Another excellent exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (the video's in this link are worth watching) its just a bit difficult to get to from my house. Each "room" was dedicated to a different subject, landscapes, portraits, animals and architecture with some examples of posters advertising films and illustrations. Bawden did lots of different things including writing and illustrating his own books and being a war artist. His style still looks fresh and he clearly is an influence on many artists working today. I can see similarities with Emma Block and Sandra Dieckmann in the way that she handles plants.
Bawden used pen and ink, lino cuts, collage, pastels and watercolour. His use of watercolour is looks almost as though he has coloured in with a felt tip, you can see the lines. I think that he was working with a lot less water than most people do now. I don't know if the pictures have faded or if he used a muted palette for most of his work, maybe printing ink availability was a factor? (pictures showing colour palette and brush lines here) Lots of earthy browns and greens and pastel shades. Some of his more recent works had splashes of primary colours, I was reminded of an artist, I think that it was Richard Alomar, who said that colours add information they don't follow lines.
He avoided life drawing at art college but, as a war artist,was required to draw people. His drawings of groups of people are lively and give a feeling of the atmosphere even thought they aren't always accurate. I need to learn from this, I reject, or overwork my own figure drawings that I don't feel are accurate enough.
My favourite pictures were the post war prints of buildings like Brighton Pier and Borough Market, but the picture that I would most like to own is this painting of Menelik's Palace, the Old Gebbi. It doesn't look quite as good on a screen but I found the lines, angles and contrasts fascinating. It's an odd subject but it's one of those paintings that you could have on a wall and keep finding new things in it even after looking at it for years. Bawden wasn't a minimalist and he managed to make busy pictures coherent.
Design Week Review
(Oh and I'd never noticed that Edward backwards is drawde!)
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