Showing posts with label sketching at the Ashmolean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sketching at the Ashmolean. Show all posts

14.1.11

Animals at the Ashmolean


Last Wednesday saw me in Oxford to pick up a frame for a painting. After our
last visit to the Ashmolean and with my new determination to do more observational sketching, I decided to spend a few hours pottering there. I always like to begin with this staircase, as it takes me back to my art student days and the first time I breathlessly and reverently climbed them to visit the Renaissance rooms. I can still remember the emotional choke in my throat (dramatic child that I was) as I paid my respects to the Masters and began my own long artistic journey.


I like the continuity of returning with another sketchbook, over twenty years on, still tramping that same road, which has twisted in ways I could not have dreamt of then. And now I find the new extension has caught my heart too. It also leaves me breathless, though for a different reason.


I actually feel a little sick if I get too near the glass partitions and look down - or up. But I love the way you can watch the other galleries and their occupants on all levels, like a giant cultural ant's nest coiling round the central space which seems to me like an invisible pillar rising through the centre of the museum.


Needless to say, I took many photos of this and that, flashless photography (for personal use) being allowed. Just look at this little collection of lovelies - three needlework 'favours' or love tokens from the 1600s, each just few inches tall -


- and a sweet gold wirework frog purse from the same era, used for carrying herbs or perfumed sachets. I wonder if I could reconstruct a similar design?


But with all this visual wealth around me, I had to narrow my choice of subject down if I were not to become overwhelmed. So I naturally picked animals. Like this adorable little hare tureen, which could sit in one's hand.



And this exquisite porcelain cat, which I think is some kind of pill box -



- scaring the nearby tapestry parrot.


I found myself more drawn to the Oriental galleries, perhaps because my own style is similarly curvaceous.



A wonderful piece of Satsuma ware, a mouse sitting on a turnip. Size is roughly that of large cooking apple.


Ivory monkey with dragonfly, just a few inches long. The tiny dragonfly is about the size of my little fingernail.


I fell in love with this deceptively simple hare-shaped lacquered incense box the last time we were here. It measures about two and a half inches across and to me is absolute design perfection. I think if I could have just one thing from the thousands of things in the Ashmolean, it would be this.


As with the landscape notes I made last weekend, the object of my sketching was not to produce a page of pretties nor even to make notes for future work. Neither was the challenge to exactly copy the object itself.




What I wanted to do was explore the design style of each piece and the way each individual artist had interpreted and tweaked the animal form, especially if it was also a functional item. Trying to get inside their creative minds as I worked; and at the end of the exercise, the final scribbles were really just a crude record. The real result was what had been imprinted in my visual memory and loosening up my hand skills. I'm already looking forward to my next visit.