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The Space Between Lines

| bessiemillar

This week I have been drawing at Kew gardens with The Royal Drawing School. “City Gardens and Greenhouses” under the guidance of Clare Newbolt and Sara Lee Roberts.

It was a fantastically inspirational session working alongside their postgraduate students.  We were given many interesting ideas to explore within our drawings. Imagining the images we create to be like small theatre sets with a “back” to our image where we were to suggest marks and indications of what was there without too much detail. We were also asked to consider not only the lines we make ourselves but the space between these line as of equal importance like in the work of Japanese Sumie paintings – where the white space is viewed not as a non space but as a solid part of the compositions. To quote Claude Debussy “Music is the space between the sounds.”

Here are a few of my sketches below from the fantastic Cacti displays.

New Year… New beginnings

| bessiemillar

New year…. new beginnings
I am back in the studio this week working in my sketchbook.
I want to explore my drawing and mark making this year.
An inspirational quote by John Berger with his honest analysis of “ways of seeing” and creating.

“For the artist drawing is discovery…. each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river.”
John Berger in his essay “The basis of all painting and sculpture is drawing.”

I have been looking closely at a landscape, seeing its history as physical scars on its surface and translating this into colour, textures, pattern and marks creating rhythms.