Monday, May 07, 2007

Whistler Month: Three Bridges

Three Bridges
20cm x 30cm, coloured pencil on hot press paper

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This image is of three bridges on the River Thames in the City of London. The subject is Southwark Bridge from underneath Cannon Street with Blackfriars Bridge in the background. The River Thames is a recurrent motif in Whistler's work.

It's my first attempt at anything resembling Whistler's style in later years in terms of simpler more abstract shapes and an emphasis on colour and colour harmonies. It's both a development and a departure in my style insofar as I've usually only done parts of pictures like this in the past but rarely the whole image. What I like about it is that it allows me to work with more marks showing and with more emphasis on the colours and the colour mixing. I'm trying to get some luminescence into the light within the picture.

I used Zest It on the paper to help get some of the depth of colour - which was a very interesting experience! The paper seems to hold the Zest It 'live' within the paper for longer than you'd expect and hence coloured pencil going down on top of it will also melt into the paper!

It's also an image I've done for the Fine Line Artists exhibition in Canada next month. You wouldn't believe how long it took to arrive at what to do for my contribution!

[Note: I am periodically having problems with uploading images - for no apparent reason - which then resolves itself - for no apparent reason. What I may do is continue to post as I did with this one - put a post and indicate upfront problems with posting and then see what happens - and then upload image as soon as the problems mysteriously goes away again.]

Links:

4 comments:

  1. sometimes reloading the template solves a problem.

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  2. You've succeeded with the luminescence, Katherine. The water in front of the bridge is beautiful - the whole painting is. Thanks for the Whistler links - I've been studying the economy of his lines in his etchings. Particularly of the old palaces in Venice. He says such a lot with a squiggle!

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  3. Thanks Lindsay - I was going to try this and then it worked again - at last - at 10pm!

    Robyn - see if you can get hold of the book about his drawings and etchings in Venice - it's really wonderful for giving you an insight into how effective hi drawing style is. I'm going to do one post later in the month all about this.

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  4. Lovely :)

    I don't have this problem but I have recurrent and frequent problems with paragraphs - if I edit at all then I lose all the spaces between them and have to go into html and add them all again as the div's are there but not working!

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