matt harvey art
Portrait paintings, art demonstrations, figurative painting, landscapes
Drawing practice
Posted on July 21, 2017
The most intense ‘drawing’ experience I have had is when I am carving directly into marble. This piece was done from photos with some simple measurements I took with a set of callipers as a guide (not easy with a baby – generally done while she was asleep!) With marble carving any wrong move would ruin the whole thing and a months work, making it pretty stressful but a great discipline. Because of that pressure I think I improved my ‘looking’. For me drawing is about making a mark, and then checking it, and checking again, and deeply looking at the subject. I even feel that the depth of the looking etches the subjectivity of the artist on the media they are working, be it drawing, painting or sculpture. I don’t know what that subjectivity is but its an emotion, and its possible to embody that emotion in a work of art. Making a sculpture in the round is like doing hundreds of drawings simultaneously. Without drawing, or when the drawing is lacking, the painting’s ruined.
In my experience CUTTING CORNERS with drawing is the biggest waste of time and I have probably wasted YEARS of my life throwing good after bad in paintings, going over and over attempting corrections when all the effort could have been saved with earlier checks. Its the ultimate false economy..
‘Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting… Drawing contains everything, except the hue’. (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres) from Art Quotes
Portrait sculpture, Direct marble carving
Posted on March 1, 2017
For this piece I made a clay model which was in turn worked up from photos, and then using the clay model as a reference I carved directly into the marble. I didn’t use a pointing machine or anything, but I do use callipers to measure distances between say eyes to bottom of nose, width of mouth etc. I hew off large areas first, for example the width of the head down to the shoulders can all come off at right angles, then the distance between the projection of the nose and the rest of the face, then down to the cheeks. You can see an example of this in the photo below of another portrait sculpture where the tip of the nose is still square. This is a method I picked up when working as a stone mason in the Wells Cathedral yard, where I worked while taking a year out of art school. #art #devonartistnetwork #carraramarble #carrara #stonecarving #sculpture #portrait #portraitart #portraitsculpture #elbowgrease
Portrait of a baby in Carrara marble, direct carved using hand tools
Posted on April 21, 2013
Miki, Carrara marble – This was a portrait commission for a marble bust of a child. Carved over one month in hand tools, working directly from photo references
Alice’ carved in Carrara Marble. 20x25x20cm. The sculpture is created from photos – One master photo, and then others to guide the 3D form. When someone smiles the cheeks get pulled up, they then narrow the eyes, the ears get pulled a bit, the neck creases.. All these things need to be pulled together at the same time to create the piece. Working in stone always makes me think of a Nichiren Buddhist quote: ‘It is like the case of a fishing net: though the net is composed of innumerable small meshes,when one pulls on the main cord of the net, thereare no meshes that do not move. Or it is like a garment: though the garment is composed of countless tiny threads, when one pulls on a corner of the garment, there are no threads that are not drawn along.’ The 2 milk teeth were fun to carve, but I need to get some really small chisels to carve inside the mouth
