![]() Its placing encourages the eye to race along the twig, from left to right, catapulting you into its interior rhythms by the passage of twisting highlights and crisp shadows.Īs a simple exercise to start, selected your own spray of leaves. ![]() The energy comes in part from the leaf itself and its selection for study. It was executed over a couple of hours of dedicated observation using watercolour and opaque bodycolour (gouache). Ruskin’s Study of a Spray of Dead Oak Leaves, now part of the Museums Sheffield collection, has a remarkable energy to it. Experiencing their smell and weight and texture before making a study, we can use drawing and painting to better understand and appreciate these things we hold in our hands. Nonetheless there remains something singularly engaging about gathering natural forms to draw. Most scientists have moved away from using a drawing as primary means of enquiry, while many artists have become used to working from secondary reference – photos and film – of their subjects. Far from being stuffy Victorian watercolours, I found them incredibly engaging, often playing around with the scale of the subject and presenting well observed images in engaging compositions. Visiting the Ashmolean’s prints and drawings room last year, I had the chance to view somemore of Ruskin’s paintings of shells and feathers. The Big Draw is particularly active during autumn, with events taking place nationwide throughout October, furthering Ruskin’s mission to help people better understand the world through drawing. Ruskin’s substantial cultural legacy included the founding of the Guild of St George in 1871, a charitable trust that in turn launched The Big Draw (previously the Campaign for Drawing) in 2000. His intention was that students “might see greater beauties than they had hitherto seen in nature and in art, and thereby gain more pleasure in life”. His dedication to art education led him to write the influential The Elements of Drawing and to establish a teaching collection of nearly 1,500 works of art at the University of Oxford, where he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art.Īn ardent anti-capitalist, Ruskin was committed to social causes and established a drawing school (now the Ruskin School of Art) at Oxford for the education of ordinary men and women. The contributions he made as a patron and critic outweigh his own artistic impact, although his competence as a draughtsman and watercolourist would have given him an insight into the work of the painters that he wrote about which few contemporary art critics could match. His troubled relationship with women and struggles with mental health ran parallel to a life dedicated to literature, architecture and the visual arts. John Ruskin was an undeniably complex character. In this article, I’ll be looking at the study as a means of enquiry and image making, taking John Ruskin’s Study of a Spray of Dead Oak Leaves as a starting point and making my own watercolour of the same subject. ![]() ![]() They are studies in the truest sense – drawings and paintings which interrogate their subject, made to further personal understanding through observation. An exponent of using drawing as a means of appreciating the beauty of the natural world, Ruskin believed that in order to paint a landscape correctly one should understand every element of it, down to the tiniest leaf and flower.Įxploring the myriad interpretations of the genre of still life, this series has mostly looked at still life painting as art making, but Ruskin’s nature studies (and, in fact, the observational drawings of so many post-enlightenment naturalists) should be viewed through the dual lens of artistic expression and scientific enquiry. In the fifth and final volume of his Modern Painters series of books, Victorian artist and art critic John Ruskin famously remarked, “If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world”. © Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield Link copied to clipboard Jake Spicer shows how to draw a leaf like John Ruskin in this series on how different artists tackle everyday objects John Ruskin, Study of a Spray of Dead Oak Leaves, 1879, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 14.4×18.8cm ![]()
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