cleaning the studio...

...and other adventures in art

I get asked all the time how I go about starting a painting.  Do I work from a drawing that I then copy onto the canvas?  Directly from a model? Or from photos?

Do I sketch first on the canvas?  With charcoal? Pencil? Paint?

Truth be told, I don’t have a single “method”. I try it all. Sometimes I work directly from a model, sometimes from photos, sometimes from both, or neither.

One thing I almost never do is work on a painting from a preliminary drawing. I draw, regularly, but I don’t draw to turn the drawings directly into paintings. There is not a direct and linear path from one to the other. I draw because drawing is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, and needs nothing else to recommend it.  Drawing is full of its own challenges and rewards, and it has the capacity to inform all my work.

At the moment, I’m drawing Iceland, so the title of this blog post, “In the Beginning” seems to relate.  Iceland is a landscape in the process of coming into being, and so it truly is “In the Beginning”. This one is charcoal and chalk on paper, and it’s a largish drawing, 46″x66″.

Original artwork by Barbara Downs, Talisman (II), Charcoal, Chalk, Pencil on Paper

Talisman (II), Charcoal, Chalk, Pencil on Paper, 45.75″ x 65.25″, 2014