Drawn from the National

Walking through the gallery   -   click on an image to enlarge

Speed was essential to make these studies. I noticed when looking at the complicated figures in Carrado Giaquinto's painting that the less I looked at my paper and just let my eye follow the shapes around the canvas I could draw letting go of thought. My hand and eye made a direct connection and seemed to ignore any other thinking.

 

Carrado Giaquinto 1703-1766, Moses striking a rock

 

The action and rhythms of the figures and clothing, enhance the flow of water as it pours from the rock and down through the image, to the stillness of the smooth puddle in the bottom right hand corner.

 

This slowly spreading puddle looks peculiar but acts as if to contain the fall of the crowd in the bottom right corner.

The Tribute Money, about 1560-8, Titian

 

 

Rain, Steam, Speed, 1844 William Turner

" The artist delights to go back to the chaos of the world...all is without form and void; they are pictures of nothing, and very like". Hazlitt

Energy within the systems

Leonardo searched through drawing to understand universal principles and the living energy within these systems. Through intense observation he developed a rational approach in his search for suitable forms.

Leonardo - Eddy

“The mind of a painter must be like a mirror, which always changes to the colour of the thing that is in front of it and is filled with as many images as there are things before it”.

He was scientifically driven to understand the visible motion of waves and currents and needed to communicate the power of water to move and destroy. Initially he visually describes the construction of water and the patterns that continually emerge.

Leonardo - Coils of rain and lightening

Leonardo - Deluge

Leonardo - Flowing

The Royal Collection: A deluge

“The artist who paints according to his talent and his eye, without using his mind, is like a mirror reflects everything that stands before it, without knowing what it is”.

Leonardo da Vinci –Landscapes and plants Edited Ludwig Goldscheider- Phaidon Press-1952

Leonardo connects man and the world, breathing with the ebb and flow of blood as rivers and bones as mountain ranges which he describes as “Chains of the World” and they are determined by the flow of waters rain, hail, snow, melted ice.

In his Deluge series he developed a visual reality from his thoughts of unseen events, what might happen if... repetition and changes of scale express apocalyptical possibilities.
So it becomes landscape in a flux, storms, the end of the world as it returns to an original state of chaos, that is the natural state of the world.

He kept hese drawings as an archive that he could return to when answering visual problems, (they were found in his studio at his death) but were they able to be understood at that time by the observer?

Michael Craig Martin talking at the National Gallery

Drawings, photo's, montage, from rhythms and movement of water.

"Only observation is the key to understanding". Leonardo

Click on image to enlarge

'How to' illustration in old book - drawing ripples

Swell Montage -  cut photographs 

 Sliced and recombined, sea swell photographs - disturbed and disrupted flow. 

flow-control-obstruct along the River Mole

 Photograph 1. stepping stones

 Photograph 2. ripples

  Photograph 3. weir

  Photograph 4. stir

 Photograph 5. pour

Swelling of the Sea, Furthest West - The Atlantic Ocean. Thomas Joshua Cooper 1990

 Sam Francis blue composition 1954 - oil on canvas

Joseph Beuys is concerned with looking at matter and energy, fixed and fluidity. Principles that organise and other manifestations of force in the universe.

He is exploring drawing in ways to evoke energy in his "Drawings after the Codices Madrid"  Leonardo Da Vinci.

"The energy of the drawn line creates a symbiosis between the life of the mind and of the thing being depicted" Beuys

Joseph Beuys, Unbetitelt, undatiert, Datierungsvorschlag, 1945. Collection Museum Schloss Mayland © Joseph Beuys Estate/VG Bild-Kunst,