Hi everyone, and welcome to Drop-in Drawing, The Met’s virtual art-making program where
we bring our collection to you with a series of artmaking activities meant to grow and
challenge your creative skills.
My name is Maud Leclair and I am a research assistant for South and Southeast Asian Art
here at the Met.
I am also a painter working on paper.
Today we are going to focus on how to create an abstract painting based on the observation
of an object.
I encourage you to browse the Met online collection to find an object that you like, but you can
also work from any object you have at home, or wherever you are watching this video.
For me, I chose a Nepalese sculpture from the 16th century that represents the head
of the Hindu god Bhairava, who is a wrathful manifestation of the god Shiva.
This object is pretty large, like a Mickey Mouse mask, and it is made of copper, gilded,
painted and inlaid with stones.
The head of Bhairava was used during the Indrajatra festival that took place in late September
in the city of Kathmandu.
The head of Bhairava was displayed on carts and platforms.
But interestingly it was not used as a mask.
It was used to funnel beer from a cask behind the mask through a tube positioned in the
hole that you can see in the mouth of the head.
The beer, which was seen as infused with the power and blessings of the god Bhairava, was
drunk by the faithful.
This object hangs in the very first room of the exhibition "Making The Met", that celebrates
the 150th anniversary of The Museum.
So if you can make it to the Met when it reopens, be sure to check it out!
Going back to the description of the head of Bhairava, the skin of the god is gold and
the hair is red.
The face has fearsome features such as fangs, flames coming out of the mouth, wide bulging
eyes, and eyebrows made of flames.
The god also wears a headpiece decorated with snakes, skulls, lotus medallions and other
floral patterns.
So this object is pretty dense visually and when I look at it, I feel rage and energy,
life, power.
And this is exactly what I am going to try to express, to make visible in my painting.
And you, what do you feel when you look at this object?
I invite you to think of what kind of emotion you want to capture and translate through
this activity.
But we are not going to use the Bhairava head as a model per.
We’re going to us it purely as inspiration.
We are going to rely on empirical observation to understand what it makes us feel.
And then we are going to allow ourselves to step back and abstract some elements, paint
them in a simplified manner and combine them in a novel way that expresses a particular
mood, a particular state of mind that we feel when we look at this object.
So I will use watercolor paint as well as an eraser, a pencil and a ruler and I will
apply the watercolor with brushes, using small recipients to mix the paint with the water.
And you can see here that I have already prepared a few colors.
You can also work with pastels or colored pencils or any another color medium if you
don't have or prefer not to use watercolor.
For the paper, if you’re working with watercolor, I suggest a thicker paper but if you’re
working with another color medium, you can use any paper you have at home, this could
be printer paper or even a piece of a brown paper bag.
And once you’ve got all your materials, let’s get started!
So first, let’s draw a rectangle that frames the area we are going to paint.
I am leaving margins that are approximately half an inch wide.
It will allow the painting to breathe when I am finished.
And while i'm doing that, let’s choose a composition that translates the bursting awesome energy of
the face of Bhairava.
Let’s have a look at the sculpture again.
We can see that the main lines point in all directions: the lines of the nose and the
third eye on the forehead are vertical, the lines of the mouth and of the eyes are horizontal,
the hair braids point upwards diagonally and the earrings point downwards diagonally.
So to translate this explosion of lines, I am going to paint following a center-focused
composition.
So I just marked the center of the sheet and now I’m tracing guidelines that go all the
way to the edges of the rectangle and in all directions.
And then I am going to fill in these areas defined by the guidelines keeping in mind
all the elements of the Bhairava face that I noticed as striking elements in my description
of this object in the introduction.
These elements are the snakes, the flames, the skulls, the flower petals, the wide-open eyes, etc.
Let’s start with snakes.
First, I am going to focus on the snake at the very top of the headpiece, in the center.
“To abstract” means literally to remove, to withdraw.
For me, “abstracting” an artistic element is not anything scary or complicated.
Rather it is the opposite, it means to find the most simple part of it that I like, and
to play with that pure element on its own.
Here I am removing the head of the snake, meaning I am not representing it, I am removing
its scales, meaning I’m not representing them either, and I’m just painting the general
shape of the snake, the curls of its body.
I am also removing its color: on the Bhairava head, the snakes are gilded.
Here, I am painting this snake in turquoise blue that I borrow from another part of the
Bhairava head, that is the turquoise inlays on the headpiece.
So I always paint the outline first, and then I fill in the shape.
And you can paint the patterns wherever you want on your sheet.
As you can see, I am just broadly positioning the snake motif along the guidelines I drew
just to keep a global outward movement.
So as I am finishing my first pattern here, you can see that what I painted is reminiscent
of a snake, but it is not an accurate representation of a snake, where I would carefully transcribe
the proportions of the body and the head, the shape, color, and texture of the scales, etc.
And now maybe I can paint more snakes, inspired maybe by the shape of the snake earrings, for
for instance which bodies are depicted in spirals.
And this let’s paint them in red, which is one of the most impressive color of the Bhairava head.
And this time around I am going to change the scale: on the Bhairava head, the snakes
are small compared to the size of the object.
On my painting, I am going to make them pretty large because in general curvy shapes such
as spirals or waves convey an impression of motion, of flow, of life, which is exactly
what I want to do in order to render the might of the Bhairava head.
And while I’m filling in the shape here, here is a composition tip: I don’t want
to have a painting that has the same density everywhere, whether it would be predominantly
small forms, or predominantly large forms, etc.
If the scale and density of the forms is the same everywhere, I will lose sense of my composition.
My eyes should be able to circulate in the painting from light areas to busy areas, from
light colors to deep colors, from big forms to small forms, etc.
If it is too homogeneous, my eyes will be lost, which can also be a very interesting
artistic effect, but this is not what I want to achieve here.
I want to help draw a viewer’s eye down a particular path, showing a particular way
of looking around the painting as if you were following a route on a map.
In a few words, I need contrast and this is what I am going work on by considerably scaling
down the next motif I am going to paint, which is the motif of the flame.
On the Bhairava head, the flames are represented as delicately designed swirls.
Here again, I am just keeping the general flowing movement of the scrolls.
And I am going to paint a multitude of tiny flames next to one another to create a very
dense area that will contrast with the areas I just filled with larger snake shapes.
Well, I will not have the time to paint that many flames in this video, but you get the idea.
And here is another composition tip: in order to make this area even richer visually,
I am also going to play with color contrast on top density contrast.
Here for instance, I painted the first flames in blue, and now I am going to paint in red.
Again, you do not have to strictly follow the guidelines, you can paint over them,
they are just here to guide you.
And here the watercolor I’m using is rather opaque so I’m not worried about the guidelines
being visible.
While I am finishing these flames, let’s think of our next pattern.
My inspiration object represents a face so I want to extract at least one element that
will recall that specific aspect.
And I think that integrating some eye patterns in my painting would be a strong way to suggest
the idea of a face, and a way to bring my painting to life and give it a gaze, so to speak.
So as I’ve done so far, I am going to keep the general shape of the eye: let’s start
with the pupil that I am painting with this very deep blue, and then I will do the rest
of the eye.
So it is always a little bit difficult to paint a circle.
And I haven’t mentioned it so far but of course you can always trace the shape you
want to paint with a pencil first.
And let’s think once more about composition.
I want to avoid having all the shapes sitting next to each other which I have been doing
so far but it tends to make the painting look rather flat.
So instead, I am overlapping my shapes by painting only the parts that would be visible
if the eye, in this case, was partially behind the flame shapes.
This is going to give depth and movement to the painting, as if the different elements
were floating on top of one another.
The gaze of Bhairava being particularly dynamic and potent, I definitely want to use that
type of device to give to my painting a sense of vigor and vitality.
With all this in mind, I can keep painting until my rectangle is full, adding concentric
circles of lotus petals as we can see on the headpiece of Bhairava, or crescent shapes
as we can also see in Bhairava’s hair.
And I can also make up my own shapes such as rays that start from the center and go
all the way to the edges of the rectangle.
When I work on center-focused compositions, I like to add rays because they reinforce
the composition and they lend to the painting a dynamic outward movement.
Actually I am going to quickly paint a ray just to give you an idea of what I was just explaining.
And it would take me probably a couple of hours to finish this painting, the final step
being to erase the guidelines.
But other than that, it is always the same process.
Here is an example of a finished painting.
You can see how I created contrast by alternating light areas and dense areas, and by juxtaposing colors.
You can also see how the guidelines allowed me to create this bursting center-focused
composition to create an abstract interpretation of the Bhairava head.
It was a pleasure to make this abstract painting with you today, and I hope you enjoyed it
too and you are inspired to make your own.
Abstract painting is something that has connotations of complexity, but it is all about feeling
free to borrow what strikes you the most in an artwork to express in your own language
what you see as the essence of this artwork.
Please be sure to share your abstract work with us on social media and be sure to tag
it with hashtag Met Sketch.
Thank you for joining, and we will see you back here in two weeks for another edition
of Drop-in Drawing.