Building an Altar

Well, I finished my final minor project.  I'll show you the finished piece another time, and tell you about what went well and what I'll need to learn from, but here I'll talk about the process.


Influences

I've always been fond of the skewed perspective and stylised foliage and patterns of mediaeval art, from the Bayeux Tapestry, bestiaries and illuminations to recent imitations.  Terry Gilliam built his animations for Monty Python & The Holy Grail on it.  Pauline Baynes' illustrations for C.S.Lewis and Tolkien showed that she had internalised the art of European and Persian mediaeval manuscripts.  Her award-winning illustrations for Grant Uden's 1968 "Dictionary of Chivalry" was a major source for me, although I don't share her beautifully clean line.  I'm sure a lot of it comes down to having spent many hours in my teens doing this jigsaw of the fleur-de-lys legend from the Bedford Book of Hours, c.1423 (left).

In Italy I was surrounded by Byzantine and mediaeval religious art, and in September the National Gallery had an exhibition of Italian Altarpieces, which came into my disseration.  I've written before about Ed Kluz's paper reliquaries:  I was inspired by the physicality of those mysterious and timeless structures.  The current Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum is a pick-and-mix of unconventional methods of representation.

Here are my sketches of St. James escaping from Prison (in Padua); Donatello's statue of John the Baptist (at the Frari church in Venice) and Carpaccio's painting of St. Peter the Martyr (at Museo Correr in Venice).

  

The Altarpiece

I'll do this in pictures:  the research drawings, alternative plans, layout, jigsaw work and construction.

 

 

Prints and Images

In a previous post I showed some of the early sketches, and I could have carried on with those thumbnails, but I want to print the main images (to make them easy to reproduce in different colours, and to keep the colours simple).  Here are:  an early test for Justinian; a page of experiments; and the acetates for the two main images:  Justinian and Appollonia.

The course is to be exhibiting in the Bargate Monument Gallery in February!  My altarpiece will need improvements, but I'm looking forward to seeing it in there with everyone else's work.

Slow Progress

I'm good at making a big plan for a project... and then failing to stick to it.  After a couple of weeks of slow progress, I was at least relieved to find that no-one in the year-group has got far off the ground.

College has been a good place.  We've had talks from the tutors about their work; I've made Christmas cards; people are using the new studios more (and someone knew of a piano in need of a home, so now that's in there, I like to imagine a tutor playing increasingly fast honky-tonk music to make everyone draw faster); the Solent Showcase gallery opened; and next week our honorary professor, John Norris Wood is giving his annual lecture and leading a one-day project, for which I need "a curious object".

As for the project, I'm still stuck on the its scale.  I could make a whole lot of martyrs, quite simply, or a few detailed ones.  I'm frustrated to be so undecided and to still be making lists of visual tricks to try.

A tutor pointed me to a few artists who make scenes of many extraordinary figures, darkness, narrative and drama:

Steven Campbell - Two Hunters immobilised by an excessive use of Bark Camouflage

Ken Currie - The Bathers

Peter Howson - Acheron

This is all much more extreme than my vision, which is a closer to this, Alice and Martin Provensen's "The First Noel".

The list of possible figures to depict is still long and could include a few more serious modern "saints", such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King.  I feel like I could spend years on this theme, especially when another tutor said that my research could form a part of the project.  I could spend even more hours combing through old books - John Foxe's "Acts and Monuments" and Thieleman J. van Braght's "Martyrs Mirror", whose stories of the faithful defined the identities of religious groups and of nations.  (See engraving).

The schedule that I made for this project says that I should be exploring text styles; body positions and facial features; symbols and backgrounds; light and dark.  It all sounds exciting but it's easier to just make more gingerbread men.

Here are:
a) Sketches from the British Museum, of Greeks fighting centaurs (I just drew the human figures).
b) Simple attempts at the first few of my selections from the Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

Negotiated Study

The penultimate project of my degree has begun:  I have from now until early January to make something of my own choosing, falling roughly (in my case very roughly) into one of five categories - all areas covered in the past two years:  Editorial.  Text as image.  Children's picture book narrative.  Reportage.  Adult narrative.

My starting point is the approach that I used in the concertina books in July.  I enjoyed the immediacy and the combination of methods; and the idea was all my own.  Of course, I would like to develop further and try things out, but it's important to retain the simplicity - to do just one thing and to do it well.

Out of the masses of religious art that I saw in Italy, I was inspired by scenes of martyrdom:  their drama; the figure poses; the details in the scene; a saint's serenity paired with the the energy of a Roman guard swinging a sword.

I'm not producing oil paintings, or even full scenes:  rather, I want to make vivid scenes of martyrdoms famous and obscure; with minimal text.

Now that my topic is approved (and counts as "adult narrative"), I can start work and narrow the ideas down early, before the possibilities overwhelm me.  I'll need a schedule for research, drawing, production, arrangement... and for a Christmas break.

Today I'm working through books about saints so that I can choose the juiciest stories... but not always the most gruesome, which make me wonder about dedicating the whole thing to Amnesty International.  After that I can work on loose figure-drawing and facial expressions.

The series of images will probably form a set of prints.  Derek made the best suggestion for the layout:  building an altarpiece!  I'm very excited about that as a form of display and as a practical project.  It's a great link to my dissertation.  Okay, the work won't be exhibited, but...  I'm itching to do it.

It's only a college project but I'm excited about it like none before.