One of the challenges of displaying artwork online is that the surface texture of the work can be difficult to capture in photographs. I’ve found this is particularly the case with my still life drawings, many of which are set against a dark background. People have sometimes asked me what kind of black paper I use, when in fact almost all of them are drawn on light brown paper which I then colour with black pencil. My purpose in this is to create a unity of surface across the background and the subject, so that what appears to be a black ‘void’ is in fact a mass. I do this by creating a matrix of very dense, vertical-horizontal crosshatching. These form a pattern which, though not necessarily obvious at first glance, is as much a part of the composition as the detailing on the still life scene. This is one of the features of my work that’s particularly difficult to convey in photos, and doubly so in contexts where the pictures appear as thumbnails.
Here’s an example from my portfolio: a still life drawing of the Portland Vase (a piece of Roman glassware in the British Museum collection, which you can read more about here).
And here’s a set of progress shots, where you can see how I block out the background in sections before embarking on the vase and the flowers:
Hopefully this gives a sense of how the massed black pencil imparts vitality to the colours of the still life, and also how the vase and flowers become part of the body of the background itself as the drawing progresses.
There is one piece from several years ago which I drew on black paper: a plaster cast of the ‘Belvedere Torso’ from the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Here we’re faced with a different version of the same problem, in that the texture of the paper is reduced to a block of black. Although that’s truer to life in this case, since the paper I used here is very smooth and matte.
So the conclusion is one that was obvious from the beginning, which is that the only way to appreciate the texture and surface details, which are so crucial to sense of artworks as objects, is to view them in person.