The Cat’s tongue #2
The Cat’s Tongue #2
24 July 26
Up and running
As the headline suggests we are up and running and have been welcoming artist students for over a month now as well as squeezing in a quick summer holiday break last week.
It is an absolute joy to have the studio active as we start to build our community in Winchester. We’ve also been busy spreading the word, visiting neighbours like the Jewry Street Artist Studios and making plans for our summer courses.
The general idea is to offer regular sessions for adults on selected mornings, afternoons and evenings throughout August, with courses for children running Monday to Thursday mornings. From September we’ll establish our regular timetable of daily sessions at least 4 days a week. For more info head over to the website and/or send us a message with any questions.
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Material Matters
Charcoal is such a versatile medium and as a drawing tool it is a bridge to painting as it allows you to cover large areas easily, draw freely and with animation at large scale, blend, correct and rub out and also achieve a huge range of dark to light values and detail with compressed charcoal and chalk.
It’s the sort of thing that’s harder to do at home because it can be a bit messy, but here in the studio you can use the medium freely and expansively, standing at an easel with an A1 sheet of paper drawing a large still life or a well-lit plaster cast.
We have bundles of charcoal of different sizes, stacks of coloured sugar paper, kneadable erasers and objects to draw from life. We often start our Taster Sessions with charcoal drawing for all the reasons above.
Top charcoal tip, you can draw with the long flat edge to get straight, fine lines.
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Artwork of the week
At 4 metres tall and almost 10 wide, Passenger Opportunity by Hurvin Anderson is a vast, billboard-like mural comprising 16 smaller panels of painted scenes representing individual and collective memories.
“Depicting family gatherings, domestic interiors and tropical landscapes, alongside images of travel, sports and cultural and historical events…The work is in dialogue with that of celebrated Jamaican artist Carl Abrahams, whose two-part mural on the history of the nation graces the departures lounge of Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport – a work Anderson saw several times when he travelled to and from the island.” Glenn Ligon in The World of Interiors
The painting exemplifies Anderson’s exceptional ability to evoke time and place through washes of thin colour and varied but economical mark making. The detail below illustrates this technique in an image of storm clouds over a Caribbean seascape with a limited colour palette and a few brushstrokes.
We also love the way Anderson turns drawing into painting and in other works combines gestural ‘looseness’ with precisely rendered patterns and detail. On view at Tate Britain until 23rd August as part of Anderson’s major solo show there.
Image copyright Hurvin Anderson Photo and Tate (Kathleen Arundell)
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Words of Wisdom
"Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.” David Hockney
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A Last Laugh
Have a great week and…keep painting!
with love from Ed, Dina and the team at OSAS