Category: Research & Reflection

The parent category for research and reflection posts.

Research & Reflection7 Comments

Brighton galleries

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Where can you see Banksy, Damien Hurst, Grayson Perry, Sir Peter Blake, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, and Billy Connolly originals within a few yards of each other in right-on-the-street galleries? Yesterday*, a friend and I went to Brighton. *Yesterday is now several weeks ago, life having got between me and this write-up. Castle Fine Art Gallery Castle Fine Art is right slap bang in the middle of Brighton near The Lanes, and my goodness I had not expected to see so many originals by ‘names’ from both art and show business. First though were these metal sculptures, each of them … Continue reading Brighton galleries

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Steyning Arts summer exhibition

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Held in St Nicholas Church, Bramber. All the work shown is for sale (with one exception) and wherever possible I will include links to the artist’s website or, if they don’t have one, to their page on the Steyning Arts site. Where possible I spoke to the artist about their work but many had taken a well-earned break on what was an extremely hot day. These photographs are by Wendy Ball who says she take them for her own pleasure and, although she has won a number of prizes, appears not to have a website. Some of them are printed … Continue reading Steyning Arts summer exhibition

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Atelier drawings – portrait 3, da Vinci

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Before: ending on a high here! The portrait to copy is Leonardo da Vinci’s Study of a Young Woman (1490) and appropriately but probably coincidentally, it is positioned on the right of the book so that the page where the copy is to be made is on the left. This means I can actually see the image I am working with instead of obscuring it with my drawing arm. The arrangement would not have been lost on da Vinci, a reputed left hander. After: so, that went well! There’s a reason da Vinci is a Master; he makes the complicated … Continue reading Atelier drawings – portrait 3, da Vinci

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Atelier drawings, portrait 2 -Los Infantes II

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

The original by Irvin Rodriguez (2016) is in ink on Hahnemuhle Copperplate paper, mine is in pencil and conte on the page in the book and I really struggled with this. The angle of the head, the ‘baby’ features (mine looks a little older, less chubby) and the expression. Every correction brought another problem and eventually I came close to running out of road trying to erase where there was little leeway to do so. What I’ve learned though is that despite all these difficulties and a few oddities of proportion, if the original were not to hand – and … Continue reading Atelier drawings, portrait 2 -Los Infantes II

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Atelier drawings – portrait 1, ‘Jamaal’

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

This felt very much like jumping in at the deep end despite completing the run-up exercises. I find blocking-in quite tricky with the examples hard to transfer to new material; too many lines seem to scramble my brain and I lose the ends of them and their position in space. Maybe practice will improve that but for now I have used some of the guiding instructions alongside my own more intuitive grasp of shape and position. The result is a portrait of a passable woman who should actually be a young man. In my defence, the small drawing above mine, … Continue reading Atelier drawings – portrait 1, ‘Jamaal’

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Aristides atelier drawings continued

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

I noticed that many of the drawings to copy are made with graphite the nature of which, until now, I hadn’t really questioned, imagining it was maybe another word for ‘pencil’. But looking at the way this medium seemed to work, I was struck by how much smoother the result was and so I investigated further. Of course, graphite really is not pencil although it does come in sticks. I bought some of each, the powder arrived first and my goodness is this a tricky substance. I had no idea (still don’t) how to make it stay where I want … Continue reading Aristides atelier drawings continued

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Art, science and the paradoxes of perception – via The Conversation

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

The fact that the visual system has to do all this work before we can recognise an object shows us that the objects we perceive are not just “there” in the world. They have to be meticulously created within our neurobiology in order to exist for us. But again, cut open a brain, probe its neurons, and you will find no sea creatures or cosmic storms, only electrochemical activity. Objects, like colours, are tangibly real yet are also untraceable figments of the mind – a contradictory state of affairs. In effect, nothing we perceive through any of our senses is … Continue reading Art, science and the paradoxes of perception – via The Conversation