5 senses workshop Touch

Touch was both the first and the last of the 5 senses workshops with the Naked Eye drawing group and produced some really lovely work. (I ran a Touch workshop last year as a space filler for Jo Kori with her Naked Eye drawing group who meet every fortnight at the The Beacon, Hastings. 

We handled various objects brought in and described them to each other to practice articulating the feel and sensation of what we were holding without looking at the objects. 

This was later translated into marks, so for example surfaces described as furrows, edges, thin lines, rough patches, heaviness, holes and indentations were then created by mark with materials including plaster on board and charcoal. Another exercise was pure contour drawing and drawing from touching the profile of the face without looking.

I've been really grateful for the opportunity to run these workshops in experimental mark making using the 5 senses as a point of departure. It's  been a learning curve for me to test them out. My thanks go to the very committed Naked Eye drawing group for asking me in the first place and throwing themselves into them! 

touching circles 

Contour drawing 

working into plaster on board 

tryptic of frotage ash and found material

lovely sketch book work 

profile by touch and contour drawing

inverted profile and contour drawing 

Touching forms 

detail of tryptic 

5 senses workshops SEE - the eyes are listening...

SEE

We use this sense probably the most and are rapidly becoming conditioned to see in particular ways through exposure to instant culture throughout the media. 

On a more mundane level we all need to see to live a daily life and just noticing details or looking at our surroundings in a different way can be inspiring. 

This week's workshop was about seeing through the eyes of an artist, how and what we see and how we translate that into marks. 

I visited The eyes are listening at Hastings Museum recently and loved the large paintings of Tom Hammick.

In terms of creating artwork I am very interested in the right brain left brain function. After reading Betty Davis' book, Drawing on the right side of the brain, I am sure there are ways of strengthening our use of the right brain thus being able to harness its global skills and lack of critical awareness  allowing creativity to grow. 

So to get students started and to switch off the left brain function we drew an upside down drawing, This is an exercise to copy a drawing by Picasso of Igor Stravinsky. By doing this the brain reads the lines and marks as just that, it no longer recognises them as eyes, arms, a collar etc so the right brain is in control and this allows the student to make a drawing without preconceived knowledge and spacial judgement . The result is a better drawing. Still not necessarily perfectly (if there is ever such a thing) accurate but conveying a more real sense of the original subject. 

           

                 

Time changing greatly affects what we see so students drew from view finders on the windows to record what they could see at different intervals during the workshop - overlaying the images made on tracing paper. 

                

                

I had asked students to bring in white objects to draw so we could just focus on the forms without too much distraction while they made 3 specific drawings, 1st to make a drawing using usual observation, 2nd to make a drawing looking at the subjects and not the paper, trusting the eye and the hand to connect to create an image, 3rd to make a drawing entirely from memory of the subjects, by removing them. 

 

                               

  

I hope doing these drawings in this way highlighted how we store up image in our brain, and when we draw we can either use the images accumulated subconsciously by just living or we can re learn new lines, angles and marks by looking carefully and memorising by repetition these new images. Increasing our own artists resource of our mind. 

Students then continued to draw the white still life using slit shaped view finders. 

                          

   

5 senses workshop SMELL

Smell 

This workshop was a fantastic feast of memories, associations and stories all tumbling out. Identifying moments in our childhood, rights of passage and first perfumes. A rich tapestry of stories of relationships, of when and when perfumes were bought and used ranging from Yves St Laurant, Poison, Chanel no 19 to Jo Malone and the smell of fresh cut grass. 

Miriam was practising losing herself in process and produced some lovely experimental work. 

I tried to keep up with doing some work myself but with so much reminiscing and memories emerging instead we enjoyed a really open and varied discussion including Wolfgang Laib's pollen fields, Anish Kapoor's wax train in the Royal Academy, dead foxes and lemon scented cleaning fluids.... 




Anish Kapoor's Wax train  and Wolfgang Laib's pollen from hazelnut. see the link below to watch his video. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-_92MYcANk 

What was really pleasing and motivating was the connections that students were making through articulating their memories and how this was inspiring confidence and the desire to apply these new thoughts and feelings to ongoing work. We all left the morning buzzing about setting new projects in place. I found myself really encouraging students to begin to set themselves their own chosen parameters to work within and to create a body of work following on from these experimental workshops. 



cloves



soap

Art after the drapes

Having spent the morning drawing drapes at the Beacon, Hastings I took advantage of the bright sunlight plus the fact i still had all my drawing gear with me and drove on up to the country park near Fairlight. It's interesting to note that in my drawings during the still life session of drapes there was an unmistakable presence of what can only be described as landscape. 

This is actually very exciting as it demonstrates I that I now approach subjects in a way that is unquestionably my own language - I have talked about having a visual language of marks and lines before but sometimes the penny drops right down into the slot and I take a significant step forwards. Trying to decipher what drawing is about is sometimes ruined by over analysing but occasionally there are moments of clarity in what is for me an intuitive and almost unconscious process that I am trying to understand better.

Here are the rest of the sketches from Hastings looking over to Dungeness power station. A mixture of charcoal, compressed and home made, black pastel, graphite and chalk.