Tag: Art

Figures Fillière 1(b)

This is page 35 from Figures Fillière 1, available at amazon.com / books / Scott Fillier

It is one of a number of faces shown in the book and drawn in many different media, to demonstrate in this instance, that a mechanical drafting pen can be used to produce a landmark and powerfully expressive image one doesn’t usually associate with the output of that pen. All the more reason to investigate its off-beat potential.

The left-hand page of this two-page spread is of US President Jimmy Carter as the perfect opposite in personality type, and, in drawing tool effect.

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Drawing Jenna

This time I will insert one of my YouTube videos, a drawing of my niece Jenna –three years old this week– but drawn a couple years ago.

My prime goal was to avoid cute; difficult to do in drawings with very small children, but the reference photo was all about her unusual sleeping pose, a superb, very unusual, neatly folded, accordion-like composition. I would only need to follow its lead and focus on that dynamic pose she had been so used to, and which had been so practical in her previous life.

As the drawing went forward I photographed its progress moment by moment, eventually arriving at what seemed a satisfactory finish. The drawing resolved itself without effort, and later on it was very easy to convert its dozens of stills into a video format.

For the music also, since I so enjoy creating the odd piece, I decided to take the most challenging route and discover whether something in a jazz mood might be less cute, less cloying than a lullaby. I think I found it.

The blend of image/music is surprising and, personally, is as close to flawless as I could hope.

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Figure Donning Waterproofs

This is one of my favourite ways to initiate and complete a sketch.

I don’t want it to be photographic so I am relying on a memory of a situation I thought had great visual impact: a fisherman pulling on his waterproof pants. A photograph of the action would actually impede my drawing because I would get entangled in its details; when I only want the completed drawing to focus on abstracted essentials memory is the best tool as it will leave room for a creative remembrance.

Drawing with a dry/semi-dry pen allows me to lightly indicate the figure and work out good proportions. After which I go directly to the heart of my intent—fluid pose and positions of arms/legs plus the lines of the clothing which will describe the critical motion. Those centres of clothing stress I build into strong visual presences with a very careful eye to placement, to composition, to textural variation, to maximum effect created with minimal input. This allows ample room for imagination and suggestion to complete the work in the viewer’s eye.

Fillière © Apr 5 2019

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Shoreline Form

This is a sculpture made using basketry reeds as armature to sketch out its form. It was made without pre-planning as I wanted a form that would freely evolve, and one which would work visually from all positions around it. The armature was covered with many layers of plaster, paint, and paper towels all bound together by the wetness of the paint, until it became this curious fish / skull-form with a dangling, floating, paradox of an eye that can be both pendulum and rotational.

The surface of the materials dried out to a firm bone-like density that can be worked in many ways. So I considered it all-in-all a satisfactory artistic experiment.

The drawing followed after the sculpture—a record of the project as an illusion of a 3-D form on a flat paper surface; which is in fact what the photo also does to the skull: both presenting and denying at the same instant, its existence as a form in real space but eliminating the dimension of time. It’s for the eyes only: only in your imagination can you now move around the object or set its eye in motion.

Fillière © March 22 2019

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Palette Figure

When I made this sculpture in 1987 I couldn’t help myself from inscribing a little poem into its plainer side. I had chosen to give its two sides as thorough a contrast in treatments as possible; hence, one side got a brilliant burst of contemporary colour and texture, while the other got my signature, tonal/colour/textural restraint, and an original poem.

As the inscribed version of the little poem cannot be read in full from the sculpture, I’ve made the words visible by arranging them in the thumb-hole of this “palette”.

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Figure Running

The paper on which the abstract markings were made had some transparency. Then the several pages were chopped randomly and the cuttings assembled and reassembled until they began to evoke a recognizable image, in this instance a male upper torso from behind and to one side. Once a figure had, with my selective choices, more or less created itself, the segments were, one by one, pasted into place on a stiff cardboard; you can actually see and count the individual pieces, and detect the overlaps. The original is about twice up in size to what is viewed here.

A second stage was to photograph and enter it into the computer darkroom and apply colouration. This revealed some gorgeous tones in which the pasted over markings came through as of the opposite part of the colour wheel. The end result is a gorgeous, original, creative piece.

Fillière © Mar 8 2019

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