Anatomy and Cornwall
All work and no play makes Jasper a dull boy.
What exactly is Jasper’s work? Chasing and fetching a tennis ball cut in half on a piece of string, this is what every muscle and sinew in his body is twitching for. It should of course, being a Springer Spaniel, be a bird shot down in flight bought back dead or half alive but Jasper’s human is not keen on that and has made him believe that a half tennis ball on a piece of string is just as good. What Jasper doesn’t know is that he is also a model and that sometimes his human stares at him a lot, which he doesn’t seem to mind as long as he can do his proper job!
High speed gallop to get his half tennis ball on a string, or what I remember of it.
And what’s my work? Well as an oil painter that has been trained in realism, anatomy is part and parcel of learning to draw and paint the human form and as I now have a dog in front of me, Jasper’s anatomy is what I’ve recently been concentrating on.
Is it really necessary to know all about the bits and pieces that go on underneath the skin and as an artist isn’t that a bit too scientific? If I think about Michelangelo making himself ill from cutting up dead bodies so as to understand and then manipulate the body to then create pieces of art that have awed people through the ages, I think that a little understanding is necessary. Whether it is a must to be obsessed by it will then depend on the painter’s own path of discovery.
Working from a photograph of Jasper I created his outline and then using anatomy books, 3D animations (which saves me from having to dissect dead dogs!), I first filled in where I thought his bones go and then some of his muscles. I will certainly not remember all the names although I keep telling myself I would like too. There is a lot of guess work in the final result but I feel it is the beginnings of my understanding of Jasper’s anatomy.
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A few days in Cornwall was how we stopped work, no half tennis balls on a piece of string or studying anatomy. New smells, sights and sounds, in particular for Jasper meeting two enormous Irish Wolfhounds at least twice his size, seeing and hearing cows, which freaked him out, paddling in the sea which he began to enjoy after I got in with him, feeling sand under his feet which he really enjoyed especially when he stole one of our shoes and had us chasing afer him. In this picture he is posing outside Merlin’s cave at Tintagel, is there a future portrait on the horizon?
