How can knowing how to draw make me a better painter? This is a question that many artists used to ask, until in many ways the Impressionist movement detached oil, pastel, and watercolor work from any responsibility to what one might call an underdrawing. In many ways, the Italian painter Caravaggio, whose great canvases of varied religious subjects revolutionized Rome in the early 1600s, was the first Western artist to defy the academic pedagogy of drawing and to flaunt that tradition by leaving not a single trace of pencil or crayon drawing preliminary to his oil compositions and by exiling from his compositions any statuary or architecture that might vaguely suggest an academic element like drawing in his creative act.
How can knowing how to draw make me a better painter? This is a question that many artists used to ask, until in many ways the Impressionist movement detached oil, pastel, and watercolor work from any responsibility to what one might call an underdrawing. In many ways, the Italian painter Caravaggio, whose great canvases of varied religious subjects revolutionized Rome in the early 1600s, was the first Western artist to defy the academic pedagogy of drawing and to flaunt that tradition by leaving not a single trace of pencil or crayon drawing preliminary to his oil compositions and by exiling from his compositions any statuary or architecture that might vaguely suggest an academic element like drawing in his creative act.The drawing and oil painting of the Venetian canal from the Castello quarter or sestiero exhibited above represent a Before and After relationship of a canal citiscape. I drew the pencil study in plein air sometime in early fall 2015 and then used it as a reference inside my Rome studio for the two months that followed –November and December 2015.
Much happened in the process from one medium to another.
Among other things, I was reading a long poem by Spanish writer Lope de Vega entitled The Conquest of Jerusalem; rich in references to the Crusades and the Romantic ballads of the Middle Ages and the Knights Templar. In fact, the reading inspired more than a few pencil illustrations of the various moments of the poem (all about the great Egyptian sultan Saladin and the fabled Richard the Lion Hearted). One day when a friend from Naples (who studies the Spanish influence on Neapolitan paintings of Ribera and others in the 1600s) reminded me of one of the more memorable and (to me) magical ballads of Medieval literature, The story of Charlemagne’s Knight – In this ballad, Don Gaiferos is on a quest to liberate his beloved lady Melisendra from the hands of a corrupt caliph in the then-Moorish or Islamic city of Zaragoza, called Sansueña in the ballads.
What began as a bare-bone exercise in translation of mediums (from pencil on paper to oil on canvas), exploring how to turn line into color, suddenly took me to the fortressed city of Sansueña! I ended up painting the small figure of Melisendra high atop one of the towers on the left hand side of the view, as well as that of Gaiferos arriving on a small white rowboat to the steps of a church all the way to the right; he holds a sword and a small Templar shield in his hands to attempt the liberation of the girl.
For someone not versed in such ballads and Medieval metaphors of courage, my journey from Drawing to Color Painting illustrates not only the challenges of these two very distinct mediums and ways of seeing but also the problem of how to move the hand and the eye (of the painter, in this case) across a field.
One of the main methodologies that I applied to the painting process in order to sharpen the form of my Venetian buildings in oil was to first lay out a general color composition of the scene. As the oil dried, I went back in with only black and white paint to draw a more crisp form for those initial color versions of the bridge stones or the tall house wall in the center of the composition. In fact, to make the creamy tones of that wall more effective against the light of the sky, I had to literally draw that dimensional separation and distinctness into what was there initially, in a pretty washed out form.
I would like to add that during a second trip to Venice after that of the pencil drawing, I read various fascinating chapters from John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, as well as Aldous Huxley’s The Olive Tree, where-in these authors discuss at length the role of ornament and imagination in design and the importance of the grey tone in both the olive tree tonality but in European/Mediterranean art. In so many ways, some of the very exciting ideas contained in these two books for any painter coming to Italy, became an integral part of my creative process in this project. For me this canvas marks a very definite threshold or entranceway to a new sense of the importance of drawing in my painting, and of how lines in black and white almost summoned from the color swaths using the brush dipped in these two ends of the spectrum of color (black and white) are essential in order to make my paintings read legibly, as the lines of a philosophical text or of a romantic ballad about a young girl waiting to be rescued from the confines of a fabulous prison.
José F. Grave de Peralta, Drawing Instuctor
Rome, January 2016