Oil Sketches and Paintings of Jasper
If you’ve lived with a puppy you’ll know that managing space, time, food, training and visits to outside are important if you don’t want complete chaos, frustration and a feeling by the end of the day that you’re drowning in a vast ocean of…not necessarily sea water!
In my last post Frantic Sketches, I mentioned how much of a rush it is to get a sketch down on a piece of paper with a young and energetic Springer Spaniel because he’s never still for more than a few seconds and then because I have to rely on my poor memory to get some kind of likeness. Apart from the fact that I could take a photo and copy it, more on that later, how do I manage this?
When Jasper is free and running around the garden either chasing a tennis ball, scavenging for windfall apples and various other things that would be less appetising to the human palate, then I can observe his movements with more distance between him and myself. In the house it’s more face to face and on walks he requires my full attention, at least until I can be much more confident that he would return to me if I called him, recall training in progress. I have considered tying the lead around me so that I could hold my pen and sketch pad when we go out for a walk but that would mean not being able to see where I put my feet and that’s not a good idea around dogs. So the garden is where I mainly sketch and where he may also lie down and chew on something, stand or sit and listen to sounds that only he can hear or snooze for a few seconds in the sunshine, this is rare but it’s beginning to happen.
As oil paints are my main medium, I decided to put down my bic pen and have a go at sketching Jasper with paints. I have a little hand held box which holds small 18x13cm boards and I just used a bit of burnt umber and titanium white, again working from life and memory. Somehow I was managing to get something down but the shapes and forms of Jasper felt slightly ugly, they most certainly didn’t do him justice.
Jasper is pretty skinny, he eats well and plays hard and is a gangly, muscly and surprisingly tall for a Springer Spaniel. His anatomy is very evident and can’t be ignored or covered over with blobs of oil paint. So I started to study a bit of dog’s anatomy and decided to work from a photograph. I took a video of him running towards me and stopped it at the position I liked best. I then got a book on dog’s anatomy and tried to distinguish where his skeletal structure was, making drawings to document this.
There was a lot of guessing and realising that I needed to study more anatomy including the beautiful muscle forms. I love anatomy, in a strange way studying it soothes me as I can get lost in the sensual shapes that the bones and muscles create. The other fascination is how they change with movement, giving the body I’m observing endless possibilities for me to catch.
Once I thought I had understood better Jasper’s structure, I then painted him from the photograph.
Was I satisfied with the outcome, in some ways yes and in some ways no. I think that the painting is better for having worked on the anatomy but on the other hand as a painting it looks like a photograph, one of my biggest points of contention.
There’s a position that Jasper repeats when he’s waiting for a tennis ball to be thrown, with some of the anatomy knowledge and repeatedly working on one sketch with my bic pen and marker I came up with this:
Using the above sketch, memory and once taking my easel out into the garden, I went for another painting of Jasper. The sunny afternoon I worked in the shade of the apple tree, throwing a tennis ball, organising my paints so that Jasper wouldn’t try and lick them (he had already covered himself once before in a vibrant green oil paint escaping up the stairs and into my studio on a adventure of discovery which left its mark on him for a number of weeks), was exhausting but valuable for colour and shade. How many artists have to keep their models entertained by throwing a tennis ball to get the right position and then trying to get something down on a canvas?
Back in the studio the first thing I did was paint with a large brush the gesture using as few construction lines as possible. I then built on that.
Was I satisfied with the outcome? In someways yes and in someways no. I’ve got a painting that doesn’t look like a photograph because it isn’t copied from one and on the other hand I can see things that aren’t real, his tail is never that long. When drawing or painting from memory things get exaggerated and either it works or it doesn’t. Overall I think it works and I will look back on it in time and see Jasper as a gangly teenager. However there is more work to be done, more movement to catch and more shapes to do justice to.