Day: November 29, 2020

Jon Snow

Jon Snow

This week’s final one-hour live portrait-drawing session on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, painted in oils by Catherine MacDiarmid. As the camera kept cutting to her explaining the progress of the painting, she made it onto the top right hand corner of my page, above Portrait Artist presenter Joan Bakewell.

Jon explained the cunning plan behind his brightly-coloured tie: when he’s interviewing people they’re attracted to the tie, which distracts them from scrutinising his face too closely. It didn’t work on Catherine though, as she added a suggestion of the tie only towards the end of her 4-hour session with him. She explained that she invariably starts a portrait with the ‘golden triangle’ of eyebrows and nose. Once she’s established that she introduces the rest of the face but she’s content not to define the edges, she lets them move freely until she’s happy with them. The mouth, which she finds one of the most difficult features, is usually the last to go in.

Jon’s preference for colour was to extend to his shirt – he thought that he should wear blue – but Catherine requested white as she’s keen on reflected light, even adding a subtle dash of reflected colour of the tie below his chin.

Wood Sculpture

carvings

These carved off-cuts of 3×3 inch timber are my attempts from my school days at abstract sculpture, responding to the grain in the wood. Despite my aims, I think that they’ve ended up looking like Kon-Tiki style totem pole figures, so they seem to have a back and a front side.

Drawing them over fifty years later, I’m also reminded of the blocks and joints of the old sandstone quarry on Storrs Hill, which I used to walk past, and sometimes climb on, on my way to and from Ossett Grammar School.

The larger one seems more successful to me. It’s some kind of softwood, perhaps pine, so I was able to gouge into it to bring out target patterns in the grain. The smaller one is beech which has a regular smooth grain, so the shapes that I carved don’t have the same unified look as the pine version.

Barbara and I both think that the smaller carving looks like a female figure. From one angle Barbara can imagine that she’s sitting on a throne, so perhaps they’re like the king and queen in a chess set.