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Burlesque Life Drawing Session

Something interesting for the weekend... Follow link here to book.

Spotlight: Don’t throw it away!

Seeking inspiration? Does your imagination go in fruitless spirals while your palette dries? Then crumple that unsatisfying piece of paper and…. don’t throw it away. Instead, draw it’s shadow. See where it takes you.

Guy Larsen draws faces based on shadows from crumpled paper. This is a fairly standard artistic exercise, and a helpfully fun one. By using shapes dictated by the paper, in which there is an element of random, the artist is free from the demands of trying to reproduce an ideal image from within their mind.

  Randomness can be a very constructive liberating force in art. You can draw the curve that is there, rather trying to draw the curve you think is needed. You can make something appear more real, if your style is rather more systematic or rigid than life. Art is not the real thing, but an impression of it, so it makes some sense to draw shadows. In times of inspirational need, The Lord or Karma provides. Pretty soon you will be practised at making forms based on anything you find inspiring.

And it is a form of recycling. Throwing things away, and making a performance of it, can be very useful. Gordon Ramsay swears by it.

  Why do faces so readily appear in the drawings people make based on crumpled paper? Why not trees or houses?

Lascaux, France

In prehistoric caves, most paintings, and sculpted pieces of bone and tusk and clay, depict animals. They are of horses, reindeer, rhinos, mammoths… They are on walls, and in carved pieces of animals, and in wall reliefs. Human figures are less frequent.

Venus of Galgenberg

However, outside of cave settings, most prehistoric sculptures are based on humans rather than animals. Why is that? The answer is simple: it is not true. Archaeologists simply find more human-based figurines, because a stone-like thing, when shaped a bit like part of a person, catches our attention. Whereas a stone-like thing shaped a bit like part of an elk will just look like a stone to us.

 'Elk' - Sally Matthews

Elks would probably find more elks.

 It depends on what you notice. Most meteorites that are found by observing them fall, as flares of light that hit the ground and are found smoking on scorched grass, are “stony” meteorites – the type which have low iron content. Few of them turn out to be the iron-rich “stony iron” meteorite variety. 

Similarly in the desert, most meteorites found are “stony”. However, among the cold meteorites found in prairies, most are “stony irons”, which suggested that meteorites fall differently in deserts. It took a while for astronomers to realise why, outside of deserts, most meteorite finds are “stony irons”. “Stony” meteorites look like stones.

A chap (Robert Ward) who has found a stony iron.  In America.

So it is with crumpled paper: we favour the familiarly noticeable, which is typically a human face.

And if you don’t like what you’ve drawn, you know what to do.

'Chance and Order IV' - Kenneth Martin, 1971-2

Sources include:

‘Drawing with shadows’ - Guy Larsen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbsbQGTSIFk

Ludlow Art Trail 16th June to 1st July

Pick up a free map from any participating location, or click here for more details.

Ludlow Fringe Artists Market

Saturday 16th June, Castle Square, Ludlow. This might be of interest either to individual artists or perhaps small groups of artists. There's more information here. Click on the info sheet and booking form below for more details. I understand there are no gazebos left, so you will need to bring your own.

 

Bridgnorth Art Trail

James Hurdwell at Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Ludlow Art Society congratulates member James Hurdwell for having had one of his paintings accepted for the Royal Academy's 250th Summer Exhibition.

We wish him every success with the new avenues that are opened up by being involved in such a high-profile exhibition. You can find details of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition here with a short video about the show:

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018