Drawing and Painting People

CHAPTER 1

MARK MAKING - A DICTIONARY OF POSSIBILITIES TO CREATE A VISUAL LANGUAGE

What is the Purpose of a Mark-Making Exercise?

Mark making is an essential tool, without which no work can be created. Creating an exercise around this means that you make marks on a piece of paper, using your chosen materials, not to create an image but with the intention of limbering up hand, eye and brain as you make contact with the tools, materials and sensations. You should seek as much variety as possible in the marks that you make. It is a reminder and refresher for yourself about the activity in which you are preparing to engage; rather like a musician might do their scales or an athlete warm up and gently stretch their muscles in preparation for the task ahead. It is about making a 'dictionary of possibilities' and investigating the versatility of your materials to enable you to create individual and poignant paintings.

All artists desire to be more articulate and inventive as they work. How to avoid those 'stuck' moments is a frequent request of both students that I teach and artists that I work alongside. Mark making offers the possibility to extend and develop your work. Without any subject in mind you are left free to play and focus purely on the language of paint. This freedom encourages you to experiment, take risks, rework things and make visual comparisons. It offers the opportunity to extend your repertoire and address the problem of repeatedly using the same old marks and colours when you work.

As you use your materials you can be conscious of improving the quality, definition and inventiveness of your marks. If you have been inspired by the touch and textures of other artists' work, or the sensation and shape of things from your experience, then this is an opportunity to test them out and see how they feel using your materials. Respond to the marks. Let them guide you and seduce you, and then invent new marks that can become fresh additions to your vocabulary.

What is a Mark?

A mark can be a single blob, line or smudge done in a very simple 'one-hit' action. It can be developed through several moves by repeating the action in layers, in order to emphasize and clarify it. It can have attachments or other types of marks contained or buried within it. These layers and attachments emphasize the character and form of the mark.

Every mark has a direction that leads the eye from one area of the image to another. This direction can also be descriptive of the surface of the subject as it rises, falls, dips, folds or judders; in making the mark the hand travels at a particular speed, which affects the feel and energy of the mark. The quality of a mark also changes depending on the weight behind it, which can involve pressing hard or gently caressing and producing even or fluctuating strokes.

Every mark has a scale in the context of the space of the paper and in comparison to other marks.

Every mark has a surface quality and character given by the consistency of the material that makes it. For example, paint that is applied thickly, straight from the tube, has a sculptural lusciousness. In contrast, thinned paint can have a transparent delicacy. Charcoal that stabs the paper in a staccato fashion will be black and puncture the white space. In contrast, charcoal that has been rubbed evenly onto the surface of the paper, with the hand or rag, and then lifted off gently around the edges with an eraser will create a soft mark that melts into the space of the paper.

Every mark can create a physical response or association, for the artist and viewer, being comparable to a tactile experience or adjective. With this in mind the surface quality can be deliberately manipulated to heighten that experience. (See the exercise 'The Touchy-Feely Exercise', specifically dealing with this concept on page 22.)

Every mark has a form. This fact is not always instantly recognizable, particularly in those marks that are simply made or are irregular in shape. Form, in the context of mark making, means that the artist must have a heightened awareness of the shape and structure of the mark. This requires the artist to be positive with their gesture and application of the materials, and to shape the mark more clearly if necessary. In doing so the mark will acquire more personality and the artist will make a stronger connection to it and use it more effectively.

To help the artist with this idea of every mark having a form, they should remember the following:

A mark must have a beginning and an end.

It must start and arrive confidently.

It must be purposeful, searching and define a space.

The character of the form is informed by all of the other qualities: direction, scale, surface and 'touchy-feely' association.

If you consider and use to the maximum effect all of these qualities then immediately your work will begin to have a strength and presence it may not have had previously. You will also become more aware of the potential in the visual language you have created.

What does a mark do, what is its job?

A mark defines a space and leads the eye around the image.

A mark can be a big gesture encompassing and condensing many qualities of a subject or it can be a small but important contribution to the visual orchestra.

A mark acts like your sense of touch across a surface. When you are responding to a given subject, for example the head, your mark corresponds to a specific sensation of, say, skin. You are deliberately moving the direction of the mark to follow the rise and fall of the face and manipulating the surface quality of the paint or charcoal to give you a tactile feeling that is true to the subject. You continue to build these sensations on top of each other and then each mark meets and combines with other marks. The image is beginning to form.

The challenge is as the work develops, and the number of marks increase and overlap, the picture surface becomes more complex. So it may help to think of yourself as more of a surgeon or a scientist. You can look at something, dissect it, arrange the elements, and focus and experiment purely with the qualities that interest you.

What makes a good mark?

Quite often the best marks come as a surprise. The creation of a successful and useful mark is governed by the way in which an artist attacks or approaches the task. If you can give yourself permission to play, or perhaps even to produce what you have previously decided are really bad/ugly marks, it gives a psychological release: a feeling of anti-preciousness, a method of testing one's developed aesthetic judgement. As adults our acquired knowledge, expectations, likes and dislikes undermine this engagement with the practical process.

The foreword of Gaston Bachelard's book Poetic Imagination and Reverie asserts that the distinction between good and bad is of no value: 'Good taste is an acquired censorship'. The colours and marks that may not be in 'good taste', as you experiment and search, may feel out of character for you to make. This can be just the shock to the system that is required to refresh and extend your vocabulary, which is very important to remember when grappling with a new language of marks. Our aesthetic likes and dislikes can hold back the progress and value of the work. 'Taste' is a fickle thing and often hides the true desire and meaning of the work.

Is it beyond redemption? Or could it be 'crap into gold'?7

Many of the freshest ideas, innovations and most exciting work come out of those desperate moments when all seems lost and the artist has to change and relinquish areas of the painting in order to salvage the work. Things get interesting when you consider them to be 'crap': there is nothing to lose and anti-preciousness becomes a releasing ingredient. In order to salvage it you have to be positive, inventive, clear and dynamic, and more often than not the end result is better than all the previous ones. The artist has to respond, invent and let go of preconceived ideas.

With this in mind I always encourage my students to keep all their work for at least a year before they 'file' any of it in the bin. With my own work I often find that the pieces I dismissed as weird or a mess at the time of their creation often have exciting elements that I pick up on and develop at a later date. I was just not ready to see it at the time because it did not fit with my idea of what I thought it should be like.

Developing the accidental can greatly assist with this process. This involves noticing qualities that have come about through intentional, or random, layering. These qualities are then extended and repeated further. The original mark may grow, by absorbing other marks into it or by being given additional insertions or attachments. The surface texture, for instance, may be the predominant characteristic that you wish to exaggerate. It is up to you to recognize something and develop it to see how it feels.

If you never push this far you never move forward and it does not take long before you...