MAGRITTE - FOLLOWING THE STYLE

About eighteen months ago Dev and I were lucky enough to go on two separate four-day courses at the Tate Liverpool, running alongside the fantastic Magritte exhibition being held at the time.

I was reminded of this because we have just booked to attend another course starting next week - 'Drawing the Line'.  This  is related to the current exhibition 'Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change'.

So, really looking forward to this because drawing is my favourite art practice.   

Back to the Magritte course, which was based on techniques and approaches he used in his paintings.

(This is a quarter of my completed cut-out)

OK, so this doesn't look anything like one of Magritte's paintings.  The course leader, Roz, focussed this challenge on his use of cut-outs in some of his work, and introduced us to the world of cut-outs at a level beyond the paper doilies we all used to cut as children.

She handed each of us a large A1-sized piece of paper and a craft knife and said 'Go!'.  Quite daunting and certainly not an easy or speedy task.  

The next image shows my completed 'creature cut-out'.

We then glued the cut image on to a backing card - colour of our choice and I chose black - with the addition of red eyes,  and red tongues that were glued only near the upper teeth.

Whew, quite a job.  But I was (and am) really pleased with the result.

We than had to apply this technique with an A2 sized acrylic painting which had to include other elements of Magritte's work.  I chose his little puffy white clouds, male figures seen from the back, and his 'out of context' bird images.
     

 Another short-time-scale task, but once again I was really pleased with the result - something I would never have painted without the inspiration of the course.

As the saying goes, waste not - want not, and so I saved the pieces cut out from the card figure and at home stuck them onto a sheet of paper.  

The shapes look completely different like this, many of them seem to be animal shapes.

Then took it further to make a 4-up image on Photoshop, which I think is quite effective.

Both 4-day sessions were fantastic and quite different from each other.

So I'm looking forward to the challenges of next week's first session of 'Drawing the Line'.