Drawing in Metal point
Although this video was made some years ago, it is still one of the best explanations of metalpoint - which is essentially drawing with a silver or gold wire on to a sheet of paper that has been prepared with a special undercoat. Aimed primarily at the non-artist, it covers the basic process and gives live examples of the drawing technique along with a nice collection of silverpoint and goldpoint drawings.
“O fortuna”
These videos are time-lapse creations of a metalpoint drawing that compresses over 100 hours of drawing time down to a few minutes, with each drawing filmed from blank paper to the finished artwork. The method used to create these was the traditional “stop frame” process used by Walt Disney back in the 1930’s and consists of around 1200 - 1500 frames.
O fortuna was a video created for an opera company in which the time-lapse video appears on a large-scale digital screen behind the singers and is played in synchrony with the aria.
Madam Butterfly 2
“Vogliatemi bene” is the second great aria from Puccini’s heartbreaking opera Madam Butterfly,
This drawing, in common with all of the coloured metalpoints was done in 24ct gold, pure silver, platinum, 24k gold leaf (a relatively new development) then colourised using watercolour and acrylic glaze.
I drew Butterfly as a Geisha. The abstract pattern behind her evolves into a pair of butterfly wings rendered in pure gold overlaying a painted sky recalling the unsurpassed beauty of a late Turner. The wingtips fragment and shatter, releasing a shower of golden butterflies.
“Harlem Nocturne”
The title Harlem Nocturne refers to an iconic 1939 jazz tune that perhaps more than any other piece of music evokes the feel and atmosphere of a crime noir film. The wrong guy meets the wrong gal and it goes bad. No matter the story, you know it isn’t going to end well. They are condemned by fate, doomed from the start and someone’s going to die. It could be him, it could be her, it could be someone else or all three. A one-way ticket to self-destruction. The model for my femme-fatale is Sunday, this time as a blonde bombshell with a hair-do borrowed from Lauren Bacall. She holds a smoking gun; a man lies dead at her feet. What was his crime? Whatever it was, the look on her face says it all, she was never going to be the victim in this melodrama. Her well-travelled bag is packed and she will doubtless disappear…
“Madam Butterfly”
'Un bel di vedremo' (One Beautiful Day) is the aria that every soprano dreams of singing. The composer Giacomo Puccini himself believed it was his best: “the most heartfelt and evocative opera I have ever conceived” – which raises the bar for any artist wishing illustrate this aria. In the video, each of the butterflies in the background was hand drawn, then lost as the darkness settles over the scene. As Cio-Cio-San (Madam Butterfly) fades away, the butterflies remain – immortal, as if in lasting testament to her beauty. In this drawing, the final butterflies emerging from the darkness are rendered in an almost abstract form, composed of pure gold.
“The Golden Dragonfly”
The dragonfly series of drawings were the first goldpoint images to be colourised and were an indispensable testing ground for the later photorealist works that resemble colour photographs. Beautiful images in their own right, they were also the first drawings to incorporate gold leaf. All of these images are available as very high quality artist prints each of which has been hand-gilded in gold leaf.
“Night Flight”
Very few wildlife subjects can be successfully depicted in monochrome, especially low-key renditions in black and white. Nocturnal animals are the exception because in their habitat, colour is not an issue. This goes some way to explain why I have a seemingly disproportionate number of owls and possums as subjects in my silverpoint /goldpoint work. The same is true in depicting white birds, which I invariably portray on a white background – a perfect foil for the inherent beauty and subtlety of a goldpoint drawing.
My aim in all of the Barn Owl drawings is to create an image that appears so real, that it is something of a shock to realise that it is not a photograph. I tend to pose these birds in old shed or barn windows, with all the rusty tin, lichens, decaying and weathered timber s which add to the sense of photographic realism.