Module 5 Chapter 8

Search for Lowry Pictures 5.8.1

I love Lowry paintings and have been to the gallery at Salford several times.  There is so much movement in each painting and lots of interaction between the figures.  Below are the ones I chose from google images.

The bottom left is a waiting room at a Hospital Outpatients clinic somewhere near Bradford and it is almost identical to the one at Scarborough Hospital 35 years ago when I used to go for pre-natal check ups.  The seats were individual chairs arranged across the room, on the right was a hatch where you made return appointments and on the left side and in front of you were the doctors rooms. I just had to print this one.

From these pictures I chose the following figures to draw.

The man laid down is from my morning coffee mug and he is laying on a wall smoking a cigarette.

These are my modern day 'Lowries'.  I found it difficult to make them as small as the others because I wasn't copying them and didn't have the scale to follow.

Keith Haring. 5.8.2

  Again I used Google Images to find some of his work and chose these few.

Here I copied some of the figures from the pictures above.

This is my set of cardboard shapes traced onto white paper which I have then coloured with a watercolour paint and then painted the figures with Inktense paints.

When I turned the page the ink from the felt tip outlines had seeped through in places leaving some feint outlines.  I didn't want to waste them so I have covered them in pale pearlescent watercolours using wavy lines both across and down.  I finished this with the black border to put a finish on the lines going across.

Here I have used a piece of black card with cut out white figures and one red figure in the middle.  There was no need to outline the shapes but I did have to mark in the heads, legs and arms where necessary.  I liked this one and the choice of shape for the red figure I felt was just right and I didn't use it again.

This last one is shapes cut from a magazine in various colours and I have overlapped them to form a complex arrangement.  I made this by gluing down two or three shapes then marking in the outlines before adding another layer.  If I hadn't done it this way I think it would have got very difficult to work out where all the arms and legs were.  As I cut out each shape I placed it on the paper background and the arrangement was great but you can never quit recreate it when you have to take it apart to put the glue on.  This arrangement is fine but not quite as good as the original.

A good exercise this,  I enjoyed looking for the pictures and found Lowry more difficult to paint than I realised.  Keith Haring is so completely different, his figures have so much movement and can be arranged at any angle whereas Lowry figures have to be placed in context with their background.