54 Artists & Illustrators
STILL LIFE DRAWING
EXERCISE The Fundamental
language of drawing
Ellsworth Kelly’s abstraction pared
back the visual language of art
making to its fundamental properties.
His paintings and coloured
lithographs presented shapes that
were translated from elements of the
observed world and through their
translation became something new.
Ashesaidofhisownwork:
“The point is, my paintings don’t
represent objects. They are objects
themselves and fragmented
perceptions of things.”
Kelly particularly admired the work
of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse,
yet whereas Picasso’s line drawings
orbit around his own ego and Matisse
subsumesallflowersandfruitintopattern, Kelly’s drawings honour
the truth of his eye.
The artfulness of his botanical
drawings lies in their selectivity,
with much of the work done outside
of the drawing itself, exemplifying
some of the fundamental lessons
of observational drawing – the
perceptionofshapeandedge.Negative Space
Observing the shapes of the (negative)
spaces around our (positive) subject
is one of the most helpful lessons of
objective drawing – it helps us to see our
subject clearly and avoid simply drawing
it as we think it should look.
It is a simple, foundational lesson
and yet it always bears repeating.Contour
A contour drawing describes edges
through the visual language of line. In fact,
the word contour is French for “outline”.
A true contour drawing avoids mapping
the tonal distinctions within a subject.
Ellsworth Kelly’s drawings are, for the
large part, studies of contour and rarely
attempt to deal with the illusion of three-
dimensional form.Original arrangement