beautifully adding the muscles to action figures and naming them as he goes. He’s in demand for teaching animators - even Disney brings him in - but his background is as a painter too. He’s fun.

Hal on the other hand is more serious. More to learn. More muscles. More serious tips. He draws some, points at charts and points at casts. Over and over again. Forcing the names to sink in. And as I discovered on the second video he also has a gorgeous young body builder as a model! (Woo hoo. Hey - I’m married - not dead…)

I really couldn’t choose one over the other. Glenn has loosened up my drawings - Hal has given them muscle. Glenn first, then Hal. Maybe. Ultimately they both have a lot to offer and for me I really think it’s the repetition that is making it sink in. Anatomy is a complex subject - with a lot to learn and remember. The videos for me have made all the difference. And now the books make sense too.

Amanda