visual language - marks, colour, tone. speed and a bit of collage

Liquid, collage, hand made sketchbook experiment. Vivien Blackburn

I've been talking to friends and students about visual language a lot just lately.

Playing a Suzanne Vega CD in the car coming home, some of her lyrics echoed the conversations - so visual and expressive:

If language were liquid

It would be rushing in

Instead here we are

In a silence more eloquent

Than any word could ever be

These words are too solid

They don't move fast enough

To catch the blur in the brain

That flies by and is gone

Gone

Gone

Gone

...........

and

Find the line,

find the shape

Through the grain

Find the outline,

things will

Tell you their name

Suzanne Vega, from Language and Night Vision

'too solid' - 'don't move fast enough to catch the blur in the brain' before it's gone - yes that's sketching in the landscape with our changing English light. Fleeting flashes of sunlight or passing clouds on the sea or a hillside, pure drama . This is why so often I like to sketch in oils, it's possible to add the light back over darks, make major changes on the run. Trying to catch the blur in the brain.

Regular sketching plein air helps you build a visual vocabulary - a shorthand that helps you catch these things quickly - but never quickly enough!

Using a wide variety of marks makes the difference between the equivalent of cheapo Romantic Fiction and Literature. A varied language of marks in your head to draw on at need means it's easier to catch what interests you.

I encourage students to 'play' in sketchbooks trying out all sorts of ways of using their paints, combining them, mixing unusual combinations of media to see what happens, using tools other than paintbrushes like twigs, credit cards, the edges of card, spray bottles, combs, splattering, flicking paint, scratching through, pouring, adding collage, varying the speed at which marks are made - a mark made faster is freer than a slow and careful mark, experiment with this etc etc etc ...... once learned they can use these as appropriate (but never simply as gimmicks please! ).

And the silence so important - the quiet parts of a painting that allow the busier parts to shine. It's so easy to lose the quiet areas with overworking.

Painting and Drawing is a language like French or English - a vocabulary of marks, colour, tone, line, shape, balance, intervals , edges, mass, composition, surface ..... anything else? I'm sure there are things I haven't listed :>) The bigger your vocabulary to use at need the easier to express what you want :>)