Module 2 - Chapter 13 Study three artists

HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER AND YOUNGER

Hans Holbein the Elder (1460 – 1524) was born in Germany and worked initially in the late Gothic style. He was a pioneer and leader in transforming German art from the Gothic style to the Renaissance style.

His son, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 – 1543), spent two spells in England, 1526 – 8 and 1532 – 40. He became painter to King Henry VIII in 1536. He made a number of beautiful portraits (drawings and paintings) of courtiers, which are a wonderful source of details and information about high status clothes of the period.

I had expected to find far more details of blackwork than I did, but below  are some examples.

The first example is of a shirt collar from a painting of  Thomas Howard, 3^rd Duke of Norfolk, painted in 1539/40. The detail is beautiful, and it would be possible to recreate the design. Note the detail of the cord holding the collar of the shirt together.

The next two samples are details of cuffs taken from two portraits of Jane Seymour painted in 1536/7 and 1540. Once again it would be possible to recreate the designs. What is particularly interesting is that both the inside and the outside of the cuffs are visible in the paintings, and they are identical.

This final image is a detail from the Darmstadt Madonna, painted in 1528/9. It is beautiful, and as with the other examples, it would be possible to recreate the design.

HOLBEIN STITCH

Holbein stitch is the stitch used to create a design that looks the same on both sides, which would be necessary  on the cuffs in the Jane Seymour portraits. It is a double running stitch worked in both directions.

In “Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Stitches” first published in 1934, it is described as follows:

“Holbein stitch consists of a simple running stitch worked in two journeys over the same line. In the diagram, the thread emerges at A and travels round the outline making running stitches and leaving spaces between, all of equal length. The small off shoots to the outline are also worked on this first journey. making them like a satin stitch. When the end of the line is reached at B, the needle turns back for its second journey, making an exactly similar running stitch.” 

BRIDGET RILEY

Bridget Riley was born in 1931, and trained at Goldsmiths College of Art and the Royal Academy of Art. Her early work was in a semi impressionistic style and she started developing her “op-art” style in the early 1960s. It is for this style that she became well known.

A representative selection of her work can be seen here – 40 images in chronological order. (Hover your mouse over each image for details.)

Looking at these pictures, it is very easy to see how her work developed –

·         starting with black and white images from the 1960s (eg Movement in Squares 1961)

·         the introduction of a third tone , gray, (eg Arrest 1 1965)

·         the gradual introduction of colour (eg Cataract 3 1967)

·         the paintings inspired by the colours of Ancient Egypt (eg Achean 1981)

·         the lozenge paintings (eg Nataraja 1993)

·         her more recent paintings with more fluid shapes, and fewer and softer colours (eg Two Blues 2003)

Now in her eighties, she is still working, and was one of 12 contemporary British artists to be commissioned to design  a poster for London 2012.

Because of the large scale and the need for precision, she has worked with assistants since the 1960s. She develops her ideas through a series of small scale studies, which are eventually scaled up.

In her early black and white works, she uses simple shapes or lines , repeats them and changes their rythms to give the illusion of movement, three dimensions and sometimes colour – making the eye and the brain do the work. It is said that some of her early paintings and the paintings of other op-artists  caused nausea and the feeling of seasickness in some viewers.

In Movement in Squares (1961) the illusion of movement and a deep fold are created by reducing the width of the squares and massing them together.

In Blaze Study (1962) and Blaze 1 (1962), she has created a series of zigzag lines radiating out from an offset centre, with each line changing direction where it intersects with a series of invisible offset circles. They both give a strong sense of movement as well as the impression of depth.

While researching, I came across a couple of things she had said about her work, which I  felt were appropriate to include:

“Rythm and repetition are at the root of movement. They create a situation within which the most simple basic forms start to become visually active. By massing them and repeating them, they become more fully present.”

“Colour as light, and colour as paint behave in quite different ways. It was artists such as Monet and Seurat who taught us to make paint behave as light does, by dividing up the colour on  the canvas, so that it works optically, only mixing in the actual process of seeing it when the painting starts to live.”

For me, op-art is  very technical and theoretical, but nonetheless very visual and beautiful, and I think there is a lot to be learnt for the textile artist in terms of her approach to shape, line and colour.   

PAULINE BURBIDGE

I have chosen Pauline Burbidge as the third artist to study for a number of reasons. I have admired her work ever since it first started becoming known to the public in the 1970s / 1980s; she has worked in black and white a lot; and I was fortunate enough to see her retrospective exhibition  at the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in August

.

Published to go with the exhibition is a catalogue “Pauline Burbidge Works between 1975 and 2012” Apart from two short introductory essays, Pauline has written the commentary herself, and it explains how and why she started making quilts and how and why her work has developed and changed over the years.

It is fascinating to discover that one of the influences on her early quilts, which  are geometric and often include a lot of black and white, was Bridget Riley.  Good examples are Maple Leaf Quilt (1975) and Mirrored Steps (1983), both of which are illustrated in the catalogue, but I can’t find any images on line.

In the mid eighties, she started to introduce collage techniques and piece in a freer way. A good example of this is The Pink Fish (1991). Initially she worked with templates, but gradually she started cutting the fabric shapes directly and bonding then in place. She made a number of large studio quilts, often in series, eg the Reflections series, and inspired by the countryside around her. A lovely example is Dancing Lines which, along with other studio quilts, can be seen on Pauline's website.

In 2005, after having made a number of studio quilts, she started to develop a series of what she describes as "a new designer/maker range of quilts that were quicker to make and therefore more commercial", which she called the Quiltline Collection.These are generally whole-cloth quilts, machine stitched using a Grace quilting frame,with colour applied afterwards with a sponge. 

Also during this period she developed a series of what she calls "Stitch Drawings" a selection of which can be seen on her website. These are quite small, maybe 30 or 40cms. She draws with her machine stitched lines, applying paint afterwards using nature as her inspiration. The heading at top of the pages of her website include some sketchbook drawings which I think must have been preparatory to this body of work.

She has now returned to making big studio quilts eg Lindisfarne Revisited, which was in the exhibition. She describes the making process in great detail in the book.

I love her work. I am fascinated how her work has developed over the years from heavy hard-edged piecing in quite hard colours to really beautiful, much more painterly and expressive pieces.