Watch the video and see what I drew in my sketchbook as we wandered around East and West Berlin last weekend, taking in the sights and history.
I went with my wife and best friends to have a good look round and came away inspired and confused! I had to confront several prejudices, or should I say cultural attitudes, that I was unaware of having before. I realised that, even at my great age, I come with the ideas inculcated my upbringing in the social class and country I happen to have been born into.
I didn’t have much time to sketch so grabbed moments in cafes and while waiting for planes and trains.
There is so much history I don’t know and haven’t been taught, because it in not “our” history. The Pergamon Museum is similar to the British Museum. It has undergone war damage and rebuilding, but I was surprised that I knew so little about it and even more surprised by the contents.
The Gates of Babylon were stupendous! Then I realised they had been plundered and brought back to the museum to aggrandise the German Empire, to add the sparkle of previous, mighty empires to the the German Empire as was. But then, that is exactly what the British Museum is all about, and the Louvre. Each museum is filled with the booty hauled from each country’s colonial sphere of influence, to say, “Look how wonderful we are!”
Of course now we say that we are saving, conserving and displaying these cultural artefacts for the World, but that is a revisionist point of view!
I lived in Germany as a child, around the time the Berlin Wall was built. I don’t remember that event particularly, but the East Berlin we visited was in such a time warp, that I sometimes felt I was back there in the sixties, like a time machine. So much of Berlin is a facade. Bombed buildings are rebuilt in an old or ancient style with modern materials, bits of infrastructure from the 1950′ and 60s survive with a lick of 21st century paint on top. You are not quite sure if anything is real or original.
Stasi surveillance Camera in a Bird Box
After visiting the Stasi museum, I kept imagining hidden cameras every time I saw a camera-sized circular shape in a light fitting or poster, for instance.
The pace of development is amazing. Building going on everywhere. Eventually the split history of the place will be built over and it will become a single city again, but I certainly felt it was still a place of two halves. We kept asking ourselves, “Are we East or West?” You didn’t really need to look for the line on the map. The East still has a generation or two’s worth of development to catch up with the West, But they are getting there.
For a capital city, it does seem quite parochial though. It’s been left out of the internationalisation of other World Capitals for so long, it has a lot to do to catch up, in attitudes as well as facilities and infrastructure. We felt the general levels of service fell short of what you come to expect in major capital cities, these days.
We came home quite exhausted, both from physically doing so much and fitting in so much culture!
Hey! If you read this blog often, you may well be into drawing, so why not have a go at entering the inaugural Derwent Drawing Prize?
The Prize is open to all living British and international artists over the age of 18 years old on 1 July 2013 and there’s a total of £8750 in prize money. Closing date is 11:59PM ON 1 JULY 2013.
You can use any pencil including water-soluble, pastel, graphite, charcoal or colouring pencils on any 2 or 3 dimensional support.
KEY DATES
1 July 2013: Deadline for entry
15 July 2013: All artists notified of first stage selection process
w/c 9 September 2013: Delivery of work
16-21 September 2013: Exhibition opens to public
18 September 2013: Private View and Prize Winners announced
October – December 2013: Exhibition tour
The work selected for exhibition must be available from September to 31 December 2013.
Let me know if you win!
As English children prepare for their new spelling and punctuation tests, It makes me wonder about the outcome of all this testing.
The testing of children is one-sided and far too academic. Where are the art exams for eleven year olds? The music exams? The interpersonal skills exams, the cooking, the athletic, the talking and the reading for pleasure exams? These are all real skills in life that are ignored by those academics and politicians who run education and wish everyone to be like them and damn them if they aren’t.
Those who excel in real life skills are taught by the education system that they are failures, that spelling and punctuation is all that matters, followed closely by maths and the cold analysis of text. Fail in those and you are a failure.
If those who excel in tests – those who go on to become politicians, set the tests and run education – were made to sit tests in art, drawing, gymnastics, football, astronomy, fashion, music and any number of relevant subjects, they would also know what it is like to be deemed a failure at the age of eleven.
I am all for good spelling and punctuation, but this comes with culture. If correct spelling and punctuation are expected and rewarded, then the achievement levels will rise. If it is made the subject of do or die testing – for the school as much as for the pupil – then for every happy smiling face on results day, there will be a crying, shame-faced failure, stigmatised for the rest of their lives.
“I’m no good at spelling,” they’ll say in their defence. “Look I’ve got a certificate to prove it!” And so the path of their lives is set for them by those to claim to have their best interests at heart.
Neuroscience is showing us daily how different we all are, how some just see the world in a different way to others. The internet is changing the way everything is done. New, previously unheard of skills are demanded daily, and yet academics are obsessed with preserving tests relevant to the age of coal and steam.
Let us have a level playing field. If you are not wired up for perfect spelling or number-crunching, let it be possible to show how amazingly you are wired up for the things in which you excel – the very skills that the world needs now.
YouTube Follower, JSWHISS asked me to draw feet this week. I think hands are the hardest, but now I’m not so sure. I think I’ve been in denial about feet. If I can, I draw feet off the page or hide them behind something in the foreground, as that’s a lot simpler.
I generally find that if in doubt, I go to see what the Ancient Greeks did as they really knew how to draw and make it simple. That’s what I did when I was drawing my Olympia books that I show in the video.
If you were thinking of getting one or two copies, it really helps support this website and my drawing videos if you use the Amazon Links below. Thanks.
I went to Brussels in Belgium on the Eurostar Train this week and I took my sketchbook with me. I thought it was a great way to share the experience with you as it is a record of my thoughts and things that catch my eye as I go along.
I was visiting the British International School in Brussels, which is in a wonderful old house full of Art Nouveau and Art Deco details. I had a great time there meeting the children, who come from all over the world, telling them stories and showing them how to draw stuff!
Thanks to everyone at the school for arranging the trip and making it both possible and memorable.
Requested by @TheWarden43 from YouTube, this video shows you how to draw a pizza from above and from the side with a little extra painting at the end. Enjoy with pepperoni, mushrooms, tomatoes, anchovies and olives!
What’s your favourite Pizza?
Learn how to draw a Pepper Mill uand shade it with stipple shading. This is created by drawing a lot of dots. It’s a lot of work – enought to drive you dotty, in fact! But you get a great effect when it is finished.
Here is a wonderful infographic I came across that explains everything about making art for other people, either as a professional or as someone who wants to have their work seen and appreciated by others.
What EVERY Creative Person with a Product or Service Absolutely NEEDS to Know – A graphic by Alex Mathers at www.redlemonclub.com
© 2013 Red Lemon Club. All rights reserved
click for larger picture
Follow the instructions on the video and when you are ready to draw click on the picture for simple drawings of the main stages of construction. Have fun… and may the force be with you!
I was really pleased to be contacted by Paul on YouTube today, who asked me what I thought of this video by Myron Barnstone, who teaches drawing at the Barnstone Studios, which I’m sorry to say I’d not come across before. Myron so perfectly encapsulates my thoughts about drawing and art teaching, I really wanted to share this video with you too.
I was lucky, my very first teacher, when I was 18, sat me down and showed me how a pencil works and showed me the shapes in the things that I was drawing. I only had that teacher for five or six months, but he literally changed the course of my life… in one lesson!
After school I went into a small print shop where I pretty much had to work it out myself. I learned a huge amount about type and the technicalities of Letraset and and wonderful machine called a headliner that produced crisp type on a strip of photo paper. All the time I was drawing and teaching myself with books from the library, trying stuff out. I then worked with a sign writer who really did instruct me. Like Myron says of his students in this video. I still feel him breathing over my shoulder as he points out where I’m going wrong all these years later!
Later I I worked for the land registry and had very strict training in watercolour wash techniques, which have stood me in good stead ever since.
Art college was three years of working it out myself. We received no instruction at all. In fact I often had to teach the skills I’d learned in the real world to my fellow students and on a couple of occasions to visiting lecturers! Our Lecturers “didn’t want to spoil out raw talent,” so they gave us a project and went to the pub for the rest of the week. Looking back, we floundered. Most never bothered coming in to college – there weren’t any classes to attend and if a lecture was arranged we’d got so out of the habit of attending no one ever went. It must have been soul destroying for the lecturers.
Myron is right. If you are serious, learn and get trained somehow. Then rebel after you know what you are doing and add your bit to the world of art and it’s body of work, but if you just rely on talent, you have a very long and hard and lonely journey ahead of you.
