Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 – 1928) was a Scottish architect and designer. He was aprominent figure in art nouveau in the 1920s and founding member of ‘The four’, a group creating the influential ‘Glasgow Style’. I found beautiful drawings, many colorized with watercolour. Mackintosh captured the essential shapes in a very elegant style. The line work is very economical and sensitive, there seems to be nothing superfluous and all shapes are very clearly defined. There is not much variation in line thickness, but there seem to be lighter and darker lines. The fine linework goes very well with the softness and transparency of the watercolours.
David Hockney (1937*), British Contemporary artist, also has a very clean drawing style, although I find it a little bit more casual and less stylized. I particularly liked the drawing of his two dogs on an armchair. The lines of varying thickness emphasize or de-emphasize elements of the drawing and make it interesting and lively.
After looking at drawings from these artists, I felt discouraged because their linework was so clear and elegant, while I was struggling with my inelegant clumsy celery root and did not know how to make something aesthetically pleasing of it. I was too busy understanding and depicting the complex pattern and had no resources left for ‘beauty’. I was searching for guidance how I might approach the line drawing task, but the drawings I saw did not seem to offer solutions.
I was unsatisfied by what I had done but did not know how to improve. My first idea was to search for drawings of vegetables and try to find out what characterized the more successful ones. I think what is important in a line drawing to get a more realistic impression is that there is some internal structure, not just an outline, and that the lines are somewhat irregular in direction. Without an internal structure and with smooth lines, the object looks designed, not grown, and resembles of a comic drawing or caricature. I found this enlarged radish drawing on the walls of a restaurant in Amsterdam a nice example of a successful vegetable drawing.
Then I remembered that Picasso’s paintings and drawings had often impressed me by their clarity, so I looked at some of them a bit closer. The ‘femme assise’ (1920) is an interesting drawing because it’s clumsy and the proportions are incorrect, but it’s a lovely drawing and the woman has such a friendly and thoughtful expression. I liked the roughness of the lines and the simplicity of the shapes they created. The ‘head of a young man’ (1923) is more conventional. The lines reflect a clear decision and through their smoothness and fluency create an entirely different atmosphere and character.
Another artist which I admire for his use of line is Egon Schiele (Austria, 1890 – 1918). I’m including one of his self portraints (1913). I’m very impressed by the irregularity of the lines and by their roughness.
I was intrigued when I realized that with the exception of David Hockney’s dogs and the radish wall drawing, all the drawings I selected were from the early 20th century, roughly around 1920. They cover such a broad range of styles, from very elegant to rough and expressive. Maybe no solution for my celery as yet, but it was good to see how interestingly varied linework can be.
Sources
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, online catalogue at http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/mackintosh/index.html
David Hockney, Artist website http://www.hockneypictures.com
Radish wall drawing, Radijs restaurant, Amsterdam (2013), from http://www.yelp.com/user_local_photos?select=weroEccmeo_ANtQx-GMLqg&userid=0eJD3pZ5mcfagtWrPbrw2w