David Tress

David Tress is a British artist that was born in 1955 Wembley, northwest London. He studied at Harrow College of Art before graduating in Fine Arts from Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham. In 1976 he then moved to Pembrokeshire where he has lived ever since.

While he was at Trent, he became involved with experiments in conceptual and performance art, but later came to question the assumptions of modernism. Deciding that he had reached the limit of what he could achieve with realism alone, he instead developed an aggressively expressionist style that involves physically scraping or cutting the painted surface and then repairing it, building up layer upon layer as if to mimic the seasonal sequence of decay and regrowth.

As many artist would, he first starts with a drawing or sketch of his subject. This is normally when he is visiting the landscapes he wishes to paint. While walking in the countryside David Tress like to keep an open mind of what he wants to draw. This helps him clearly see the landscape and not get distracted by searching for his ideas of what he wants to draw. Often he revisits the same landscapes he has already painted and redraws them. He talks about how even when he returns to the same place that he has drawn before, there are still differences that occur, be it the time of year, weather, light, or just noticing something that he missed the last time. This makes each drawing different from the last.

After David Tress as completed his sketches, he then returns to his studio. Sometime days, or weeks later, he then looks at his drawings to start the painting. The painting is not just a likeness of the landscape, but rather captures what David Tress had done, felt and seen on that day. He tries to capture the emotional memories of the landscape, as well as the view that he has seen. His paintings develop slowly with some paintings having gaps of days, weeks, or sometimes months of no progress.

In each of his paintings David Tress likes to take risks with his work, trying out different ways of layering paint onto the cavers and going with his instinct. This way he feels that his decisions are made more with the subconscious, and that can make the painting more interesting and interactive instead of a flat technically accurate one.

With his use of layering canvas and paint, gradually it gives his work a rich texture that works well. This adds to the landscape mimicking trees, grass, mountains and even weather like fog or rain, as he has painted over it. David Tress seems to use these textures to his advantage with each layer adding its own detail and character. With the thick layering of paint it gives the landscapes a vibrant dramatic feel, while still having an abstract look to them.

Michelangelo – Life Drawing

Michelangelo, a compulsive drawer was being typically Florentine when he asserted that "Design, which by another name is called drawing . . . is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all sciences." The preliminary drawings of artists are here seen as essential to the advancement of learning as the technical drawings made or commissioned by mathematicians, engineers, doctors and scientists.

Michelangelo was an artist who worked on projects in various disciplines. One of the commonalities that relate each of his works in the different fields together is that they all start with a drawing. Whether designing a tomb, planning a colossal sculpture, or beginning a fresco, they all begin with the initial sketches. Michelangelo would sketch what was to be painted or sculpted. Often, these sketches are of single figures that will make up the finished composition. In order to get the anatomical detail that renaissance painters, and especially Michelangelo are known for, they would work with models. Seeing the models in the various poses would show the artist how the body moves, muscles are defined, and all the parts of body relate to each other in contorted poses.

What makes these unique from the works the artist intends for people to see is that the drawings are very often not finished works. As can be seen in Michelangelo’s study for the Creation of Adam, it is a study of the torso of what would become Adam painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The drawing shows a figure without a head, and no definition of one arm or leg. Scattered about on the same paper is repetitive representations of aspects of the figure. You can see the hands drawn multiple times as Michelangelo studies the positions. The only part of the figure with any real detail is the torso, and it becomes obvious that Michelangelo was drawing this purely for him to see and to prepare for the final work. It was drawn from a live model. Michelangelo manages to make the impossible position of Adam's upper body look convincing, because his observation of his muscular form and the play of light on it is compellingly realistic.

Michelangelo must have made a number of further drawings of Adam before the production of the cartoon (the full-size drawing which would have been transferred onto the ceiling). The head and the hands are only in outline here so would have needed refining.

Occasionally Michelangelo would produce finished drawings. As is the case for Head of an Ideal Woman, also known as Study of a Head. The amount of detail shown in the woman’s hair and helmet indicate that this was not just a preliminary sketch for another work, but was intended to be a piece in it’s own right. Many of the drawings not done as sketches, but as final drawings, were given to friends as gifts.

Whether the initial sketch or finished drawing, the medium Michelangelo used would be familiar to people today drawing. Both the Study of Adam and the Head of an Ideal woman use chalk on paper. It is also common to see sketches using pen and ink on paper or charcoal – all mediums that artist’s and students still use.

 This drawing is for Michelangelo's 'Bathers' scene, which was designed as the centrepiece for a never-executed fresco of the 'Battle of Cascina' for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The drawing relates to the pivotal seated figure at the centre of the work. A combination of pen and lead white describe the model's glistening limbs in a highly effective way. The figure is of crucial importance in the larger scene because his turning body directs attention to the bodies behind. Close inspection of the figure reveals that, despite the remarkably realistic three-dimensional rendering, his pose is unnatural. This is particularly true of the upper body, which has been twisted to impossible limits.

This is a life study for the crucified figure of Haman, painted about 1511-12 on one of the corner sections of the altar wall of the Sistine chapel. The finished figure appears to stretch out his left arm into the real space of the chapel.

The model for the life drawing would have had to maintain a dynamic pose for a considerable length of time. He must have had his left leg supported in some way, perhaps by a loop suspended from the ceiling, and have held on to ropes to keep his arms aloft. The small circles visible on Haman's right thigh, and on the separate study of his bent left leg on the same sheet, are a notation used by Michelangelo to denote the most highlighted area.

Jenny Saville texture

Born in 1970, Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter and associated with the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England.

Saville has been noted for creating art through the use of a classical standard; figure painting. Although Saville’s chosen method is traditional, she has found a way to reinvent figure painting and regain its position in the context of art history. Known primarily for her large-scale paintings of nude women, Saville has also emerged as a Young British Artist (YBA). Much of her work features distorted flesh, high-calibre brush strokes and patches of oil colour, while others reveal the surgeon’s mark of a plastic surgery operation. In 1994, Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York City.

Saville has dedicated her career to traditional figurative oil painting. Her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her paintings are usually much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, slightly deviating into subjects with "floating or indeterminate gender," painting large scale paintings of transgender people. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients

Jenny Saville:

"I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation." (Extract from ‘Interview with Jenny Saville by Simon Schama)