Sydney’s Japanese Gardens: Gosford/Edogawa Commemorative Garden

I had the good fortune to visit this Japanese Garden last Spring, during the very short period when the fuji/wisteria were in bloom. The garden took me straight back to Japan, the flow of the strolling shuyu garden and the creation of mini-landscapes of mountains and valleys; it was hard to hold back the tears. This time, in mid-summer, I had none of the overwhelming visceral reaction to the garden. I spent a lot of time walking around the outside of the garden on the foreshore of Caroline Bay (including taking the Friendship Walk) and noting the extent of the ‘borrowed landscape’. so important in appreciating Japanese gardens. 

The view from the Wisteria Walk was out of the sun. The formal clipped shrubs were easy to jot down. More difficult was the architecture of the Koi Pavilion, especially the darks under the roofline. More difficult still was the Cypress Bridge. The Australian Gums had to be included. I added pencil after the watercolour, not before.

“Cold” sketching – sketching something I’ve never seen or sketched before – is always a challenge. Little wonder artists concentrate on subject matter they know intimately and draw/paint again and again.  The Koi Pavilion was the venue this morning for a Naming Ceremony so was crowded. The sunlight was very strong and this was the view looking north to the Pavilion including the Turtle Island from the teahouse. The shadows became prominent geometric shapes.

After retreating indoors to the airconditioned Australian Watercolour Institute Exhibition, a second session began in the Koi Pavilion, looking west. Again, another attempt at understanding the Cypress Bridge. On my next visit to the Garden, I will take a closer look at the roof architecture of the pavilion. Family groups, feeding the koi carp, wandered in and out of the view. Having ‘got my eye in’ after two hours, this was going to the best drawing possible of the day.

I’m averaging four or five sketches per outdoor drawing session these days, a vast improvement on 12 months ago when I was exhausted after a single drawing (at the most two), after less than an hour.  When concentration wanes, I take on ‘impossible challenges’, ’something completely different’ and today’s involving the texture of the black pines. The spiky leaves (pruned along their lower parts) provide the basis for “starbursts” in Japanese art and textiles, “fireworks” at the end of every branch. 

I was very impressed by the many sketchbooks on display as part of the AWI Exhibition. I wanted to see how others combined media, especially with pencil drawing. Most sketchbooks were invariably hand-bound on largely smooth paper; most drawings showed a lot of careful, considered effort – no rash or hasty marks. A lot of attention to detail in built environment landscapes; rather more fluidity of course in landscapes, but, again, a lot of time spent on them, with a lot (if not all) of the picture plane filled. None of the drawings on show will have been completed in less than an hour or two. None were “mere impressions”.

* pocket-size, very small (designed for inconspicuous sketching abroad, e.g. Italy – the Lucca piazza included a lot of pencil detail, very studied and very light, with no tonal work in pencil, all the tone being provided by the paint alone);

* judicious use of watercolour highlights within pencil drawings, not clashing at all with the pencil work (e.g. drinkers at an outside cafe on Oxford Street, Sydney);

* a large sketchbook of watercolour landscape paintings, on thick watercolour paper, by Rick Amor – no pencil drawing but lots of very clear colour – “preliminary” paintings in effect;

* Robyn Norling’s three sketches of a cathedral facade with two concentrating on the poses of people; 

* a large sketchbook page with a very small watercolour miniature in the middle, surrounded by lots of white paper.

* “transitional” work of Jocelyn Maughan – pencil in sketchbook plus single sheets of watercolour (studies for paintings).

The exhibition contained monumental works by Rob Wade, Ron Stannard, Jocelyn Maughan and other watercolour greats. The prices on some virtuosic works were shockingly low, more a statement about how watercolour painting is considered compared to oil painting in today’s market.

Traditional Pen & Ink. Landscape with watercolour.

A4-sized approx, Winsor & Newton watercolour washes with Staetdler Fineliner 03 penwork.

Completely bushwhacked by university exams, but took in a fortnightly pen & ink class anyway. Following on from work I’ve thrown up in previous posts, we are working on landscapes. In preparing for the class, I brought along three newspaper photos of Australian bushland and shacks/country retreats. I also got myself three watercolour brushes (a rigger for flexible fine lines, a chisel-edge since I’d since it at work so effectively with straight-line architectural renders and a mop brush for backgrounds) – this was my first formal watercolour lesson ever.

The others worked on an exemplar of an American hut in a snowscape, but I went off on my own tangent, as the teacher has come to expect. Plonking the “barn” smack in the middle was a mistake, but I went with it. This was all about experimenting with splashing paint about, at times pulling back the colour. I will do the same thing again on 190gsm watercolour paper, but today’s was done on plain 110gsm cartridge.

I’m surprised how much pre-planning and forethought is involved. Building up each layer of paint is a lot slower than I’d imagined. It looks flexible and volatile, but turns out not to be, given time passing while layers dry. Surely watercolour is the most confected of painting mediums or styles?  The trees at right seemed almost to have been done by someone else. I am probably ready to look more closely, or emulate/copy, some of Donald Friend’s pen-and-wash work.

The frenetic quality of today’s watercolour comes from exhaustion following university exams as well as responding inwardly to “The Slap” and “Dead Europe”. Following each episode of the television version of Christos Tsiolkas’ “The Slap” (and re-reading each chapter prior to its showing every Thursday night), I’m halfway through reading “Dead Europe”. I’m still waiting for it to turn nasty, since we are moving down the circles of Hell. So far, it’s a realistic portrayal of Europe. Anyone with family connections to Mediterranean Europe will simply nod in empathy. While strong stuff (but no stronger than a Grimms fairy tale), I’ve found the “circles” devoted to Greece, Italy and Czechoslovakia gritty but not disturbing. As a Sydney reader, I find Tsiolkas deeply rooted in Melbourne. Parts are very mannered, compared to the more abject cruelty and horror of Sydney. It is, of course, mandatory reading for anyone with family connections in Europe, or anyone whose spiritual home is in Europe.

Tsiolkas speaks to one half of Australia, the European ‘half’ but it will mean nothing to the Asian ‘half’. My Asian colleagues – refugees from Asian wars, obsessed with contemporary politics and poverty in Vietnam or Burma - look at me with completely blank expressions when I talk about things European: the Jewish state, World War II and the Holocaust, German occupation of Europe, let alone civil wars or revolutions or people power in any individual country like Greece or England or Italy. I expect in another 20 or 30 years, an Australian Vietnamese Tsiolkas will arise and tell us similar stories from another part of the world as it links to Australia, talking of their parents as Tsiolkas portrays Manoli – the end of the lives of the first generation migrants. It’s still early days, though I see its beginnings in the comedians behind “Fear of a Brown Planet”.

Anyone interested in human rights or social justice, or the social usefulness of art, will get a lot out of “Dead Europe”. Perhaps it is all the more gripping for me at the moment given the unfolding eurozone financial crisis and the end of the “berlusconismo” and the fact that Italy’s social fabric now has to off to be mended and renewed. It may be too late – in cinema, “Her Whole Life Ahead” shows a contemporary Italy quite different from the Berlusconi production of “Mediterraneo”. All the more gripping for me too having recently seen more Greekness portrayed in Richard Mills’ opera, “Love of The Nightingale”.

I appeciate the discussion of activism and aesthetics throughout the novel (Athens, Megalo Houri, Venice’s ghetto, Sal Mineo and the private exhibition by the RMIT photography student having visited the factory). Hardly a day goes by when I seriously question the purposes of urban sketching. Are artists condemned to see, observe, witness, record? I notice Australian journalists don’t witness and record any more – they are “over that” and now embed themselves in politics, become players and game-changers in their own right. As rich 1%ers, they, like radio shock jocks, see themselves as little different from their political colleagues, emboldened by their salaries which outstrip those of the lawmakers, reinforced by their own “focus groups” which tell them what’s what in the nation. But in my own little head, urban sketching has to be something more than well-heeled artists travelling to exotic places, a 1% being watched by a curious 99%. It has to be more than Charm School – more than Margaret Olley or Donald Friend.

As for “The Slap”, television has watered down many aspects of the novel and has upgraded a lot of the John Howard-era issues to a post-Kevin Rudd era. Political correctness is in constant flux so I can appreciate why something like this needs to be freshened up, made relevant to contemporary audiences. It’s done all the time in opera and theatre, so why not television? The lack of any worthy, meritorious characters is very depressing of course, but the bravura involved in accurate representing modern Australian characters is breathtaking and makes up for that – it’s interesting that “Crownies” immediately follows “The Slap”, equally depressing in terms of the circus known as the Law, but much more Charm School in character portrayal. In his interview by Jennifer Byrne (or was it Geraldine Doogue?) Tsiolkas hinted at Richie – the last episode, still some weeks off -being the only possessor of a true moral compass in his social network. It will be interesting to see how television embraces his drug experiences, or perhaps that will be metamorphosed (in the Ovidian sense) into that contemporary issue, binge drinking. How will they portray his links to Nick and Lenin?  How will the events surrounding Bill Henson’s photography colour the representation of Richie’s cohorts? I found Geraldine Doogue’s question about his work spending too much time and effort on sex quite the “wrong” question: a better question would have been the link between drugs, spiritual refuge and spiritual knowledge. But I find many critics and reviewers can’t come to the basics of Tsiolkas’ writing; some stupidly review “The Slap” at the same indicating they haven’t even read “Loaded”. And why not situate Tsiolkas’ chapter on Aisha (the Bangkok conference and the Bali holiday) in the literature devoted  to Australians in Bali? How does Tsiolkas’ Venice link to that of Robert Dessaix’ “Night Letters” and “Corfu”? Time for me to read some Seferis, some Loukakis… and next week the final assault in university exams on Vergian verismo and social justice in “I Malavoglia”, feminism in Driss Chraibi and portrayals of the Other in 1940s Quebec portrayed in short stories by Roch Carrier.

Traditional Pen & Ink. Landscape with Trees #4.

I’ve been going through old photos and taking cuttings from newspapers, looking for images relating to the current pen-and-ink exercises relating to adapting particular marks to landscapes with trees. Pen-and-ink is not usually associated with landscape, I’m told. I’m  still not fully engaging all the marks of the original exercise in to these “transcripts”, but I can at least proffer four (if not more) pieces of work at this Friday’s class.

I don’t buy the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend for the news anymore. I used to, but with the increasing duopoly in the newsprint industry, the laziness of journalists who now write stories based on the Internet and are busy simply shifting paragraphs around when it comes to Media Releases provided to them as written by spin doctors, SMH has simply become views-news, with a “balanced” number of leftwing and rightwing opinion pieces. The same with The Australian. The SMH does continue to provide interesting photographs however: portraits, figures, dramatic black-and-white photos.

This winter scene fitted the bill: the 1920s house had a variety of textures and the tree was mercifully without leaves. From a photograph, it’s not easy distinguishing between real branch and shadow, which branch belongs to which bough, etc. – I imagine this has to be easier when drawing on location. Which this sketch motivates me to do – in fact I’m examining trees on my walks around the neighbourhood much more closely these days. There was a mass of smaller branches to the left, but I gave up eventually. I persist in leaving areas of white, blank space – much to the annoyance of my pen-and-ink teacher, I’m sure!

Great Garden Sketchabout #14: Canova “The Boxers” – Damoxenos

 

21 March 2011, dusk, 10minute ‘pre-sketch’. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. The ‘southern’ (winning) Boxer, Damoxenos, beneath a Moreton Bay Fig tree, not far from Morshead Fountain/Palace Gates/Captain Cook statue/Rose Pavilion.

Pouring rain, holding sketchbook and umbrella in one hand, pencil in the other. Stopped when pencil started sliding over wet paper! To do this properly one would, I imagine, need a manservant to hold an umbrella over one while one sketched. I was torn between this view and sitting under a canopy of vegetation (almost entirely out of the rain) to re-draw the Chorisia insignis again, to get more of the tree’s height suitable for a ‘portrait’ format, but more of that later no doubt… My Damoxenos today looks more like an evil faun than a Herculean boxer, but I am conjuring up ways to incorporate The Boxers into my Garden Sketchbook.

What I like about this vista, from a public bench nearby, is that it includes not just the two boxers (with the strong contrast between white of the statue and dark of the surrounding Moreton Bay fig tree), but an additional smaller statue in the distance, plus another bench, so there’s plenty of variety and content for the viewer to take  in in a single sketch. Speaking of which, come back tomorrow for some penwork and colour to bring out the aforesaid content rather more clearly. The contrasts between sunlit areas and deep shade are particularly vivid around 1pm, I’ve noticed, at this time of year. The photo below was taken a few days later, again at dusk but without the rain.

I should add that both Boxers were draped today in elaborate necklaces/braces made out of beautiful dark seed pods and in pandanus leaf jockstraps. It will be interesting to see how long these eco-friendly additions will stay on; someone has obviously gone to a lot of work getting the measurements right. The Boxers missed out on costume when other sculptures around town got ‘dressed’ last year as part of an art event. I’m glad to see someone else taking these two statues seriously!

***

Drawing even for this very short time was a blessed relief from work and work colleagues, with their snide remarks about asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Last night was the French film, Family Tree – a seminal film on The War which had to be made eventually. And speaking of the Asian theatre of that war, today was Harmony Day, though you wouldn’t know it – what with the endless round of anti-Japanese jokes about the tsunami. Racism and anti-Asian sentiment runs to the core of the Australian experience, even Asian colleagues lament the “banana effect”, being yellow on the outside and white inside.  Not helped by right-wing commentators using refugees for political ends: the look of horror on their faces when Jason Clare’s listed examples of fear-mongering by journalists down the ages. Josh Thomas’ video question in Q&A cut to the core, a splendid juxtaposition to a new app released on iPhone for curing homosexuality. I’m imagining a world where gays invented marriage, where profligate, promiscuous heterosexuals were unhappy about having to be satisfied with a second-rate civil licence, the equivalent of a dog licence. What a delightful world we live in – little wonder we seek refuge in the controlled beauty of gardens!

Garden Sketchabout #5 – Canova “The Boxers”

        

4×5″, 5B pencil, watercolour pencil. Dangerously too hot to sketch plein air today, Sat 5 Feb, so I’ve turned to photos taken during the week.  I think the spare line indicates my current inability to work in the heat. I look forward to cooler days when I can sketch the statues ‘in the flesh’. My aim is to build up slowly from tonal thumbnails (as Ernest Watson would have me do); the fall of shadows is dramatic enough to sustain a treatment involving an entire absence of contour for example. I am keen too to practice rendering them in straight lines only, no curved lives.

 

The repros of The Boxers by Canova in the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens hold special personal appeal. I doubt they’ll make themselves into the sketchbooks of any lady-painters, but for me they are central to the RBG experience. Figure-in-landscape is something to which I aspire, in the wake of my gay exemplars Keith Vaughan and David Hockney. I was very inspired by an exhibition in Newcastle Regional Gallery years ago of the early work of Euan MacLeod, who put males in torrid, almost frenzied, green landscapes. He’s gone on to other things of course and his figures now look more wraith-like by comparison; the early works now seem very early, but I found the rawness attractive then and still do now.  Of course, the Canova Boxers are larger than life and brutish. Boxing is of course a hideous sport, a microcosm of war itself, but is entirely emblematic of how men relate to each other. In a sense it’s what gay men entirely reject. Mention boxing to str8 men and an eerie lust wells up: their voices falter, their eyes narrow and the gourge of blood-lust is like some vampiric calling. I don’t know any str8 man who doesn’t love boxing passionately since their whole being is focussed on patrolling the boundaries of their gender and being ever-ready to ‘box’ to prove it.

Like the footpath separating the two sculpted men however, these boxers aren’t engaged in a real fight. They preen, like gay men drinking at a dark, seedy bar late at night. The simple plans of light and dark can make representation of the boxers almost trite, so the art lies in not making them look entirely like cardboard cutouts. A quirky or edgy sketchbook would in fact have them as pop-ups against a garish watercolour pencil green background and faded yellow grass. I would desperately like to transplant them to Australia and not re-create for them an English repro-sculpture context, though the surrounding lawns and trees reinforce that perspective. They are, after all, Italian in origin. I’m reminded of several attempts in the 1970s to link Sydney with Venice: 1974 saw the first production of a baroque Venetian opera in Australia in the NSW Conservatorium close by the Gardens (the Opera House not then completed) and much was made at the time of the link between both cities and the waters on which they sit. Such an early post-modernist interpretation has not been sustained over time since then. But the real trick would be to introduce some Italianism into a sketch of the sculptures.

One of the things which surprised (and inspired) me on looking into the Gardens Sketchabout event was the proliferation of sculpture and installations. I wasn’t prepared for a figure of over four dozen, which confirms my concept of the Gardens being a mashup of the natural world and art objects imposed on it and in it. It is an amazing figure and I’m sure the RBG are not widely enough appreciated as a contributor to the city’s arts.

The originals in the Vatican (without figleaves, depending on which photographs you come across) are said to have been inspired by the Dioscuri of the Palazzo Quirinale. The Gabinetto del Canova in the Vatican (perhaps also known as the Cortile ottagonale del Belvedere) contains three neoclassical statues placed here when Napoleon took most of the Classical masterpieces to Paris in 1800: Perseus (inspired by the Apollo Belvedere) and the boxers Creugas & Damoxenes.

The RBG copies in marble, by an anonymous copyist, are 2 metres high, were set up in the 1880s or at least by 1890. One wonders why these sculptures in particular, at this particular time, unless it was in the wake of some wave of European feeling following the demise of the Palace in 1882. Judging from a photo on Flickr take in 1998, Creugas seesm to have been cleaned of algae and is no longer looking like the The Green Man. The Boxers were not among Sydney statues “clothed” during the 2010 Sydney Statues: Project!

The northern Boxer is Kreugas or Creugas, while in the shade of the tree stands his opponent Damoxenes. Gardens management have highlighted the loser unprotected in an open field, while the canny winner lurks beneath a large tree; the eternal conflict between light and dark, though this is not at all about good vs evil as the story of the boxers below will tell. One commentator, http://www.publicartaroundtheworld.com/The_Boxers_Statues.html, likened them to one bowling a cricket ball which is a typically deprecating Australian perspective. Typically Australian too is the notion of trivialising serious issues around gender and masculinity, not to say of trivialising culture and art in general in Australia.

Antonio Canova (1 Nov 1757 to 13 Oct 1822) was a successful Italian sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered flesh. The epitome of the neoclassical style, his work marked a return to classical refinement after the theatrical excess of Baroque sculpture. Canova seemed to have been somewhat tortured artistically: his natural strength lay in graceful beauty and apparently produced the Boxers and other heavily masculine statutes to refute the charge of being little more than an effete Bernini. Do these Boxers ultimately lack strength and masterliness? Are they wimps in disguise? Are these boxers trying to be something they can never be, are they innately locked into being comely? How very Sydney!

I find it fascinating they are separated by a roadway or footpath – we, as observers, travel between them, as if we were the judge of the fight. There is something of a Greek tragedy here, since we know the outcome of the boxing match. That is to say, if we think these are inoffensive copies of Italian sculptures, we need to think again. www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Athletes.htm provides information about the original boxing event, the detail of which seems to reinforce my opinions about boxing and str8 men.

In a Pancration event in Nemea in 400BC (Creugas (or Kreugas) of Epidamnos and Damoxenos of Syracuse struggle for hours without a decision, Creugas and Damoxenos agreed that each would accept an undefended blow. Creugas delivered his first punch to his opponent’s head. Still standing, Damoxenos jabbed Creugas with hits fingers straight out, piercing his rib cage. Damoxenos yanked out his intestines, killing him on the spot, Damoxenos was expelled, although seemingly on a technicality; the judges deemed the disembowelling to be several blows (one for each finger) instead of the single agreed-upon blow. (Info from Betsy Carpenter, The First Olympics, US News 1/8/04).

In addition to various photos of the RBG and original Boxers on the Internet, I note in particular one at http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/35936592.html; A&A art and architecture: the Courtauld Institute of Art has in its Conway Collections, a plaster model of Creugas, dated 1802, located at Possagno Veneto in Italy, Canova’s birthplace.

In terms of artistic representation of the RBG Boxers, the Powerhouse Museum possesses a full-plate silver gelatin dry plate glass negative taken by Kerry & Co. c. 1884-1917. The view looking west shows the same wide path between the sculptures which exists today, but the Boxers are out in an open field, with no background vegetation, The sandstone pedestals are surrounded by garden beds with flowering Spring plants – a huge work for the gardeners, to be sure. This fin-de-siecle photo (available on Flickr with Commons restrictions) is useful in terms of evaluating the building skyline to the west.

On a final note, it’s important to note that Canova appeared to have been a sketcher, or at least a journaller, with his Quaderni di viaggio still extant. (Hugh Honour, Canova’s Studio Practice-1: The Early Years, The Burlington Magazine 114 no.828, March 1972, 146-159).

References

Tyrrell Photographic Collection, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney - http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/2414453771/in/set-72157605112590123/

Great Garden Sketchabout #2 – Morshead Fountain Gate

 

8×10″, graphite pencil and Sharpie XF pen. Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Morshead Fountain Gate from Mitchell Library. A 20min sketch done without support, 4.30-5pm, 1 Feb, 102F degrees. The composition is interesting enough without having to add the Captain Cook statue, available but a few steps to the left (see last photo). My main problem is the rapidly changing shadows at this time of day. A remarkably poor sketch, I am not deterred; I need to go back and add more botanical detail. I have this idea of colouring the vegetation and thus ‘alienating’ the Built Environment in the process. The shapes of the palms and pines are simply wonderful but need reworking here. The whole thing needs a lot more work – it looks like a vignette from The Bulletin from the early 20th century. One thing not obvious from the b/w sketch is the brilliant light thrown on to three faces of the blocks of the fountain, which can only be highlighted if I surround that area with colour. I think the amount of work these and subsequent RBG sketches are requiring – especially in the current heat wave conditions – they are being “upgraded” to drawings very quickly.

I am chuffed that the Royal Botanic Gardens is open till 8pm in summer, thus allowing me some midweek sketching after work, at least potentially. As predicted, Macquarie Street is plunged into near-darkness in the late afternoon so the western boundary of the Royal Botanic Gardens – with its buildings, cars, palm trees and garden walls – looks as if it needs to be sketched only in the mornings. This is obvious in the photos below which show the long shadows drawn by the high-rise over the gardens. I had the idea of the Built Environment casting a long shadow over the natural environment as a metaphor for the predicament of the Gardens in the modern world. The Gardens, instead, may have to become something of a “guiding light” with the early morning sun lighting the way for Man and his buildings!

Undeterred, the obvious starting point for me in any sketching of the RBG is the Morshead Fountain Gate, opposite the Mitchell Library.  This is a view personally very familiar to me, since I’ve been visiting the RBG on and off since 1969 and entering it at this Gate. I’m determined to include the Dorchester and other highrise buildings because they not only hem in the gardens on the western side but are somewhat crucial in the history of this part of the gardens. Had this been the 1882 or so for a very short period, this particular aspect would have looked directly at the facade of the Garden Palace, that giant wooden structure, several times the size of the Queen Victoria Building still extant at Town Hall; it’s said the Macquarie Street residents were upset about the Palace blocking their view of the gardens and that they may have been responsible for burning it down. Other reasons have been posited for the demise of the Palace. I found it particularly ironic today that the Dorchester (Sydney’s first high-rise apartment block) is currently under renovation and that a giant screen has been erected in front of it, blocking all views. This particular aspect cannot take in the Renzo Piano building, the Macquarie apartments; in my day, I knew it of course as the State Government Office Block (a peculiarly 1970s/80s monicker in its own way), a giant black granite tower. I’d like to be able to conjure up the Garden Palace in my sketch somehow.

Ernest Watson would pick out the dramatic shadows and the wonderful play of greens in the view, not terribly obvious at all in the photos. I am concerned that whatever trees I draw actually convey the particular species, so I will have to not only draw more accurately but find out a bit more about what I’m drawing.  Certainly the distinctive qualities of the Norfolk Pines, which I’m passionate about, ought to shine through. There is more variety in the skyline of trees than I anticipated. The Volunteer Guides during the Garden Sketchabout in February/March might be able to come to my rescue.

    

To the left are the buildings of Macquarie Street, including a vignette of the top of the Harbour Bridge with its flag. The palms and Norfolk Pines behind the Morehead Fountain in centre are particularly lyrical. Fortuitously there is a wonderful play of light on the stones surrounding the fountain and some trees at far right balance up the composition. At this stage, unless I draw a very wide panorama, there is no need to include either the Macquarie Apartments of Renzo Piano (far left) or the Shakespeare Monument (far right), though that is one option at least worth testing. 

I re-visited this vantage point on Thursday 3 Feb at the same time to check my previous efforts and also to introduce some colour because I thought the black-and-white too stark and ‘in your face’. The colour has certainly softened the overall, which is the same soothing effect the trees have set amongst the bitumen and hard-edged urban context. Tourists were playing in and around the water of the fountain today, oblivious of the fact that it’s a memorial. But then I’ve seen tourists photograph themselves, with flash, in front of the high altar of Notre-Dame-de-Paris. The only thing I haven’t captured at all to my satisfaction is the gorgeous quality of the palm fronds – they look like plumped-up petunias here – so it will be worthwhile to keep coming back to get them right.

The larger Gardens Sketchbook concept

In terms of my take on the Gardens Sketchbook concept, and my mania for relevancy, I ought to be including a panel or two devoted to not just the flying fox and its predations, but also the seaweed of Wahganmuggalee (Farm Cove)  as well as the Wollemi Pine (a great plant to look at!), the Waratah and the bush foods of the Cadigal. I’ve discovered there are more formal Gates than I anticipated, and each has its own name: Rose Garden Gate, Palace Garden Gate, Morshead Fountain Gate, Opera House Gate, QE II Gate, Tarpeian Way Gate, Wooloomooloo Gate, Victoria Lodge Gate, Government House Gate.Yurong Gate. One could obviously sketch each of the gates in their own right. This concept of the walls and gates and exclusivity, and barriers to access, goes to the heart of the creation of the gardens. Established and maintained not just as a scientific entity, it was also the public domain or public “face” for colonial society. It’s fascinating to read injunctions down through the centuries about keeping rascals out and later, the need for gas lighting to deter anti-social behaviour. This backstory may become important if I want to represent humans at all in my sketches, with connotations of the Gardens being a territory for colonial/Victorian courting as well as communing with Nature.

I’m  not sure it’s my style exactly, but I have been playing with the idea of whimsy, of interpolating flowers over the naturalistic representation of the landscape. This was in part driven by the idea of the carpet, with a border of buildings and a centrepiece of flowers. There are some remarkable plants in bloom in planter boxes in nearby Martin Place which represent this idea of geometric all-over patterning, which I might pursue as a sideline sketch.

Cockle Bay Wharf Twilight Sketching

Cockle Bay Wharf, Sydney AUSTRALIA (Sydney Sketch Club)

28C degrees and 90% humidity were a challenge. This took the best part of an hour, standing with sketchbook on a sturdy railing. With no 0.3mm black marker or pen to hand I inadvertently created depth of plane space with a 0.8mm marker and dark graphite pencil. I simply couldn’t resist the chequerboard of black and yellow to create a bit of interest on the right hand side of the page, but the scan made it stronger than on the page.  I worked alone and wasn’t bothered by the hoards of passing public on Pyrmont Bridge. There silent solidarity was strangely comforting. The portrait format of the sketchbook matched the building facades; could I have picked less complex detail in the architecture? Yes, but I chose to work with what I had in front of me, no matter what. I was picking up on the frenetic mid-summer vibe and the area is certainly a lot ‘tighter’ than photos convey: people and buildings crawling over each other. With finer pens, it would have been perfectly feasible to set up large, separate sections, suitable for finer penwork but it was a sketch after all.

By 5pm the light had darkened and the architecture started to ‘prowl’. Heading down to IMAX, I liked the darkening clouds over the Maritime Museum to the north. The conte pencils came out, in the lack of any grey/blue markers. Note to self: practice drawing boats (e.g. the permanently-berthed ferry in Darling Harbour).

Plein air dynamics

* no matter how good the subject, don’t persist if someone lights up a cigarette nearby – the cigarette will certainly win every time!

* photographs will present opportunities for possible vantage points, but apart from that are nothing like the real thing – everything will be much more In Your Face;

* work with a support (one-handed sketching is only good for something gestural – use a camera or come back later with a support);

* keep kit as simple as possible: containers will break, zippers will stick (I have along way to go before I can confidently manage a watercolour field box).

* stand only if you can’t sit; sit in a restaurant or cafe if you can’t sit outside. I’m convinced that the Perfect Vantage Point is not likely from a cafe or teahouse window, but I may be proved wrong over time!

* double check the Little Things at the front door prior to leaving the house: handkerchief, the most comfortable clothes possible, hat, sunblock…

* don’t sit near women if sketching solo: they think you are either a Pervert or Insane. Men I don’t think mind much; they just see sketchers/artists as Effeminate and therefore Not a Threat.

Doesn’t Play Well With Others

Sydney Sketch Club

I’m looking forward to my first plein air sketching session (a “meetup” in today’s language) with the Sydney Sketch Club. I don’t know exactly what has happened to the Club in the last hundred years but it’s President used to be the august Conrad Martens who first represented New Holland through the eyes of a European. Given the high pedestrian traffic, I can’t imagine being able to sit down at Cockle Bay Wharf so I’m not exactly how long I’ll devote to any one sketch; colleagues on the Internet give few indications about how long they spend on each sketch. I may take an A4 sketchbook for an extended draw or two. I am anticipating uploading at least two sketches, possibly in wildly different styles – one spare and Apollonian, one tonal and Dionysiac – since I don’t have a consistent “voice” these days. I notice urban sketcher Marc Holmes of Montreal/San Francisco uses ballpoint and brush pen, a combination I haven’t tried before.

Cockle Bay Wharf Twilight Sketching

I ‘hate’ Darling Harbour because it is wall-to-wall concrete. Like the rest of Australia, it is arid and barren: Australians walk up and down the hard concrete paths surrounded by concrete buildings. Even the water is made artificial with marinas. Darling Harbour and Cockle Bay Wharf are renovated docklands, built like most things in Sydney these days for people inside looking out rather than being out in public spaces. What drives city planners away from places where people can congregate (rather than areas in which people walk from one destination to another) is the fear that ‘static’ places will cause the homeless to congregate. There is nothing more irksome for Sydney’s polite society than to have to deal with the poor. Sydney would never build piazzas in the Italian style; it’s believed they would quickly degenerate into daytime sitting areas for the indigent and homeless. The buildings at Cockle Bay Wharf are bars, hotels and shops; Sydney does public places extremely badly. 

Our former Prime Minister Paul Keating has spoken vividly about removing the ‘straight line’ foreshore mentality for the former wharves in the development of Barangaroo further along from Cockle Bay, closer to Sydney Harbour, and Cockle Bay Wharf is certainly proof of that. More than anything else, the Wharf is more of an odd querky building housing a restaurant which has given its name to a boardwalk precinct. I’m on the hunt for sketches of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco for ideas; the SF correspondents on Urban Sketchers.org seem not to have included that Wharf in their work.

Preparation

These days, with the Internet, I don’t have to imagine the plein air drawing venue because thousands of photographers have gone before me. On a hot and humid summer weekend afternoon, probably with the threat of rain,I’ve done some prep by considering possible vantage points. Three obvious ones in landscape format come to mind: aerial looking south from the bridge; looking south at ground level and looking north at ground level. Of course there will be quick sketches of pedestrians or even buskers involved but my main preoccupation at the moment is perspective and large planes. The two querky facades lend themselves to a couple of portrait-format sketches also. Exaggeration of the verticals and horizontals to give a strong sense of the cavernous quality of the bay seems to be called for. If the sky and setting sun turn out to be particularly dramatic, then I may focus on the clouds instead in conte pencils on coloured ground. Dusk was always critical in the work of the Sydney paintes of the Heidelberg School so a 4pm meetup should be interesting in terms of the fading light from the West; of course the sun won’t have set by 8pm either so I’m not anticipating a Marc Holmes-like approach to night sketching though I might take a piece of black paper or two with some coloured chalks just in case.

Looking more closely

Superficially, it’s all about the straight-line waterfront and massess of concrete buildings behind, an area boxeed in by expressways to the south, an unprepossessing marina to the west, high-rise to the east. On closer examination, there are three informal buildings (dark and with circular structures) set among three more formal facades. Sketching/drawing is never just about representing reality but heightening it, so in terms of architecture, there is scope for exaggerating the three informal buildings. I like the idea of architecture being pressed in by sky and sea (a silhouette and detail of buildings); I also like the potential for the yellow/black chequerboard of the facade of the IMAX cinema.

References

http://citizensketcher.wordpress.com/ Marc Holmes (Montreal/San Francisco) mercifully provides indicators such as ”10minutes, ballpoint and brush pen” under some of his quick sketches. Obviously from Paul Heaston’s sketches too, where he indicates under 30minutes, I get a sense of how much detail in a building facade is possible – a ‘quick’ line nevertheless, which differentiates itself from the more studied line and extensive cross-hatching in more elaborate drawings which obviously take a lot longer.

Accommodating Sketching into Daily Life

  

Boden Reserve, Pemberton Street South Strathfield NSW 2135 AUSTRALIA. A return to the children’s playground, after a week. A focus on the Apollonian, but I couldn’t resist falling back on my natural bent for tonality by adding some shading. Unusually for me, I could go back and keep adding to this sketch including other parts of the climbing equipment. Superficially of course it would end up looking like some technical drawing exercise, so in a sense I’m returning to childhood when we were taught about elevations and planes and perspective. But of course, I’ve stopped myself. Like the sketching in Rookwood Necropolis (it’s too large to be called a mere Cemetery), it’s all about a foreign object(s) in a natural setting. As with the cemetery, it is largely devoid of people. It is Apollonian: clean lines, order, symmetry, imposed on a wild wild world (especially this week given the massive flooding in Queensland). Why am I drawing it? My midweek  of metro-bouleau-dodo is Apollonian, imposing order on an unruly world. My weekends are Dionysiac, full of tonality, vague edges, sensuality. I scour the weblogs of my fellow sketchers for similar parallels: the illustrator or architect who is Apollonian by day (built environment), meditative with sketchbook in tearooms after-hours (still life) and Dionysiac with sketching friends (landscape): covering all the genres, covering the spectrum of emotions.

Rookwood Necropolis, Lidcombe NSW 2141 AUSTRALIA. All-Russian Orthodox Section. A return to the cemetery for 20-minutes at lunchtime, with an entirely new working method. Very fine, single, gentle construction lines for the middle ground (these have only middle and fore, there is no background – largely because the trees on the horizon are so non-descript and given the size of the page would clutter and overtake in terms of decorative quality), including through lines. After the middle tomb comes the foreground one(s) and of course I have misread the proportions and the two don’t match (but that’s okay).  I learn today about the proportions of the cross, which is useful. On the train trip home, I also draw in the perspective lines to the eye level (about half way up the cross to the far right) and at night I threw in the felt-pen outline so it could be reproduced on the scanner. I’m not happy with the result, but sketching is almost never about the result – it’s about the lessons learned which may or may not show in subsequent drawings and sketches.

Chinese terracotta warrior, exhibition catalogue. A brief return (Orpheus-like, without looking back!) to my natural tendencies, the Dionysiac (but not too much!): tonality without line or contour, with strongly defined whites and blacks on a middle ground. In this case, horses from the Chinese terracott warrior site.

 

The Context. Week Two of the new year. It’s still quiet with most of the country on holidays: the trains are not crowded, the roads less full. Everyone comes back to work after Australia Day full of passion and energy, like bulls in china shops - but not for a few weeks. The daily grind of commute-work-commute and all revolves around a mere twenty minutes in the middle of the day. Over breakfast and after dinner, I’m scrutinising the websites of other sketchers, drawers, illustrators… their sketch kits, their approach to sketching and drawing. I find I’m developing a “middle ground”, where initial sketches are retouched as “skraws”/”dretches”: part-sketch, part-drawing, mainly in response to the demands of the scanner and digital reproduction. I won’t find that trend while I’m still finding my visual “voice”. 

I am nearing the end of my current A5 sketchbook, spiral-bound 100gms. On completion, it will disappear on tour for a year as part of The Artist’s Notebook Project (Fibre Arts Australia). Despite fixative, the sketches are showing the signs of wear-and-tear which come from daily transportation. There’s a whole section in the back now where I’ve glued in the newspaper clippings which have inspired some fo the sketches – they need to be trapped so, otherwise they will get lost and most are certainly worth more than a single sketch, worth coming back to. I’m tempted to insert text comments throughout as an overlay, but I find the clash with text problematic – even adding the date is a ‘distraction’. I’m not so frightened of messing up the drawing as detracting from its message. I cannot possibly include all my thoughts and commentary – that detail is here in the weblog. Otherwise I’d need a separate facing page for text: which might be the way I have to go. A journalling phrase or two about how I feel at the time seems too superficial. I am amassing new materials and moving towards 200gm paper suitable for on-site sketching using wet media and/or for more studied drawings based on sketches. I’m not sure I like markers and pens, but I feel I ought to acquire them and test them – they’re so cold compared to pencil! While experimenting, other aspects are consolidating: I know I love three-pencil work on mud-coloured paper; will almost certainly start carrying around a mud-coloured paper A5 sketchbook if I can find one (my A4-sized one is too big to go on the road). I know I need a small moleskine (less than 5×8) for surreptitious sketching, a landscape one for the landscapes I love (I find the portrait format too yang), a 5×8 for pencils/markers and an A4 for elaborations on the sketches. A3/A2 for life drawing classes. As a bookbinder I keep coming back to hardbound rather than spiralbound. I notice Balahy uses one side of each folio in his sketchbooks which I admire – more of a ‘statement’ than a ‘ramble’.

I’ve never sketched with others plein air before. Thanks to the influence of Urban Sketchers, I think I can balance some plein air sketching on weekends with the Sydney Sketch Club with the work week and university study commitments – a weekly untutored life drawing class would be ideal, but that would be stretching my time management resources. In the meantime, the daily uploads of new and exciting work to Urban Sketchers.org and sketchers contributing to Flickr keeps me going. My “better” or more considered sketches are going up on Flickr now.

I have done all this before – notable spurts of drawing energy, which quickly dissipate like waves.

 

Heroes.  Thibault Balahy (Angouleme) for his cerebral comments (Drawing Apprenticeship Notes 1-7) and his overriding simplicity, a poetic distillation. Christian Tribastone (Washington) and his use of coloured paper as a mid-tone ground; again the illustrative simplicity and focus on individual objects surrounded by lots of space allowing them to breathe; the Apollonian focus on the everyday (food trucks). Also his interest in moving beyond the sketch to the drawing (lots of differentiation here) and then to its communication to other people, via framed drawings on building walls or sm handmade books or giving away sketches – this liaison between artist and viewer in new and innovative ways is engrossing. The ability of Liz Steel (Sydney) ability to infiltrate her sketching into the everyday: to draw table settings and to constantly comment on her own process, like a dog entrancingly chasing its tail. It’s not only wonderful to behold but enormously informative (which is the chief feature of the Internet), essential for solitary sketchers outside formal art education contexts. And lastly, this week, Paul Heaston (San Antonio), whose prolific drawing on Flickr is all about the observer of buildings and landscape; the facility is paramount – the lack of any barrier between him and his subjects, that permeable membrane. Lastly the potential for social engagement of drawing exhibited in Damien Roudeau (Paris), that the content we focus on, which we choose to sketch/draw,  is  – whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not – inscribed with class, power and politics. Art has so often been the footstool of the rich and powerful, a means of consolidating exploitation of others and the natural world; Rodeau doesn’t let us forget this. His work is not whimsy or Charm School, but like Tribastone’s or Balahy’s, it is not so oppressively serious as to be off-putting.

References

http://thibault-balahy.over-blog.com

http://ebbillustracoes.blogspot.com

http://tribbie.blogspot.com

http://paulheaston.blogspot.com

www.flickr.com for Liz Steel, Paul Heaston. See Groups: ‘Urban Sketchers’, ‘Sketch Kit’, etc.

Plein air sketching

LANDSCAPE

Lunchtime sketch at Rookwood Cemetery, All-Russian Orthodox Section. Overlapping forms again, with tighter perspective than Tuesday’s. I was struck by the contrast of white and black marble. As with the other lunchtime ventures this week, prelim sketch on site followed by a makeover at night.

I’ve often railed against my daily commute but have softened under the weight of a new routine: if I have to wait ten minutes or less at any transit point, out comes the sketchbook. Redfern Station, Platform 4, south end. This is an early 20thcentury building I have noticed for forty years; given the state of re-development in the area around Carriageworks and Wilson Street, it may eventually come down in the next five or ten. This gives no indication of its faded painted commercial lettering or the fact that at this angle it’s obscured by railway infrastructure. Feel good at having ‘won it over’ by drawing it after all this time. Introduced a warm grey Copic marker, which of course bled through; coincidentally it conveyed the sense of impending thunderstorm – it’s been trying to rain all day.

ANIMALS

I’ve been thinking what I’d REALLY love to draw (next): the Gallipoli Mosque at Lidcombe; the Dutch-inspired building near Central Station and its counterpart in Newtown; kangaroos. I have long adored kangaroos or malu (Arente Language) but have never drawn them. They move to the eastern fence of the Deer Park at Univ New England Armidale every dusk, swapping over with the deer who occupy that space in the middle of the day. I always seem to be too busy whenever I’m at UNE to sit and draw them. I have noticed some urban sketchers here in Sydney tackling them at Taronga Zoo and I’ve ordered a copy of the DVD of Roo Gully, a brilliant ABC TV documentary on the Western Australian wildlife refuge where they are looked after. Copying from a video is of course not optimal, but there are protracted scenes I recall showing their movements – not the usually highly-edited quick visuals you’d expect normally. There’s also a section on drawing from TV in Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing (pp.216-217) of relevance. As for drawing kangaroos in the wild, I think I have to travel a long way by public transport across to Featherdale Wildlife Park at Doonside, or a caravan park at Jervis Bay or the most convenient (still 2.5-3hrs away), a clearing at Euroka Valley in Glenbrook National Park in the Blue Mountains.

References

Dodson, Bert. Keys to Drawing. Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light, 1985.