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    About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
    About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
    About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment

    By Jasper Salwey and Leonard Squirrell

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    About this ebook

    Written as a sketching artist's companion, this guide by a noted author of art instruction manuals attests to the value of sketching as a distinct art form rather than merely a vehicle to achieve more polished works. Artist and author Jasper Salwey details advantages of many drawing media, from pencil to watercolor, and their application to depictions of interior studies, figures, landscapes, seascapes, and architecture.
    Suitable for artists and students of moderate to advanced skills, the book makes a case for why the artist needs to sketch and the importance of sketching to the history of art. Salwey's advice and insights are illustrated by relevant examples that range from works by the Old Masters to those of his great contemporaries, including Frank Brangwyn, Dame Laura Knight, and John Singer Sargent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 19, 2017
    ISBN9780486821047
    About Sketching: The Art and Practice of Capturing the Moment

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      Book preview

      About Sketching - Jasper Salwey

      KNIGHT

      CHAPTER I

      THE ART OF SKETCHING

      AMONG the innumerable activities of man in the realm of Art, the sketch holds a position of marked importance; for apart from its use as a mere preliminary practice or note, adopted by artists as a preparation for the fully developed picture, it is often of such a high order as to be, even when considered only as a sketch, a work of art in itself. The very fact that the term is understood to define a spontaneous and rapid delineation of a subject, limiting both time and labour, precluding premeditation and subsequent touching up, concentrates the artist’s whole ability on this one direct effort, during which there is time for no extraneous thought to impede him or detract from the clarity of his achievement.

      When we stand alone before a sketch and comprehend it, we are perhaps nearer to the artist than we could be in his living presence. Whether it be a rendering in pencil or crayon, water-colour or oil, or any other medium, the artist has expressed himself without the embarrassment of doing so personally; he has told us about himself, and we know not only of him but of Life.

      If it had been the custom for artists to withhold any but their finished works from public exhibition, it may safely be said that pictorial art would have lost a large measure of the enthusiasm and appreciation that it has received from later students and connoisseurs. The astronomer’s calculations, the engineer’s graphs, the scientist’s experiments, are secrets of the workroom and the laboratory; even the architect’s sketch plans are seldom on view—a fact to be deplored. But the sketch-book of an artist has always been considered among the treasures of its possessor, and the sketch, even when known to have been produced as a step towards the accomplishment of a finished picture— a means, in fact, to another end—is recognised as being in itself something of special value and appeal; of such interest, indeed, as to have resulted in its housing, exhibition and preservation in collections and public art galleries, and, even more, its marketing at prices equal to, and sometimes surpassing, finished works of art.

      The practice of sketching cannot be said to have been concomitant with the dawn of pictorial art. Early Art was approached through drawing, delineation and study, without the added aid of sketching. The very nature of the early pictures, mural decorations and frescoes, conceived to fill prescribed spaces or panels, conforming largely to the prevailing convention, and concerned with the arrangement of figures and a comparatively limited range of subjects and treatment, did not demand preliminary experiment and trial as have the later developments of Art. The idea was evolved in the process of drawing, rather than from a pre-stated sketch of the completed panel.

      As Art became increasingly emancipated, the practice of sketching as a preliminary to work on a large scale began to be recorded in histories of the early Italian masters. Such early masters as Giotto and Fra Angelico made little drawings on parchment, which are in the nature of sketches, and Masaccio in silver point on tinted paper. It was Andrea Mantegna who first carried the practice much further, sketching objects and sometimes complete subjects of peasant life direct from nature, bringing to notice the beauty of the real as beside the classic, thus moving the Art of his country into a new phase which was to be realized in all its fullness and splendour by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

      PLATE 2

      INK SKETCH BY REMBRANDT

      PLATE 3

      VELASQUEZ A SKETCH RECORD FOR A COMPOSITION IN CHARCOAL

      The Renaissance was, to a large extent, an unshackling of the chains of convention that weighed the artist down. A new race of artists appeared who, in the enchantment of this golden age, realised that Art was an end in itself, worthy of the pursuit of a lifetime, and revelled in their freedom to pursue it according to the call of their own spirits. A new beauty seemed born into the world, and in the magnificent outburst of pictorial art that ensued we find the sketch playing no mean part. The very fact that such a legacy of sketches has come down to us from this period goes to prove that the artist himself must have had a sufficient realisation of the quality of these works, and an appreciation of what they represented from the fact that he preserved them at all and did not throw them away on the completion of his picture as an author might discard his preliminary rough notes.

      From the hand of Leonardo da Vinci may be seen some of the earliest pen sketches, though his more usual medium was silver point. In them we find a new note of action and emotion over and above the mere power of depiction which is so evident in them. Thus was the practice of sketching leading Art onwards into a wider field which found so magnificent a culmination in the work of Michelangelo, whose extensive use of sketching in various media reveals to us perfectly the means by which he approached the problems of his profound achievements.

      Sketching had become a practice of the Venetian School no less than of the Florentine. The sketches of Titian in pencil and ink are evidence of his belief in the value of rapidly rendering the interests of nature and life. The fast perfecting medium of oil-colour may also have been employed for sketching by this school, if not by Titian himself at this time, though there is no direct evidence that this was the case, even at a period when such strides were being made in the employment of rich colour in portrait work.

      Dürer, who by some is considered the first great painter of landscape, visited Venice in 1506, and he, among others, may have been the means of conveying something of the Southern method to Northern Europe, though the influence he brought was Florentine rather than Venetian. Dürer made numberless interesting sketches, many of which are still preserved, though these works are really more in the nature of close studies than of what may be truly defined as sketches, his usual medium being colour and ink.

      The Baroque style which followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the first general realisation of the function of the sketch as we understand it nowadays. The new school sought to emancipate itself from the somewhat severe forms of the preceding century, to dramatise, as it were, the subject-matter of pictures, and excite the mind and the eye by an added exuberance of form and violence of movement. The innumerable sketches which come down to us from this epoch perfectly express its artistic ideals. Here we find a more varied use of media and a new variety in their combinations. There is an added virtuosity in technique and a serious endeavour to add to the means of expression at the artist’s disposal. Men such as Caravaggio, Guido Reni, the Carracci, Tiepolo (see Plate 66) knew well how to seize the impression of an instant and perpetuate it in a rapid, vigorous, if sometimes over-violent sketch. Though the artistic achievements of this age cannot be compared with those of the epoch preceding it, it may at least be said that it witnessed a definite advancement in the art of sketching, and the first signs of appreciation of the sketch as a work of art in itself, distinct from the drawing or painting.

      In the work of the Dutch and Flemish artists to which this brief outline now brings us, Art is seen to range over a far wider field. The two men who stand out most prominently and demand a student’s attention are Rembrandt and Rubens. A wonderful range of studies, sketches and notes by both these masters has been collected in England alone. The medium most usually employed in the case of the former was pen, in that of the latter charcoal. Both individualists indeed, facing tradition but looking beyond it, they attained to almost unique achievements in the field of Art, and those who would trace to its source the realism of the modern landscape, as differentiated from the classic, must look back to Rembrandt, while the sketches alone of Rubens, quite apart from his finished works, are in themselves an education to the student of figure

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