Turning the Place Over

After the visit to Tate Liverpool, we went to see a very unique piece of art.

Liverpool was named European capital of culture in 2008 and the City commissioned a number of public art pieces for the occasion.

Turning the Place Over is a piece of public art by artist Richard Wilson (who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize). This piece is on an abandonned building in the centre of Liverpool. An oval piece of the front of the building has been cut out and is rotating 360 degrees. The cut out piece rotates upside down but is only aligned to the front of the building when in the right position, otherwise it sticks out.

This piece of art is daring and very spectacular. It is also a well executed piece of engineering.

There are many YouTube videos, but the short one below will give you a good idea.



Related resources

Times interview of Richard Wilson

Turner Prize page for Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson’s biography

Turning the Place Over Liverpool Public Art Richard Wilson

Tate Liverpool

Last Sunday, I visited the Tate Liverpool , which is located at Albert Dock in the English city of Liverpool.



"DLPA Piper Series: The twentieth century: how it looked & how it felt" Exhibition
The exhibition “DLA Piper Series: The Twentieth Century: How it looked & how it felt” is on at the Tate Liverpool until the end of April 2009, with almost 200 works on show.

The first floor is dedicated to figuration, starting with a sculpture of Degas
“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”.

Here are some works that caught my attention:

The Bath by Pierre Bonnard. The paint has been applied very thinly apart from Mrs. Bonnard’s head that sticks out of the water and has more visible brush strokes. The water has been glazed over and present the subtle quality of watercolour washes. By contrast, the rest of the work present some dry brush work. The raw canvas is visible on the edge and shows that the work has been stretched afterwards (see for more details on this on my previous post Bonnard: working in batch and creative process ).

Nude bending down by Pierre Bonnard is another painting on show

Woman in a Tub (circa 1883) is one of the pastels on paper of a women taking her bath by Edgar Degas. The work is delicately executed with a fantastic work on lost edges. Degas was famous for the high luminosity he achieved in his pastel work and this one is no exception. The interesting point from an execution standpoint is to see the predominantly vertical strokes on the woman’s body.

Three sculptures I liked in the exhibition:

• Man Pointing 1947, a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
• Lobster Telephone 1936, a sculpture Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
• Seated Woman: Thin Neck 1961, bronze sculpture by Henry Moore was inspired by the breast bone of a bird.

A whole room is dedicated to Andy Warhol (1928-87) and is covered with The Cow Wallpaper that was first used by Warhol in an installation at the Leo Castelli Gallery (New York) in 1966. The works on show have been made using the method of silk-screening. A Marilyn Monroe series is on display as well as the Electric Chair series.

The Second floor is dedicated to Abstraction, with works from Jackson Pollock, Mondrian, Calder, etc. I feel less attracted to this type of works, although I find the works of Vasarely clever.

The website of the “The twentieth century: how it looked & how it felt” exhibition offers more details and photographs of some of the works.


Meeting Georges at the Tate’s Cafe




We ended our visit in the Tate’s cafeteria. I noted a gentleman seated a few tables away from ours, concentrated and trying to solve the Rubik’s cube. I did not pay much more attention to him until much later, when it looked odd to me to see him still in the same position, visibly puzzled. Also, the face of this visitor looked vaguely familiar. On close inspection, I realised that I had been fooled by a work by Alison Jackson.


More information

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
Liverpool
L3 4BB
0151 702 7400http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/
Entrance : FREE (Donation suggested to keep it free)





Tate gallery Tate Liverpool Art exhibition Pierre Bonnard Degas Andy Warhol Salvador Dalí Alberto Giacometti Alison Jackson

Welcome to the sketching club

This article was first published in "Frequency Magazine" – October 2008.


You should be sketching everyday. I don’t, but I would like to. Sketching has many advantages and will take you a long way in improving your artistic skills.

Sketching is quick: a sketch can take you from a few minutes to half an hour. There is no set-up required and you just close your sketchbook when you are done. Sketching is cheap, portable and flexible. You can experiment; try new subjects or new formats. You also build a visual reference library for future works.

You can sketch almost everywhere: cafés, trains, airports, parks, at the zoo… This is the ideal artistic activity when you are stuck in a queue, waiting, or only have small pockets of time at your disposal.

At the restaurant

The material

At a minimum, you need two things: A piece of paper and a pencil. Pencils are made of a mixture of graphite and china clay. The more graphite, the softer the pencil and the darker the mark will be. Pencils are graded from light (H) to dark (B), with digits to indicate the intensity on this scale (6H is really light, 8B gives the darkest black). HB pencils, being the middle ground, are good for everyday use. For sketching, 3B pencils are ideal with their medium soft texture. I also use a 6B pencil for deep shadows.

With pencils, you will need a sharpener and an eraser. Putty erasers work best. They look like modelling clay and can be shaped with your fingers for precision erasing. Furthermore, they do not create dust like conventional erasers.

Pencils are only one option. You can sketch with graphite sticks; colour pencils (ordinary or water soluble); ballpoint pens; fountain pens (some are manufactured specially for sketching); felt-tip pens; sepia, sanguine pencils and white pastel pencils; a metallic nib and a bottle of Indian ink.

Pencils, charcoal and pastels need to be protected using a light spray from a can of fixative, otherwise they will smudge. If you use felt pens, make sure you buy ones that are lightfast and waterproof when dry.

Finally, you can draw in black and white or add colours using colour pencils or a wash of watercolour.

What paper can you use? It depends on your technique. Buy a sketch pad of medium weight cartridge paper (90lb/150gsm), acid free for good conservation. Chose a sketchbook you love, feel the quality of the paper and make sure it is suitable for your technique. Go for a paper which is strong enough to withstand water and can therefore be used for watercolour washes. Don’t skimp on quality. Your work is important (even your day-to-day sketches) and the last thing you want is a thin yellowing paper that will not stand the test of time and will be hard to work on. If you think it is too expensive, divide the price by the number of pages and you will see that it is not that expensive after all.


6 tips for better sketching

1. Define the overall shapes first, before going down into details.

2. Learn to draw from your shoulder rather than by using your wrist. This way, you can draw lines in one continuous movement. To work this way, you need a larger paper format (at least an A3 paper pad).

3. Don’t rub out ideas or line you traced. It does not matter if you have several lines to define the contour of a person or an object. Imagine that you are carving out the space like a sculptor in order to draw your subject. Working this way will force you to think and only put on paper the marks you want.

4. Learn to quickly capture movement. Animals are difficult to draw because they move most of the time. Unless you catch them resting in a field or in their barn, they will likely move before you finish your drawing. Don’t worry, just stop there and start a new drawing of the same animal on the same page.

5. Try all sorts of formats: from a small notebook to A2 sheets of papers.

6. Experiment with different marks: pure line drawing; hatching; cross hatching; stippling or sweeping marks with the side of a graphite stick.

It takes thirty days to establish a new habit. Buy a nice sketchbook, a selection of pencils and start today on this new drawing venture. I would love to hear about your experience with sketching and what it’s brought to you. So please, visit my blog and leave a comment on your sketching experience.

Sketching Sketching notebook Art material Pencil Drawing Art technique

Cézanne’s slow art

This article was first published in my newsletter "Notes From My French Easel" – June 2008. Follow the link to subscribe to the newsletter.


When we think of “impressionism”, we see buoyant artists painting fast on location in order to capture the fleeting light before it goes. This is most probably a cliché as we have evidence that even Monet used to work on his canvasses over long periods of time and would come back to them in the studio.

Cézanne was not a painter of the instant. In fact, he was deliberate to the extreme when painting. He hated when people watched him painting, but the best account I have read of his technique is the one by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in his book “Listening to Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir”.

Vollard had ample time to see Cézanne in action as the artist was working on his portrait. The art dealer recalled how he sat through one hundred and fifteen sessions and described his fear of upsetting the artist (who in such a case often ended up stabbing the canvas with a painting knife or throwing it in the fireplace).

Cézanne liked to paint apples but it took him so long that they would be rotten before the painting was completed. He tried flowers and, as there were too short lived, he switched to paper flowers. He was still complaining that the colour of these artificial flowers would fade over time and Vollard reported that, in one instance, Cézanne resorted to an engraving as reference material to get all the time he needed to paint a still life.

Paul Cezanne. Still Life with a Curtain (1895). The Hermitage Museum.

Here is Vollard’s description of the process Cézanne used for oil painting:

“To paint, Cézanne used very soft brushes that reminded me of marten or polecat. He washed them after each stroke in a dipper full of turpentine. Whatever number of brushes he had, he would use them all during a session, and he was getting himself so dirty that the police arrested him one day he was coming back from working on location.”

“We can explain, by Cézanne’s working method, the solidity of his painting. As he was not painting with thick applications but rather layered the paint in applications as thin as watercolour, the colour would dry instantly: there was no fear that the internal tension of the paint would produce cracks, as it may happen when one paint on a layer that is not totally dry.”

If is difficult to imagine, while studying the thick application of paint on Cézanne’s canvasses that he worked this way. His process also explains why it was taking him so much time to complete a single work.

Cézanne Vollard Oil painting Art technique

Chrysanthemums and apples

Chrysanthemums and apples - oil on canvas (46 cm X 38 cm) by Benoit Philippe

I set-up this still life in our dining room. The bowl came from Russia. After the first session from life, I re-worked this painting many times and over several months, adding the apple on the left and the two paintings in the background.

I also paid a particular attention to texture (using painting knives as well as hard and soft brushes) and edges.