About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
176
About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
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Overview
Suitable for artists and students of moderate to advanced skills, the book makes a case for why the artist needs to sketch and the importance of sketching to the history of art. Salwey's advice and insights are illustrated by relevant examples that range from works by the Old Masters to those of his great contemporaries, including Frank Brangwyn, Dame Laura Knight, and John Singer Sargent.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486821047 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 32 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
About Sketching
The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
By Jasper Salwey
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2017 Jasper SalweyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-82104-7
CHAPTER 1
THE ART OF SKETCHING
Among the innumerable activities of man in the realm of Art, the sketch holds a position of marked importance; for apart from its use as a mere preliminary practice or note, adopted by artists as a preparation for the fully developed picture, it is often of such a high order as to be, even when considered only as a sketch, a work of art in itself. The very fact that the term is understood to define a spontaneous and rapid delineation of a subject, limiting both time and labour, precluding premeditation and subsequent touching up, concentrates the artist's whole ability on this one direct effort, during which there is time for no extraneous thought to impede him or detract from the clarity of his achievement.
When we stand alone before a sketch and comprehend it, we are perhaps nearer to the artist than we could be in his living presence. Whether it be a rendering in pencil or crayon, water-colour or oil, or any other medium, the artist has expressed himself without the embarrassment of doing so personally; he has told us about himself, and we know not only of him but of Life.
If it had been the custom for artists to withhold any but their finished works from public exhibition, it may safely be said that pictorial art would have lost a large measure of the enthusiasm and appreciation that it has received from later students and connoisseurs. The astronomer's calculations, the engineers graphs, the scientist's experiments, are secrets of the workroom and the laboratory; even the architect's sketch plans are seldom on view — a fact to be deplored. But the sketch-book of an artist has always been considered among the treasures of its possessor, and the sketch, even when known to have been produced as a step towards the accomplishment of a finished picture — a means, in fact, to another end — is recognised as being in itself something of special value and appeal; of such interest, indeed, as to have resulted in its housing, exhibition and preservation in collections and public art galleries, and, even more, its marketing at prices equal to, and sometimes surpassing, finished works of art.
The practice of sketching cannot be said to have been concomitant with the dawn of pictorial art. Early Art was approached through drawing, delineation and study, without the added aid of sketching. The very nature of the early pictures, mural decorations and frescoes, conceived to fill prescribed spaces or panels, conforming largely to the prevailing convention, and concerned with the arrangement of figures and a comparatively limited range of subjects and treatment, did not demand preliminary experiment and trial as have the later developments of Art. The idea was evolved in the process of drawing, rather than from a pre-stated sketch of the completed panel.
As Art became increasingly emancipated, the practice of sketching as a preliminary to work on a large scale began to be recorded in histories of the early Italian masters. Such early masters as Giotto and Fra Angelico made little drawings on parchment, which are in the nature of sketches, and Masaccio in silver point on tinted paper. It was Andrea Mantegna who first carried the practice much further, sketching objects and sometimes complete subjects of peasant life direct from nature, bringing to notice the beauty of the real as beside the classic, thus moving the Art of his country into a new phase which was to be realized in all its fullness and splendour by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
The Renaissance was, to a large extent, an unshackling of the chains of convention that weighed the artist down. A new race of artists appeared who, in the enchantment of this golden age, realised that Art was an end in itself, worthy of the pursuit of a lifetime, and revelled in their freedom to pursue it according to the call of their own spirits. A new beauty seemed born into the world, and in the magnificent outburst of pictorial art that ensued we find the sketch playing no mean part. The very fact that such a legacy of sketches has come down to us from this period goes to prove that the artist himself must have had a sufficient realisation of the quality of these works, and an appreciation of what they represented from the fact that he preserved them at all and did not throw them away on the completion of his picture as an author might discard his preliminary rough notes.
From the hand of Leonardo da Vinci may be seen some of the earliest pen sketches, though his more usual medium was silver point. In them we find a new note of action and emotion over and above the mere power of depiction which is so evident in them. Thus was the practice of sketching leading Art onwards into a wider field which found so magnificent a culmination in the work of Michelangelo, whose extensive use of sketching in various media reveals to us perfectly the means by which he approached the problems of his profound achievements.
Sketching had become a practice of the Venetian School no less than of the Florentine. The sketches of Titian in pencil and ink are evidence of his belief in the value of rapidly rendering the interests of nature and life. The fast perfecting medium of oil-colour may also have been employed for sketching by this school, if not by Titian himself at this time, though there is no direct evidence that this was the case, even at a period when such strides were being made in the employment of rich colour in portrait work.
Dürer, who by some is considered the first great painter of landscape, visited Venice in 1506, and he, among others, may have been the means of conveying something of the Southern method to Northern Europe, though the influence he brought was Florentine rather than Venetian. Dürer made numberless interesting sketches, many of which are still preserved, though these works are really more in the nature of close studies than of what may be truly defined as sketches, his usual medium being colour and ink.
The Baroque style which followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the first general realisation of the function of the sketch as we understand it nowadays. The new school sought to emancipate itself from the somewhat severe forms of the preceding century, to dramatise, as it were, the subject-matter of pictures, and excite the mind and the eye by an added exuberance of form and violence of movement. The innumerable sketches which come down to us from this epoch perfectly express its artistic ideals. Here we find a more varied use of media and a new variety in their combinations. There is an added virtuosity in technique and a serious endeavour to add to the means of expression at the artist's disposal. Men such as Caravaggio, Guido Reni, the Carracci, Tiepolo (see Plate 66) knew well how to seize the impression of an instant and perpetuate it in a rapid, vigorous, if sometimes over-violent sketch. Though the artistic achievements of this age cannot be compared with those of the epoch preceding it, it may at least be said that it witnessed a definite advancement in the art of sketching, and the first signs of appreciation of the sketch as a work of art in itself, distinct from the drawing or painting.
In the work of the Dutch and Flemish artists to which this brief outline now brings us, Art is seen to range over a far wider field. The two men who stand out most prominently and demand a student's attention are Rembrandt and Rubens. A wonderful range of studies, sketches and notes by both these masters has been collected in England alone. The medium most usually employed in the case of the former was pen, in that of the latter charcoal. Both individualists indeed, facing tradition but looking beyond it, they attained to almost unique achievements in the field of Art, and those who would trace to its source the realism of the modern landscape, as differentiated from the classic, must look back to Rembrandt, while the sketches alone of Rubens, quite apart from his finished works, are in themselves an education to the student of figure drawing.
Rembrandt occupies a unique position in the history of Art, for it was he who above all other artists understood and made use of effects of chiaroscuro and light. It has been said indeed "that he painted in light," and this singular luminous quality is to be found in his sketches, many of which were made as a preliminary to etchings. Rubens, too, executed thousands of sketches, many of which remain to the present day, in a great variety of media. They stand as models of what such sketches should be, full of vigour and action, conceived with a virtuosity and a sureness of touch that amazes us to-day. "It was his recreation to create works," Taine, the great French critic, said of him, and indeed such was his mastery of the "language" of sketching, that he appeared to work with no appreciable effort, to be able to express perfectly what he saw about him in sketches that stand supreme of their kind.
Sketching is a practice which by many is associated almost entirely with the open air, where its joys as well as all that it has to teach may be discovered. The act of sketching, however, does not necessarily imply an open-air practice. One may make a sketch, as differentiated from a drawing, indoors in the studio or anywhere; and, quite apart from the methods of any particular artist, the benefit of occasionally limiting the period of study to a rapid sketch has long been realised in art schools. It is an excellent practice for the student to be for ever sketching everything that appeals to him at any time or place, and setting down the visions of his imagination in miniature sketches of compositions and design. Turner was once identified by a native of Yorkshire as "the little man who always had a pencil in his hand."
It may be said that sketching for the sheer joy of sketching or in an experimental way for more ambitious work came into practice in England with the general revival in the appreciation of Nature towards the close of the eighteenth century. In this curiously sudden reaction from classicism a new world was revealed to the artist, who found on all sides a popular demand for the representation and portrayal of the country-side. The demand for landscapes in the classic manner had subsided; pictures regarded more as a stage for the representation of temples, heroes, maidens, myths and the varied properties which the fashion of seeing Italy and Greece had cultivated, were on the wane. Taste and fancy took a new turn, and "the earth was regarded as the scene of man's existence rather than the stage of his imagination." Draughtsmen even set out to explore England for crumbling buildings, ruined Gothic architecture, and subjects of like sentimental appeal. Homely scenes and local colour, cottage and farm, field and woodland, were seen in a new light.
Gainsborough and lesser men of his time abandoned the Dutch influence and took to sketching familiar scenes of English landscape. Its sentimental appeal was too strong for it to remain unrecognised even when rendered in monochrome, but Cozens appeared and developed the practice of painting in water-colour and, though his comparatively primitive methods of tinting over a monochrome basis gave his work only a limited semblance of reality, the exhibition and circulation of such pictures doubtless fashioned a fondness for the scenes portrayed.
The first love of landscape and English country life is probably traceable to Gainsborough and Cozens, who abandoned conventions and went out to sketch what they saw and found on every hand. It is more than likely that their choice of subject was a subconscious response to the demand of the age, but this response brought about the development of sketching as we know it to-day. A knitting together of a whole range of new objects not hitherto commonly introduced against a landscape background became a necessity of the picture.
It is then obvious that it only needed the full development of water-colour as a rapid and comprehensive medium finally to establish the practice of sketching in the open air, and to begin its long history up to the present time, when often, alas, the carrying of a colour-box and camp-stool is an all too popular hobby! A development of the new medium soon resulted through its employment by a few English draughtsmen of this period, Alexander Cozens, Hearne, Malton and others; and it was they who also helped to lift painting from the merely topographical to the pictorial, a process ultimately completed by Girtin and Turner.
But though the dawn of the nineteenth century saw water-colour established in England as a definite medium and a very dexterous art in itself, its special facility did not blind artists to the particular advantages of other media. The use of ink line with a monochrome wash was popular, and was very successfully employed by Edward Dayes and others, whose work doubtless influenced Turner in his extensive use of this medium for sketching; brown and even red ink being effectually applied, especially on grey paper. It was Girtin, however, who did perhaps most to advance the practice of sketching, working in various media and over a wide range of subjects. He even formed a Sketching Society, which had among its members John Sell Cotman — who ultimately became its president. Although lead pencil did not come into general use for finished drawings until the early nineteenth century, Girtin employed this medium with power and confidence, as the illustration on Plate 50 well shows, and it is more than likely that its particular advantages for sketching — responsiveness and rapidity — were soon widely appreciated for experimental purposes.
Armed with this new choice of media the artist set out to portray at will both fact and fancy, and by the process of either systematic or spontaneous sketching to increase his powers as well as greatly to widen the horizon of pictorial art. To these sketching media Turner added direct sketching in oil-colour, and among his achievements in this manner — one of which is to be seen on Plate 11 — are examples of all that, it seems, a sketch should be.
The several forces already at work in the process of developing the new and English art of water-colour were soon stimulated by a new group of artists, eager to pursue and develop it, endowed indeed — some of them — with a genius to practise it with masterly freedom. John Varley, William John Müller and Peter de Wint stand out especially. The work of these men should be closely studied by the student who seeks the elements of weight and force in his work, and particularly the work of Müller, who, perhaps more than any other man of his time, not only understood the great value of direct sketching in the open, but actually practised it with great ability in water-colour and in oil. David Cox is said to have watched with amazement Müller's dexterity and confidence when sketching in oils, and to have added power to his own work thereby.
But all the artists of this period, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth — and there were a number who were greatly accomplished besides those whom we have mentioned — proved instrumental in revealing some new aspect of the fast developing art of landscape; each experimented in some hitherto untried technique, leaving the knowledge of the subject fuller than he had found it. The many wonders of treatment and technique which it was now realised might be embodied in a rapid sketch entirely established the fascination of this pursuit, and revealed even more far-reaching possibilities in pictorial art.
The chief problem that these artists were seeking to solve, either consciously or subconsciously, was, doubtless, that of tone values. In monochrome it had proved difficult, but the adding of colour to weight was found to render it doubly so. Often at that period perfect tonal value was achieved, notably by Cotman, by Girtin and de Wint, and in France by Corot, but in the period which links that day to the stronger work of the present century this problem seems too often to have been neglected.
The practice of sketching continued, but like so many practices of the Victorian era it became meticulous and sentimental, altogether too popular. For when a practice or a task is considered a necessity of curriculum it is taken less seriously, and an appreciation of its true purpose and value is likely to be lost. The Victorian period is, however, a mine that should not be left unworked by students of Art simply because so much that is narrow and sentimental attaches to it. The process of digging will be rewarded by fine veins of ore; for in these days strove a number of lesser masters, the excellence of whose work is only now being brought to light by cultured enthusiasts. Curiously enough it is often the prettiness and sentimentality of their finished works which has kept in the background the fine qualities and innate Art of their sketches, which, when discovered, display over and over again the spontaneous beauty that the practice of sketching engenders. Stoddard, Westall, Birket Foster, Marcus Stone may be considered too sentimental at their best, but their sketches should be seen, while the sketch-books of such artists as W. R. Beverley, Harding and Sir John Gilbert are a revelation. Neither are the lithographed sketches of Isaby, Decamps and others by any means to be despised.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from About Sketching by Jasper Salwey. Copyright © 2017 Jasper Salwey. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Written as a sketching artist's companion, this guide by a noted author of art instruction manuals attests to the value of sketching as a distinct art form rather than merely a vehicle to achieve more polished works. Artist and author Jasper Salwey details advantages of many drawing media, from pencil to watercolor, and their application to depictions of interior studies, figures, landscapes, seascapes, and architecture.
Suitable for artists and students of moderate to advanced skills, the book makes a case for why the artist needs to sketch and the importance of sketching to the history of art. Salwey's advice and insights are illustrated by relevant examples that range from works by the Old Masters to those of his great contemporaries, including Frank Brangwyn, Dame Laura Knight, and John Singer Sargent.
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