Gwen Hardie
Gwen Hardie returns to the Essential School of Painting for a 3 day workshop on Context and Scale in Portraiture.
COURSE OUTLINE: In this 3 day workshop we will immerse ourselves into understanding why context and scale play so significant a role in portraiture.
Verge Blue by Gwen Hardie 2002
Friday July 31st
10.00am – 10:10am Participant Arrival and Welcome
10:10am – 11.00am Presentation about practice, influences and approach;
Gwen Hardie Film Presentation;
Show Film Interview from REALITY: Modern and Contemporary British Painting; Discussion about technique and concept underlying Gwen’s current practise in oil painting. Topics covered will include the significance of The Verge Paintings, The American Artists; James Turrell, Joseph Albers; The British Artists Lucien Freud. Gwen will discuss reasons for decontextualising the human image and magnifying it. Demonstrate the difference perceptually of painting on a circle/oval to a square.
11:00am- 5.00pmAims and Outline of the weekend
Context and Scale in Portraiture
Face 11.27.06 (After Ginevra)
by Gwen Hardie
2006
We will paint at least 2 oil paintings based on an observation-based self portrait ; examining the role of context; how does a background influence the image of you / what happens when you zoom into the image of yourself and do away with the background? Today we will do a self – portrait within a context, thinking of scale and light in the room we are in, with attention to how large or small we are within the context of the room, and how the light falls on us.
Demonstration/Making session begins. Demonstration on square canvas of the body as a small object in a large room, in relation to light. (10 minutes)
1pm-2pm Lunch
Saturday August 1st
10:00am Workshop starts
We begin with a demonstration of the technique of blending wet into wet oil paint; use of warm and cool colours to create a skin like effect. Gwen will magnify from observation an area of the body/face de-contextualising it, on a circle.
Today we will paint a self – portrait in close -up, without a context, choosing either another square or a circular canvas (Tondo).
1pm-2pm Lunch
4:00pm-4:30pm Group Discussion
Sunday August 2nd
Body 12.30.10
by Gwen Hardie
2010
10.00am Start
Today will be an opportunity to select one of the approaches to making a portrait from the previous 2 days and develop it more fully for the entire day.
1pm-2pm Lunch
3:30pm-4:30pm Final Group Discussion
About the Artist
Gwen’s work reads of a highly skilled and conscious artist whose awareness of the human body (and the possibilities of painting it) is immense. Her work is grounded in the human form; her early monumental single female figures expanded the scale of the figure and decreased proportionally the context. Paradoxically, they were painted in subtle colour and tonal changes to infuse life and gentleness into her subject.
In her pursuit to question and heighten awareness of the body, Gwen’s work has become more ambiguous spatially; reading at once as the small portion of skin that it is and also opening up the possibility to be read both as close-ups on a cellular level or at the other end of the spectrum, the cosmos.
Gwen Hardie’s exacting observations of her subject give the paintings their power; a delicate curve, the undulations and crevasses of the skin’s surface are evoked in subtle tonal shifts and warm/cool colours which breath life into the illusion of the body. Presented in tondos and ovals in extreme close-up with no apparent ‘context’ these works question our sense of personal boundaries.
This year Gwen was one of the artists invited to participate in REALITY: Modern and Contemporary British Painting an exhibition celebrate the strength of British art bring together some of the best and most influential artists of the last sixty years.