Reading & Responding, Part V, Invictus

The creative process and flow of ideas has been working it's way through the literal (and literary) images associated with Ernest William Henley's Invictus for three weeks now, and I have three more weeks from today to polish the ideas into a final piece.

My initial dissection of the words of the poem produced the "usual" suspects, the resultant mind images of various depictions of words or phrases used.  The concept of trying to capture these as small thumbnail sketches definitely works for me and the output of my muses has, as perhaps expected, been too literal.  However, this cathartic process of getting out the obvious images is good, as it leads me to think of new alternative directions and areas of investigation that may be less facile.

So the initial images are shown here for completeness, and I can annotate some of the thoughts accordingly.

 The obvious lines of text that suggest isolation, an image of a "God",  enlightenment, wretched and the scream are all there!

But also, the playful ones too... Like the Unconquerable Sole!

 An image of the Captain of my Sole, Master of my Fate, "Victory V sign" and a rather nice shadow type simple line / white ghost of an old man too came to mind.  

I liked the idea of the lower centre thumbnail idea, -  creating a negative style drawing by simply using a shaded pencil area and then making suitable erased marks to hint the suggestion of a disappearing sole, almost lost in the fog?  I will play with this idea a little more perhaps?

  But these are all a bit too literal at the moment, I want to move on from these ideas towards a more suggestive piece...

Drawing Transformations - Life Drawing Class No 4

Today prooved to be far more challenging for some reason.  I had been reading the book "Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain" By Betty Edwards recently, and my attempts today seemed to be way off course for some reason.  Nevertheless, I will persevere!

Reading & Responding, Part IV - Chosen Text & Visualisation

I have been working to keep my visualisation response to the text as non-literal as possible, however my ideas are now coming to the point that the ideas may be too far removed from the signifiers within the text.

• Fear
• Death
• Darkness
• Wretchedness
• Isolation
• Self criticism
• Abandonment
• leading to hope
• Enlightenment
• Conquering of fears

However, my thoughts are still currently centred around splitting the final work into two parts, - A dyptich is a potential likely vehicle to respond to Invictus.

The concept of Death as depicted in a graveyard scene on  a very cold winters day, dark sky, snow, fog & gloom; with the silhouettes of gravestones and crosses and monumental angels can be very bleak.
Consider this juxtaposed with;
The same graveyard scene but in spring season, golden light, beautiful flowers in bud and bloom, vast distant vistas of meadows with abundant growth and joyous birds in the air etc....

There's so much ground here that at times I have wondered if all my ideas can be actually recorded!... The suggestion to make just simple thumbnail sketches of ideas is a great one, I have been using this to formulate and hone the concepts over the past couple of weeks now, and as a sample of the process I have outlined some of the sketches below;

Reading & Responding Part III - Invictus by William Earnest Henley, 1895

My poem from William Earnest Henley is so rich in it's content.  A moving and gripping narrative of Victorian values of hardship followed by hope and accomplishment.  I need to chose ideas that reflect what is going on outside of the text itself, the emotion, the drive and the sense of suffering too.

I'm keen to start trying now to come up with the ideas for the final piece, as we are already into week two of a six week cycle, so we only have 4 weeks left.  I would have hoped that I can start my final piece by next Monday (17th March), however, Christian suggested at yesterday's tutorial that there is no set production plan.  I am free of course to change my mind... I appreciate that it is fine for me to reconsider things, but equally, I just think that it is perhaps best practice (especially for my own practice and way of working), for me to set milestones in a project, with critical dates and go/no-go style decision gates, as has been my project management process now for many years.

So, the plan is, to have a good sense of what I am going to achieve by the end of this week (and weekend)!...

Drawing Transformations - Life Drawing No. 3

I'm still rather tight in my arm movements in my Life Drawing today.  I think that I need to practice larger freehand drawings more often, simply because I am usually confined to using an A4 Sketchpad.  However, my attempts today have been created using shade and light, Chiaro e Scurro as I think the Italians might say...  Thanks to Helen again, the model, who is extremely patient with our (especially mine) attempts, and to Jill for her ongoing patience in tutoring our group.

I need to flex my arm rather than my hand, and I must practice using proportionate representation in these sketches.  Jill also suggested that I might try to use pencil to create an initial outline and then continue with Charcoal once the form is appropriately measured and represented.  I'm still rather embarrassed at my attempts of life drawing, - the other students have natural skill, but I think my efforts are way behind in both skill and fluidity.    Much to do ....