Art Placed in Magazine Cillage of a Tree and Birds
The ordinary becomes extraordinary in David Morrison's colored pencil drawings, captivating artist and viewer.
By Austin R. Williams
In meticulously rendered colored pencil drawings, David Morrison isolates small pieces of the natural earth against fields of pristine white infinite, confronting viewers with the stunning intricacy and dazzler of these objects. Morrison'due south subjects include tree branches and bird nests, many of which he finds nigh his dwelling in Indiana. "My intention is to show the beauty of a simple flowering co-operative or fallen residues from trees for the viewer to reexamine the realities of nature," he explains in an artist's statement.
In a conversation with Drawing magazine, Morrison shared insights on selecting subjects, incorporating photography into his process, and working in colored pencil.
Tell me about your subject matter. Take you always been interested in drawing and painting nature?
I've always been interested in looking at nature. A number of years agone, equally I'd go on walks with my wife, I started noticing these compositions on the ground, which made beautiful shapes and patterns. We also have several sycamore trees on our property, and they constantly shed their bawl. As I rode my backyard mower over the fallen debris, I kept stopping to look at how stunning the shapes and patterns were — each piece was a little landscape of the surroundings. They also remind me of Chinese calligraphic marks, which I beloved. I started to photo them and make drawings from there.
My drawings are trying to capture a moment of being. I want to take a simple stick or piece of bark, which seems then ordinary, and show how captivating and circuitous it is. I like how when nosotros look at nature, we can see how the environment has modified a plant and learn virtually its life. These fallen branches and things show a process of degeneration and a kind of rebirth, of returning back into the ecosystem.
I started drawing the bird nests when I was asked to do a serial of drawings for a evidence titled "Elements." I'm fascinated by how the birds are architects, taking elements of sticks and yarn to create these weavings and structures. And these nests are potent where they need to exist. When I touch the nests they sometimes start to fall autonomously, but the center always holds together.
Practice you commonly find your nests and branches around your dwelling house, or practice you lot await farther afield?
Most of the piece of work I've been doing is cloth from my grand. Nosotros have sycamores and a magnolia that I actually love. The magnolia has been hit by lightning and has branches that accept broken off, just it still has this incredible growth to it. I adore the tenacity this tree has to hang onto life and persist throughout the years.
But I'm besides looking for subject matter wherever I go. For instance, I did an creative person residency at the Banff Eye, in Alberta. I would find these beautiful sticks with algae and insect tunnels, and I started to depict them. People would visit my studio and inquire what I was working on. I'd say, "I'm drawing sticks!" We had an open house at the end of the residency and everybody saw my rendering of these common objects isolated on a pristine background. I call up in that location was a existent wow factor. And the side by side day at that place was a pile of sticks in front of my studio; everyone else had started going out and discovering these magnificent items from nature.
Tell me about the negative infinite in your drawings. What do you similar about setting your subject against such a stark white groundwork?
Activating the negative space is very important to me. I teach cartoon and printmaking, and I'g always talking with students about negative space. In some of my before drawings I included an autumn background, with leaves and everything else, just I couldn't see the shape of my chief field of study equally clearly as I wanted to. By sterilizing the object, past removing everything else around it, I could show the shape and the complexity inside the form. I try to depict every little detail. I want to show the shape and how nature made it grow the way information technology did. When I removed the groundwork detail, I besides was able to accept the shadows go an intrinsic part of the drawings.
How did you come to settle on colored pencil as your primary medium?
When I was in third grade, a instructor asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said that I had two ambitions: One was to be a professional football player; the other was to be an artist like Grant Woods. Beingness an artist won out.
Drawing has always been essential to me for discovering form and shape. When I was young, I'd expect at artwork of others and try to draw it. I would take some famous painting and encounter if I could practice it myself.
I came from a small background, and pencil and newspaper were the materials I could e'er afford. Growing upwards I mostly did black-and-white drawings, simply when I started looking at things in nature I wanted color. I started using colored pencil. I felt comfortable with the pencils and how I could alloy the colors by layering one on height of another.
What do yous utilise as reference during a cartoon?
I use both photos and the physical objects. If you lot're working from nature your subject field is constantly irresolute. I may exist trying to practise a leaf or stick one day, and the next twenty-four hours the whole colour range may be different. So I like to photograph it to capture the betoken in time when the object spoke to me. And, in photographing information technology, I can set up the shadows to collaborate with the object. Shadows are one of the most important aspects of the work. They give it a trompe-50'oeil issue.
For a given object I might accept 20 or 30 photos from unlike angles and with unlike lighting. I'll choose i, drop it into Photoshop and print out iii versions: a lighter value, a medium value and a darker value. I set up my drawing tabular array with those photos and the object so that I can run across them all right in front of me. As I depict, if the shadows in one image are too dark, I tin can refer to the lighter-value print and put more information into those areas. Or in a lighter expanse, I might refer to a darker shot. The bodily cartoon is a comprehensive version of those 3 photos along with looking at the bodily object.
Once you've selected a reference prototype and printed the photos, do y'all make whatever preliminary studies? Or do you lot dive right into working on the finished slice?
I dive right in. I offset by doing a detailed contour line drawing on tracing paper. Using Saral transfer newspaper, I then transfer the drawing to Stonehenge 250-gsm paper.
In society to keep the background make clean while I work I utilize Annoy Foto/ Frisket Flick, a low-tack production that airbrush artists employ to stencil out spaces. I cover the paper with the frisket and trace the outline of the image on the pic with a Stabilo pencil. Using an X-Acto knife I cut out the area where I will draw the image, plus an extra quarter of an inch all around the shape. This keeps the paper in the not-image area protected throughout the drawing process. I can smudge and blend as much as I want and not worry most my hand rubbing on the white background. After the drawing is done, I remove the low-tack frisket and have that pristine groundwork.
How does the cartoon progress in one case you lot've applied the frisket?
Using colored pencils is all near pressure and sensitivity — learning how to apply the pressure, how to blend, how much of one color goes on height of another. Because colored pencils are translucent, there are normally three or four layers built upwards to become the correct colour. A lot of people think I apply a blending tool, but I don't. Information technology'south all about layering and using a lighter-colour pencil on top to exercise the blending.
I adopt to draw with Berol Prismacolor Premier pencils, which are highly pigmented and like shooting fish in a barrel to blend. I start by edifice up the base color. And so I apply multiple layers of colors to achieve the desired tone. The next step is to use a lighter color close to the shade I'one thousand working with and alloy with that pencil. I develop the values first by layering and blending the colors to grade the underdrawing. After I layer more than colors while working on the sharpness of the details in the object.
I start in an area that has both lights and darks and establish the value range there. Then I move to another department, oft on the other side of the cartoon. I move around the drawing so that I tin can create the same intensity and value throughout the entire image. Each square inch volition usually take 3 to four hours to terminate. I work with a headband magnifier that magnifies the surface area three½ times, and my olfactory organ is 4 inches from the cartoon.
Drawing for me is abiding learning about procedure and technique. With every drawing I exercise things a little differently. This keeps me visually excited and challenges my technical abilities.
What advice tin can you offer to artists who are new to colored pencils?
I'd encourage them to experiment and play. Have fun with the medium. There's no right or wrong way of doing information technology. The affair is to be creative, have a skillful fourth dimension and limited whatever you accept to say.
The Prismacolor pencils I utilise are really soft and beautiful. They're sensitive to pressure, and they actually become an extension of your hand. If you keep the point sharp you lot tin can be very expressive. Prismacolor likewise makes watercolor pencils, which I've used before. With those yous can get the fluidity of watercolor with the richness of color layering and the solidity of the pencil marking.
Is at that place whatsoever advice you notice yourself constantly giving to students?
When I do critiques, I find I'm always using two words: density and tension. "Density" refers to the research that goes into a project — researching other artists, testing papers and materials, making thumbnail sketches. "Tension" means that bit of uneasiness — something that makes you question the content and why the person is doing this. When there is a partnership between density and tension it's like a matrimony between adroitness and content.
What are you working on now?
My current work is focusing on ii serial. My married woman and I went on vacation and stayed at a motel on a small Michigan lake. The property had beautiful birch trees, only the owner had had to cutting downwardly several that were falling into the lake. They'd been chopped upward for firewood.
One night I went to pick up these logs, and started to contemplate how striking and circuitous they were. I thought this forest was also remarkable to merely burn down, so I photographed it instead. My electric current serial is called "Firewood," and it'due south well-nigh how beautiful a slice of firewood really is. The drawings are fairly large, and there'south a lot of intricate particular. My photography skills are improving and I'm trying to push button the edge of how much I can capture.
I'1000 also working on a serial of drawings of paper wasp nests. They construct nests with these beautiful cone shapes, using wood that they've digested. The unlike wood fibers create delicate, subtle rows of grays. They have this intricate weaving pattern, and I'm trying to prove how incredible the weaving actually is. It's very challenging to show that weaving, to get the shadows right and to have a iii-dimensional look. Information technology'south and so incredible what nature has to offer. And to capture that on a apartment sheet of paper is a claiming every fourth dimension.
About the Artist
David Morrison studied printmaking at the University of South Dakota and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His piece of work tin can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Fine art, in New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Missouri; and the Portland Art Museum, in Oregon. He teaches at the Herron School of Fine art and Pattern, in Indianapolis. He is represented by Garvey Simon Art Access, in New York Urban center.
A version of this story appeared in the Wintertime 2017 issue of Drawing. Austin R. Williams was senior editor of Drawing.
Source: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/colored-pencil/nests-and-branches-drawing-natures-details/
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