Figurative Painting with Collage by Rod Judkins

Author:Rod Judkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785000751
Publisher: Crowood

Sketchbook work – 2 (acrylic on paper) by Louis Judkins.

Sketchbook work – 3 to 5 (acrylic on paper) by Louis Judkins.

He had to work with urgency to capture the facial expressions of the passers-by. The brain and hand have to work speedily together. There is little time to reflect because the drawing has to be produced instinctively. Decisions have to be made quickly. By necessity, Louis had to strip away all unnecessary detail and capture the fundamentals of the passers-by. This led to some interesting and bold mark making using swift, dynamic brush strokes.

Painting figures on location is extremely difficult because you have to work so quickly. The beauty of it is that it is a very real situation where people are behaving naturally. In the studio you are painting a carefully posed model from a single viewpoint. Everything has been set up and composed. On location, by contrast, everyone is moving about unselfconsciously. Passers-by are fleeting and move quickly. They are in constant movement, sipping their coffee, chatting or doing a myriad of other tasks. This means the artist has to be alert to the way the figures are moving, their postures and gestures.

Louis’s sketches of passers-by are intriguing because of the mixture of observational painting and the typography and colour scheme of the paper used, creating a layering of materials but also of meaning. The background paper is sending us a message about corporate branding, while the painting is communicating observations about a unique individual. When capturing people whose presence is fleeting, the artist has to look for the most distinctive features that represent that person. In this way the paintings become an intensified version of that person’s appearance.

Towards the end of the series Louis began to use thinner but more intensively worked marks. He had become interested in the work of Alberto Giacometti, who used a technique that was the exact opposite of the strong, definite lines that Louis had been using up until that point. Giacometti used a process of trial and error. He would paint in a line, but then adjust it again and again until it was accurate. In this way he built up a history of all the failed attempts.

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