After he had reviewed some of the work I had produced over the last week or so, he recommended that I begin to focus upon combinations of tonality, combinations of tone, not line and gradation.
Tone is not a colour thing, it is about variation and the lightness of touch. Consider the work of the great masters as I am currently, in effect they painted the stalls of their subjects before putting further layers of paint to show skin tonality. By doing so they created the scaffolding upon which to paint. Prof Swindells explained that much of this technique has now been lost in art education, and whilst his generation were perhaps the last to be taught some of these techniques, art education and the Coldstream report of the 1960s written by William Coldstream has completely altered how art is now taught in universities.
The recommendation for me is to keep the line and the tonality fluid. Be in doubt about what I'm drawing or painting constantly, a constant fluidity of drawing and more particularly "drawing" the paint auto, is where the finess actually lies.Research through practice, is not just about reading or just the visual research but I may be conducting. It is also about getting evidence around me and then re-studying through reproducing and representing this evidence. Work harder to drill down constantly is more ideas flow through this reproduction and representation of the three-dimensional objects.
Tonality must be practised, not by creating outlines and then filling them in, but by actually recreating the three-dimensionality of the object through tone itself.
Whilst the line is important, and it will appear in certain places to create divisions and borders of objects, it is the tonality, just like the Cézanne's problem, of how to represent an object in three dimensionality that we are trying to explore.
It is for this reason that in my studio space I need to surround myself with full 3-D objects as well as photographs and other visual stimulus. This is vital in any artists studio in order to gain a proper and deep and thorough understanding of the skeleton of the object you are trying to depict. It is as much about creating those layers on top of the scaffolding that build up the three-dimensional's, where each layer is doubted as it is applied.
[Having thought a little further about this, I mind was drawn to a natural occurrence that I had witnessed a few days earlier, where the frost on my conservatory roof and formed into beautiful patterns, which can only be described in terms of tonality, as there is not the opportunity for light and shade nor colour, other than the background colour of the blue sky to be recorded. I wondered if this was a perfect example of the natural tonality?]
This doubt, the uncertainty, the anxiety that the continuous drive of making and creating as you go along is what actually creates tacit knowledge, known as "tactile epistemology". This is true research through practice.The whole action of researching by creating is what through research through practice is all about. It was pointed out that whilst I may be creating paintings or drawings, what I'm not doing at the moment is drilling down enough into the scaffolding; the raison d'être of the object and its relationship with all the other things it shares in space.
I realise so much now that I need to create much more three-dimensional tonal sketches. In my current project, I can continue to study curtains as my vehicle narrative on taste class and culture by all means, but I also need to further study the tonality of them. To define the texture through tonality and the relationship of what is underneath a textile or the cloth is what I am trying to capture. I am looking to try to understand what is the skeleton or the scaffolding which lies in three-dimensional space underneath those same curtains but I am trying to represent. The question I must keep asking myself is what holds each fold each line and more importantly each shadow or tonality in space?An example I'm thinking of might be the drawing of a football? I will look to make a sketch of a sketch of a sketch, in that tonality is different from shade and shadow.
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