Van Gogh
"Peasant of the Camargue (Portrait of Patience Escalier)," by Vincent van Gogh, brown ink over graphite on white wove paper, 19 ½ by 15 inches, 1888
Broadly speaking there are differences in the formal qualities of eastern and western drawing.
Oriental drawing often creates contained shapes with little modelling. There is an emphasis on contour, especially the outside edge, while tonal contrasts are kept to a minimum. Pattern and surface texture animate the interior of enclosed forms.
Western drawing, shaped by the discoveries of the Renaissance, led to a concern for tone and spatial systems and a desire to reveal the action of light. Contrasts of dark and light, so apparent in the world around us, were recorded to create the illusion of three dimensions. The interior of forms is rendered as a three dimensional structure –alive with modelled forms, cast shadows, local colour and reflected lights
Van Gogh understood both. His early autodidact education in to drawing looked at the western traditions through Dutch and French drawing and painting. His later interests, fuelled by Japanese prints, led him to more oriental graphic methods .
This reed pen drawing is a powerful hybrid of east and west graphic approaches and choices :
· The silhouette shape of the hat,face and torso have clear contours. You could cut their shapes out of the paper. There is no sense of ‘lost and found’ edge where the contour line disappears or it is lost in tonal areas
· The hat has some contour lines to express its volume but it is not differentiated by a change of tone to note its local colour. The smock is the same. Though both might have been naturally light in tone they are primarily treated as light shapes to frame the dark face.
· There is no cast shadow ( of, say, the hat on the head, the nose on the cheek or the head on the shoulder) There is a suggestion of a darker side to the face and scarf through the density of the marks
· The head is a mixture of responses to the surface .The surface of the form is tracked with marks following contours, much like the way Van Gogh followed the surfaces of fields with reed pen marks. The highlight left on the nose and lips and the way the surface away from it is rendered preserves a western approach to tone and is like the illustrations and cartoons Van Gogh admired from artists such as Charles Keene.
· The cheeks are cross hatched and speckled with reed pen suggesting a ruddy complexion. This hatched way of suggesting changes of colour was also part of the graphic languages of etching and illustration he would have been looking at ( e.g. horizontal lines for a blue sky)
"Peasant of the Camargue (Portrait of Patience Escalier)," by Vincent van Gogh, brown ink over graphite on white wove paper, 19 ½ by 15 inches, 1888
Broadly speaking there are differences in the formal qualities of eastern and western drawing.
Oriental drawing often creates contained shapes with little modelling. There is an emphasis on contour, especially the outside edge, while tonal contrasts are kept to a minimum. Pattern and surface texture animate the interior of enclosed forms.
Western drawing, shaped by the discoveries of the Renaissance, led to a concern for tone and spatial systems and a desire to reveal the action of light. Contrasts of dark and light, so apparent in the world around us, were recorded to create the illusion of three dimensions. The interior of forms is rendered as a three dimensional structure –alive with modelled forms, cast shadows, local colour and reflected lights
Van Gogh understood both. His early autodidact education in to drawing looked at the western traditions through Dutch and French drawing and painting. His later interests, fuelled by Japanese prints, led him to more oriental graphic methods .
This reed pen drawing is a powerful hybrid of east and west graphic approaches and choices :
· The silhouette shape of the hat,face and torso have clear contours. You could cut their shapes out of the paper. There is no sense of ‘lost and found’ edge where the contour line disappears or it is lost in tonal areas
· The hat has some contour lines to express its volume but it is not differentiated by a change of tone to note its local colour. The smock is the same. Though both might have been naturally light in tone they are primarily treated as light shapes to frame the dark face.
· There is no cast shadow ( of, say, the hat on the head, the nose on the cheek or the head on the shoulder) There is a suggestion of a darker side to the face and scarf through the density of the marks
· The head is a mixture of responses to the surface .The surface of the form is tracked with marks following contours, much like the way Van Gogh followed the surfaces of fields with reed pen marks. The highlight left on the nose and lips and the way the surface away from it is rendered preserves a western approach to tone and is like the illustrations and cartoons Van Gogh admired from artists such as Charles Keene.
· The cheeks are cross hatched and speckled with reed pen suggesting a ruddy complexion. This hatched way of suggesting changes of colour was also part of the graphic languages of etching and illustration he would have been looking at ( e.g. horizontal lines for a blue sky)