The first decision I took at the begining of my MA practise and research, among the inumerous doubts that I inevitably had back then, was that drawing my surroundings using my sketchbook would be the core and unifier element of my work. In a sence, I was looking at the sketchbook as a gathering tool for raw material but simultanously a way to map my walks and my interests in London. I believe the author Martin Gayford describes accurately that same process regarding the artist Frank Auerbach’s practise: "This process of walking and drawing is a means of importing new impressions - a daily set of data - back in the easel. It is a way of getting himself start and also a fresh starting point." (Gayford, 2019 p.254)
Evidently, this process ended up bringing some questions to the table as I progresed in my work. The references tools an artist chooses are fundamental decisions and there are obvious differences between using a photograph, a found image and a hand made drawing. It’s a debate as old as the time the first photographs emerged. The artist David Hockney has one interesting way to address those differences and connect them to the way people interpret reality, one that I tend to agree with: "I question photography. A lot of people don’t, they accept that the world looks like photography. I think it really does, but it doesn’t entirely. I think it’s actually a lot more exciting than that. What’s more, we don’t have to view the world in the way a lens does, two human eyes and brain do not actually see in that way” adding later that “The camera sees geometrical but we see psychologically." (Hockney, 2016 p.11)
By using the sketchbook I was looking subjectively and actively to my surroundings. Subjectively because I was building my own reality even if it was based on a common ground. Actively since this practice was acting as a filter. I was making decisions by drawing a certain object, a certain person, a certain place. Raising questions but also giving answers.
In order to actively research my surroundings I had to move. Since my arrival to London, using the underground became a daily routine, which inevitably led me to start looking at it in layers that surpassed the mere necessity of transportation. The unknown travelers that shared this space with me became my sketchbook models. At this earlier stage, I wasn’t interested in their cultural, social or political background, neither in their objectives or daily routines.
With time, the drawings I was making started to become more synthetised and less detailed and my focus became mainly concerned with the line, the gesture. There is a curious expression used by the chinese artist Chang Dai-chen which is painting from heart to hand. He defended all his life that "the success of a painter (...) depends on his ability to make “the spirit dwell in the purity when it’s done." (Zhang, 2019 p.10) Maybe the decision to draw what I see, and the way it was leading me to finding those synthetised lines is connected, even if not only, to that idea of searching for a certain "purity" in my practice, by removing old habits and ideas and making choices that helped me in that sence.
After gathering dozens of sketches it was time to understand what would be the next step. I ended up, firstly, by doing direct transitions to acrylic painting. In similar sizes as the sketches, maintaining the original drawing lines as much as possible. I had no colour references so I had to paint from my memory. I didn’t associate this lack of photographic or colour references as a flaw, instead, it gave me some freedom to explore important ideas. I kept researching by making more work.
Just as happened with the first sketches, the paintings also started to grow largely in number. However, this time the visual impact was much different since I could put them side by side, creating different compositions, which gave resembled the presence of a “crowd”, an anonymous London underground crowd, one which the artist George Proesch describes in a relatable way: "(...) They’ere all coming out of the underground (...) you can’t tell the difference between the builder and the young city man going off to the gym before work." (Obrist, 2016 p.293) This was something new, something I couldn't see previously because the first drawings were constrained inside sketchbooks and also a door to other branches in my research.
Even if together this series of paintings added an idea of an anonymous crowd, I still felt the existence of some sense of individualization. There is a passage in the book The Crowd a Popular Study of the Mind by Gustave Le Bon that accurately acknowledges this idea of the individual existing in the middle of the crowd and how that affects that same individualization "It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individuals but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference." (Le Bon, 2008 p.18)
However, I believe that the lack of individualization is an inevetibatitly of the specific work process I was following. The sketches were quickly made, there was no personal contact between me and the model, I was exploring the gesture and its nuances but not the portrait per se as if looking for individual human characteristics and traces. As I said earlier, I was not looking for any particular social or cultural background.
However, and even if I was conscious of the limitations that my practice brought at this stage, I still decided to contradit them and explore the individual portraiture a bit further.
The first attempts didn’t work so well. This, in my perspective, happened because I was going against my previous practice methodology. I was following this idea of a "traditional approach" (if that expression even exists) to a portrait painting without the necessary tools to do so. I couldn’t just use a sketch and my memory and expect results simliar to a painting where you have a live model sitting for hours, or a photograh with close ups and colour references.
"The portrait of me by Lucian Freud took a hundred and twenty hours of sitting and you see all that time layered into the painting." (Hockney, 2016 p.78)
Even if David Hockney was referring to “a fraction of a second” in this particular case as the use of photography, that same principle can be, in my opinion, applied to the usage of a single sketch, and so can, the same flaws and limitations appear.
With that in mind, and although those first attempts didn’t allow me to achieve what I first intended, they certainly opened other perspectives, particularly in what concerns the technical aspects of painting.
I realized that more and more, patterns, paint texture, scale, composition, those were important things I could explore in my work even if I wasn’t portraing an individual’s particular characteristics. I was, while attempting and failing to do traditional portraits, making decisions, exploring possibilities. Martin Gayford depicts very well this idea when he talks about Lucian Freud and says: "From everything he observed, he made a selection; and it was that choice that gave the picture its power (...) what the picture should contain was the artist’s own feelings and thoughts about the subject, put together that it acquired a power and presence of its own." (Gayford, 2019 p.118)
The portraits became more synthetised, just as happened with the undergorund sketches, and so these were results that interested me more. However, it was time to put portraiture asside for a while and explore other topics using the experience and knowledge I was gathering.
Space. Was it important to me? If so, how would I represent it? Do I wanted to depict a specfic location, like the subway, or aproach this idea in a more neutral way?
I decided to act in the middle term. Since my practice so far involved mainly the underground as a reference location, I chose it as a starting point. However, I followed the same principle I had with the portraiture experiences, not depicting exactly what I saw, but playing with textures, adding and retrieving specific elements, playing with geomatrizations and patterns using the raw material I was collecting.
Some of those results were interesting but the most important factor I retrieved from this phase was concerned with the integration of the figure into space.
I kept thinking to myself what kind of results I wanted to obtain with this idea, what factors could make me think of it in different and more interesting directions. This idea of continuum, of time, this daily habit never left my mind. The sketchbook drawings represented, after all, not only my surroundings but mostly my surroundings through time as a manifestation of my daily routine.
I tried to imagine how a more technical approach could help addressing those thoughts. I needed to scale up my work in order to have a bigger sense of freedom of choice. By placing different sheets of paper together I gained that scale and at the same time I didn’t lose the time lapse idea presented in the sketchbook, an idea of frames or comic strips. I felt time was somehow presented in that space.
Despite these being positive results since I was finally getting some sence of direction, I started to feel I was stuck in the subway space. I never intended to depict the London Underground, or its crowds in particular. Even if deconstructing and playing with both elements in order to address questions I previously had ended up as a crucial step in my work direction, it was time to change the environment.
My interests were going gradually to this idea of the figure in the landscape. By using the sketchbook aproach, that landscape was the city London, I was limited to where I could move, to my surroundings.
What if the walks itself had more to it than the mere idea of moving from point A to B?
With that in mind, and some conversations with colleagues and tutors, I was led to the figure of the Flaneur. It was Walter Benjamin that brought this figure to the light of the academic interest, basing his depiction in the poet Charles Baudelaire. It became a symbol of modernization explored later by artists and writers, among others. The Flaneur is considered to be a 19th century gentleman that wandered around the city of Paris, an urban explorer for whom "The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work i done." (Benjamin, 1969, p.37) To me, this figure is a metaphor for the city stroler, the wanderer, the invisible walker among the crowds.
In a way, my work methodology was connected to that figure and to what it represented. I was an anonymous observer led by the need of getting lost in a city and using my work to question my place in it. Rebeca Solnit has a passage in the book A Field Guide to Getting Lost that accurately illustrates this idea: "For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastness (...)." (Solnit, 2017 p.16)
Following the idea of drifting, I started to frequent and depict different locations besides the underground. The public parks of London ended up as being very important in my walks. It was one of the only outside places I could go, since the pandemic crisis led to a large number of circulation restrictions. I felt I was in an oasis of normality. I could still feel the presence of other people even if in totally different situations. It is funny and even ironic to think that I was integrating crowds as a topic in my work during a pandemic. Who knows if unconsciously I wasn't looking for a sence of normality?
Back to my research regarding "space", I understood that there were differences I needed to understand and maybe incoroporate in my practice in order to proceed. In the subway, it was the space that was moving. In the parks it was the opposite, people were moving in the space, there is a different sense of mutability, of time passing. What I felt while sketching in the parks reminded me of the way Leon Kossoff depicted the mutability presented in the swimming pool that he painted through a different number of sessions: "In the summer of 1967 Kossoff began to make regular visits to a place so unglamorous as to be exotic - Willesden Sports Center. (...)Kossof started to draw the pool, densely packed with aquatic youngsters diving, splashing and shouting. (...) He was fascinated by its mutability, (...) In this mundane setting Kossof has found a microcosm." (Gayford, 2016 p.256)
I tried to build time lapses through a representation of multiple leisure activities in the park paintings. In order to do that I took in account some topics I was already exploring before, such as scale, materiality and repetition. More important than that, I felt the need to understand how perspective might be a crucial factor in my work. I wasn't following a traditional renaissance perspective or photographic. Instead, more and more I understood that by using an isometric perspective I was achieving results that were better suited to my ideas. "Medieval artists often used isometric perspective, as did Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Indian ones. The idea that those artists didn’t get perspective right is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as “right” perspective. In isometric perspective the lines don’t meet at a vanishing point; everything remains parallel. You could say that isometric perspective is more real, since that is closer to how we actually see." (Hockney, 2016 p.88)
With Unit 1 coming to its end, and some core ideas of my practice on better defined, I felt the need to explore other mediums. So far I was focused on drawing and painting and even if lockdown limitations didn't allow me to explore workshops outside my home studio, I still tried to work with what I had by trying some stencil printmaking with cardboard and old paper. These were particular experimental works, and they remained like that even after inumerous trials.
References
Obrist, H (2015) Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects. London: Penguin Random House UK
Gayford, M. (2019) Moderns & Mavericks. London: Thame & Hudson
Gayford, M. ; Hockney, D. (2016) A History of Pictures. London: Thames & Hudson
Le Bon, G. (2008) The Crowd a Study of the Popular Mind. Radford: Wilder Publications
Solnit, R. (2007) A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Canongate Books
Johnson, M.; Zhang, J (2019) Chang Dai-chien Painting from Heart to Hand. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum
Howgate, S.; Gayford, M (2016) Lucian Freud's SKetchbooks. London: National Portrait Gallery
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