TECHNIQUE
Stippling Technique
I like the unforgiving medium of pen and ink: once the mark is made, here is no turning back: it is indelible and permanent. Stippling as a technique requires precision, skill, and concentration, and I like the fact that progress is necessarily slow and steady. My stippling technique emerged co-dependently with the subject matter of my work, since I was always searching for the best way to capture tiny detail and texture. As a child I was intrigued by the way an image in newsprint was built up of tiny dots, and as I pored over black and white illustrations in encyclopaedias and technical and scientific books, I became fascinated not only by the level of detail, but by the values and textures which could be achieved with them.
Working in monochrome simplifies things into the basic on-off, presence-absence, opposing qualities I find so compelling. Light and shade are the most basic elements to me. I love intense shadows, and almost bleached-out whites; uncompromising and graphical they seem to me to cut to the essence of a thing. Documentary imagery tends to eradicate colour as extraneous, and monochrome stippling brings my work visually closer to the super-realist effect I want to create.
My drawings combine stippling with other fine marks and lines which give additional texture and depth. I fell in love with Rotring Rapidograph pens many years ago because the control and accuracy they afford, and stick with them because I’m a traditionalist at heart. I use various sizes of nib to create the marks: to create the stipples I primarily use the 0.13 and 0.5 nibs, but while these are excellent for fine detail they are not easy to hatch or draw lines with. The larger nibs come into play for more shaded areas. Each of my drawings is composed of many thousands of points of ink, and can take hundreds of hours to complete. They are all done on either Cartridge paper or Bristol Board.
Process
Many of my ideas first occur to me as images which arise more or less fully-formed while I’m day-dreaming, half-asleep or otherwise not thinking about work at all. I jot these down as quick sketches, or record them as a memo. I find that the more open I become to the images, the more frequently I record them and take interest in them, the oftener they come; recurring and transforming themselves, and finding echoes in the objects I see around me. The work then is to represent them in something of the detail and intensity with which they present themselves to me; to ‘amplify’ them until they resonate, often by reflection or repetition on a different scale within a single drawing.
I frequently begin this process with location photography, and often with the collection of items such as pebbles and sea-shells in situ. I may also use existing images from my collection; I never leave the house without taking my camera to capture things that fascinate me, especially interesting lighting effects. I then work in my studio, drawing both from photographs and directly from life with the collected objects. This allows me to achieve an uncompromising detail right through my work, from foreground to horizon. The skies are almost always drawn from combinations of cloud formations photographed on different days, which I work together in order to achieve the sky in my mind.
Quite often with a larger work I will sketch out and begin stippling a main subject before I am certain of the position or even the nature of the additional images I will eventually include. The pieces grow organically as I allow ideas, objects and scenes which feel somehow connected in my mind to suggest themselves for inclusion. I do not try to ‘illustrate’ or force an idea, but rather allow it to grow naturally. I find that as part of the process of collection, assembly and drawing, the essence of the work becomes clearer in my mind and ‘makes sense’ in a way it never would have done had I begun with a fixed idea. I have sometimes felt myself to be as much an observer of this process as if I were watching myself draw over my own shoulder.
Current projects
My new projects involve more location photography, as well as model-making and set construction on a small scale, which is something of a departure for me. I will be exploring my fascination with dolls’ houses, chairs, and reflections, and the themes will be memory and the way we construct our mental spaces, as well as the concept of ‘reality’. I’ll be recording the work in progress in my blog, along with inspirations (including other artists and philosophers), and information on techniques.
Please follow the links if you would like to subscribe to my blog, contact me, or take a look at my pen and ink drawings.
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