Maia (left), Wilson’s Pde, Victoria Pt (right). Photos: Supplied.
BY JAN NARY
Redland Yurara Art Society’s current exhibition is exclusively of drawings, and popular local artist Lynne Wright is one of the exhibiting artists. Lynne has chosen charcoal and pen and wash for her contributions, a charcoal self-portrait and a pen-and-wash portrait of a German Shepherd dog. And she knows well the different challenges posed by drawing.
“Pencil, charcoal and pen are far less forgiving than paint; using them requires skill and conscious effort, unless you do something that’s completely abstract and a lot of artists – and buyers – aren’t into abstract,” Lynne says.
“A lot of people choose to work in charcoal, but you need a fixer spray to hold it – in the olden days, they used hairspray. Some artists feel that it ruins the surface of the charcoal, but work in charcoal or pastel can very easily become messy and damaged without a fixative.
“Pastel requires paper with a ‘tooth’ so that the pastel stays on, and if you’re framing unfixed pastel pieces, the frame has to have a ‘shelf’ to catch falling pastel fragments.
“I like using pencil because of its accuracy and the degrees of softness. A nine B pencil is like charcoal and almost as smudgey, but it’s graphite with clay bonded into it. Using the softer pencils gives you a lovely dark, rich colour but I rarely use anything more than a six B.”
Lynne also loves working in ink. Working in black and white means simplifying the “colour”; Lynne has her students create a grey scale, ten graduations from very pale to very dark, to use as a guide.
“Most of the work will be from the centre group of grey shades – three to seven – but you can make a very effective drawing using just the lightest and the darkest. Shadow can define a form, say a face half in dark shadow; the brain will add features to that half of the face.”
The exhibition runs from March 2 to April 5. For more information, visit www.redlandyurara.com.au.
