A new place can be a fresh inspiration in art. It’s easier to see what’s really there and feel curious and interested in a scene which you’ve never seen before – there’ll be fewer existing assumptions or pre-conceived ideas about it. You can enjoy that child-like experience of exploring and discovering, and it’s also an opportunity to find out what you’re interested in, so that you can consciously pay more attention to that.
How to find out what interests you? Start by wandering, and absorb. Let yourself relax, let what’s there flood in without judgment. Be curious and playful and notice where you want to look more closely.
Wandering around the gardens at Belton, I found interesting contrasts and effects of light, patterns of foliage, shadows, different shapes, colours and strange things. The iron architecture of the conservatory gives structure to the green lushness and contrasts of the planting within. Windows give a frames work and let in light creating patterns on the walls and floor. It’s a sheltered indoor contained world of rare things, full of interest fro tiny details to how all the parts relate.
We will be playing with this process of drawing inspiration on the in-person drawing weekend I’m running in July. This year it’s located at Belton estate in Grantham, Lincolnshire. We’ll be based in the spacious and quiet venue of the old School in Belton village, and have access to the grounds and house of the estate.
Particpants in previous years have valued the time, space and supportive atmosphere of this yearly drawing event. It’s flexible so that your csan pursue your own interests throught eh weekend, but we will start together and you can get guideance on your develop through the weekend. There are opportunities to socialise as well.
To find out more, and register your interest, follow the link below.
It’s mid-winter, and bitterly cold where I am. Snow, floods and ice are not enticing me out right now. It’s time to wrap up in blankets, get a hot drink and look for indoor inspiration.
Drawing objects involves the same sort of decisions as any subject matter, in terms of shapes, space, colour and tone, contrasts, mood, balance, harmony and feeling. It’s also very accessible, and has a long pedigree stretching back into the past -artists have used objects from their surroundings as vhicles for their image making for ever. When you’re drawing at home, or joining me for a class, it pays to spend a bit of time gathering objects together which will be interesting to you, and provide opportunities for interpreting textures, exploring modelling, contrasts, and tone and colour.
Start with objects already around your home, in different shapes, sizes and textures. Anything is fair game for drawing! -a shoe, a candle stick, a cabbage, a bottle, a crumpled pillow case, the aftermath of dinner. Get curious about it, even if you’ve seen it a hundred times. Have you really looked, at the shapes, the surface, the angles? How could you indicate that texture, mix that colour?
Objects organised in groups give you more to see and interpret, and are a way to begin playing with composition. In this grouping, there are a few ceramic pots with similar shapes but quite different sizes (repetition); there are contrasts of texture (variety), and the objects are grouped in such a way that the eye travels through them, they relate, like group of friends having a conversation.
Some artist stick with the same obects which appear over and over in their work through their life. Ben Nicholson’s striped and spotted jugs and mugs appear over and over throughout his art, but over time they transformed, he interpreted them afresh. You can read more about his still life collection here, at the Pallant House Gallery website.
This idea might horrify you though. If you’ve been drawing the same things for years and are feeling stale, try looking eleswhere in your home for objects you haven’t spent time looking at. The veg drawer in the fridge is a good source of change (and often decay!) – there are often things in there or the fruit bowl in various states of freshness, and perhaps it changes by season and even variety. Apples will certainly change variety through the winter, with russets in autum, golden yellow matt skin, through to deep red flecked ones which are appearing now. You can cut and slice your fruit and vegetabels in different ways to create a new view. Below: Pak choi, drawing in graphite, sliced in half and observed in coloured pencil, then printed. The remains went in the stir-fry.
Small ornaments can make a good study by themselves. You never know how they may become involved in something else later on… like the animated objects in the 2017 Disney film of Beauty and the Beast (director Bill Condon), your possessions might take on imagined a life of their own.
JOIN IN: from 9th January 2025, Thursday Drop in Drawing at 7.30 PM London Time. Click here to find out more.
It’s been a busy few months; I’ve run two drawing summer schools this year, of very different sorts, and met some diverse and interesting people in each setting. One was more informal, the other more structured, but both about developing confidence and allowing people to grow their belief in themselves and their own creativity. I feel so lucky to spend time with my students, and their questions and conversations really stimulate and inspire my own thinking about art.
For the third year running, in July I hosted a small group in the lovely surroundings of Pucks Oak Barn in Compton, Surrey. It’s a beautiful green space surrounded by a woolly and wild community orchard, buzzing with insects and all sorts of plants; the weather was kind enough to allow us outside on Sunday, where particpants collected also sorts of interesting things from sensations to seedpods.
The focus was on creating space for each participant’s own practice, whatever they might need at this point – and we had a diverse group with varying levels of experience and wishes for what each wanted from the time. With such a small group I could work with each person and give individual guidance, so each could follow their path – and we had quite different results from the weekend: small folded books made of drawings, a giant collaged painting, colour charts and collaged concertina books.
It was a very relaxed time with lots of permission and encouragement to do whatever one felt like doing, including rest and chat!
For the first time this year I participated in the Royal School of Needlework’s International Summer School, the first to feature an art class. It was also my first time taching this back on site at Hampton Court since March 2020. A week later that year the country was locked down; the last session of that course was delivered on Zoom, and was the pioneer for live online classes for the RSN.
The classroom was beautifully prepared by Noleen, Education Manager, and I was very ably assisted by RSN graduate Future Tutor Sonia Lee. We had an intense week with eight students, looking at drawing principles from the beginning with lots to learn and lots of experimental processes amongst the more traditional artistic principles and processes. People are often surprised to discover that there are learnable structures and principles behind art, it’s not a magic process which you can do or not.
There’s always a lot going on at Hampton Court in the summer, with costumed intpreters and re-enactors doing their stuff in the kitchens, walking about the palace and jousting in the grounds. RSN staff and students had a special trip to Buckingham Palace to see the Coronation exhibition and the robes and screen on which RSN staff and students had worked. It was in all a super busy week with lots to learn, lots of complicated travelling arrangements and much to see and digest.
For me what tied both quite different teaching experiences together was the goal of enabling confidence and excitement for the students. I aim always to give encouragement to see more clearly, to experiment and to play, and permission, to follow wherever curiosity might lead, and believe in one’s own inner creative voice.
My greatest reward is when someone says: ‘I realise I can just do whatever I want with my art and try things, it doesn’t matter’. When they say ‘I believe now I can draw’. When they say ‘I see new things I didn’t notice before’.
Do you have lots of UFOs lurking? PHds? Unfinished objects, projects half done… and does it matter? After a few terms of experimenting and trying lots of different processes, the students in my weekly drop in drawing class have a lot of work which may or may not be ‘finished’. I’ve written before about the process of reflection in creating artwork. Is this a case of reviewing the work, reflecting on what’s been done and then adjusting or adding to it til it’s complete?
Depends what you wanted to achieve. Sometimes when creating it’s about working out through the process what works, and equally importantly, discover what doesn’t work in order to change it – or discard the first attempt (or the second, or third…). The drawing/designing and making process is different to the mode you need to be in when you evaluate something; you need a bit of distance from your creation to see it objectively. Distance can be literally holding it at arms length, or it can be time. Put the work on the wall for a while and look at it now and then, or get it out of its folder or open the sketchbook and have a look through later, when a few days, weeks or years have passed. If you can introduce this discipline of periods of reflection, and then revisting your work, things might move forward in a way you don’t expect. If you’re the sort of person who likes a folder full of completd things this might be uncomfortable! It might mean making yourself stop before it’s finished and give some time for the image and your ideas to be assimilated and coalesce.
I have a piece of work currently sitting on an easel because I dont know what it needs next – but if I wait, and look at it ocasionally, that might become apparent. It’s been through a few of these hiatuses already. I have other work that I might just leave as it is, half done and not looking like a finished thing. It might get re-used in some way or ultimately binned (pulped and remade by the borough rubbish collection service), or burned. At the moment for me it feels important to let myself not worry about making finished things. I am just beginning to feel like finishing one or two. And others I might like to try that process again…
How do you know if it’s finished? Give your work a bit of love. Try putting some L-shaped pieces of mountboard around it and see how it looks, given the honour and care of a frame. The only difference between a drawing shoved in a folder and a piece of art on the walls of a gallery could be your attitude, and a carefully chosen frame. Remember to sign and date it. (You can make up the date if you’re not quite sure…)
Sower of the Systems, 1902. GF Watts.
Watts Gallery Trust.
Finished? There’s no reason to suppose Watts thought it was anything other than complete, but… imagine yourself in front of this painting, still wet with paint, brushes in hand. Would you have stopped here?
GF Watts took decades to work on some of his paintings. He would return to them and alter them over long periods of time. The (admittedly enormous) ‘Court of Death‘ was started in 1870 and finished in 1902.
Picasso made 58 versions of the painting Las Meninas by Valezquez, each one exploring different aspects of the picture. Each one is finished, but there was still more to explore.
Even when you think you’ve finished, it might only be one part of a bigger idea.
Caroline Homfray 