1 REMBRANDT

Heatherley School of Fine Art tutor and artist LAURA SMITH looks to the work of the Old Masters and sets a series of exercises that will improve your composition skills

LAURA SMITH

In this three-part series, we will look closely at a few paintings in terms of how they have been composed. I teach a class at The Heatherley School of Fine Art called “Drawing from Paintings in London Collections”, which normally involves a group of us meeting up at a different gallery each week, with camping stools under our arms and heading in to look at, talk about and draw from the paintings.

When the first lockdown hit, I, like a lot of people during that time, found it difficult to continue drawing. One of the few things that felt manageable was to make a small drawing from a postcard of a painting. When we took the class online, however, we missed seeing the paintings in the flesh, but there have been good surprises.

Many galleries now have high-quality images of their collections on their websites so you can zoom in and see details that can be hard to see in real life. It’s more comfortable to view them from home and there’s an unexpected intimacy to zoom discussions without echoing hallways.

Drawing from anything is a way to look more carefully and in a more searching way. It gives you a deep connection with what’s going on in front of you and puts you in the moment. It can be frustrating, but it is often very absorbing. That’s one of the things that, at the moment, we all want more than ever before. We want to get lost in an activity and forget about other things.

For me, drawing from a painting means that I look more closely at every part of the picture, even those bits that I might have ignored before. It also means that I am engaging with how the painting was constructed and the decisions that have been made.

In the same way that writing uses language to convey an idea, painting too communicates the thoughts and feelings of a human being. Ultimately, every single mark is a decision made and every brushstroke has its own tonal value, temperature, degree of saturation, speed of application and relationship with its neighbours. These all add up to the painting to which you’re responding. When you take each small area in turn and compare them, you are learning about the mind and hand behind the image.