We’re fortunate to have an excellent lending collection at the Honolulu Museum of Art School, where I’ve been teaching for many happy and productive years.
This gorgeous ceramic piece, a T’ang Dynasty Ceramic horse replica, is a favorite go-to object when I have the desire to hone in on something stationary to draw and paint. They allow me to take out back to my studio, and I spent a couple delightful sessions getting absorbed in the drawing and painting of this lovely piece.
My Goals
With all the work I do outdoors, where unpredictability reigns, a stationary object that I can leave in place for a few days, control the lighting on, and that possesses such beauty is a welcome opportunity.
I wanted to tune-up my drawing skills, so a full session was spent just drawing the object on the watercolor paper. I used well sharpened charcoal, some old American willow of a firm hardness, to do the drawing. I really wanted all the shapes and proportions to be true, but then find ways to paint the horse with a truthful, yet looser, feeling to it.
The Big Look
Some painters use the term “The Big Look” as a way of describing paintings that have a “truth” about them. Not what the brain knows about something, but what the eye really sees. An appearance, or impression, that seeks to recreate our eye’s actual response to reality when something is seen in a single, first glance. That ideas, as opposed to a carefully painted inventory of visual facts, is elusive and I seldom am satisfied that I get it. But…that’s the hope that spurred me on with this horse.