Contextual Studies Essay - Assessment task 2: Conceptualising your own work

Louise Richardson

Assessment task 2: Conceptualising your own work

Tutor name: Malcolm Moseley

In this essay I intend to show the ways Henry Moore has influenced me in my current work. Henry Moore is a sculptor, but in the second world war he was unable to made large sculptures, so instead  made a series of drawings that are today collectively called ‘Henry Moore Shelter Drawings’. They documented life in the London Underground travel system, where people safely took refuge during bombings. The image above is just one of his many famous drawings. As you can see it is very mixed media and combines a lot of very dark and very light parts. I think Moore has used items that are available to him at the time, wax from candles and coal, to create these images. I think he has made this obvious in his work, as there is no real detailing or very fine line. Most parts are smudged or done roughly.

It is the mixed media part of Henry Moore’s shelter drawings that interests me the most, I like the idea of using paint, charcoal, wax resist and other materials in one drawing as it adds texture and character. It can be used unevenly and quickly to illustrate a rough texture or can be used subtlety and softly to show more light or shadow upon a surface in some places more than others.

I could take inspiration of Henry Moore’s work into any of my favourite ways of working; Ceramics, Printmaking, Textiles and Painting especially, as shown in my image above. I have used wax crayons, oil pastels and watercolour in the drawing to create a resist effect, to show the wooden and rough texture of the table, and where the light shined more on certain parts of the wood. I left the leaves in oil pastels to keep them clean and crisp as they were in real life. I have also used a white crayon to highlight the chair leg , and darker to show the shadowing, and then I have gone over with a watercolour grey so that it shows up the actual colour of the metal in between the crayon parts, but still giving little rough dots of colour on the wax where it hasn’t resisted as well. My drawing was made 25.11.10, just a few weeks into my foundation course.

Another feature of Henry Moore’s shelter drawings is that he did not actually complete any of these in the shelters themselves, instead he observed the shelters for a short while, and then went home and draw from memory, which may explain why his drawings seem so rough and abstract. An advantage of using mixed media, especially wax resist and watercolour paints, as that you can built up layers of texture and preserve certain parts of a piece of work with wax and then go over in a different colour. I definitely want to experiment more with this way of working, in both 2D works such as drawings and paintings, and 3D work such as ceramics.

Word count: 508