I’m three quarters of the way through the latest portrait in my ‘Reading Men’ series and my thoughts are turning to teapots.
There’s no obvious connection to Charles, the nude male figure currently on my drawing board, other than the fact that he, like a teapot, doesn’t have legs (not yet, at least, as I always draw them last).
It’s more to do with the slow, mysterious germination of ideas and the urgency with which they present themselves. There’s always a sense when one arrives that it comes with an imperative to strike while the iron’s hot.
The seed of this one was planted while I was having breakfast in a restaurant called Dishoom (a London based chain which, if you haven’t visited, I would highly recommend). The metal teapot that was placed in front of me was plain, functional-looking and in no obvious position to compete with the myriad visual demands of the space. But something about the lights and the pattern of the table cloth, compressed and stretched on the curvature of its reflective surface, was briefly arresting. So I took a reference photo.
Now the image has risen without warning from the cloudy depths of my mind and is demanding to be drawn or painted. Obviously I don’t want to abandon Charles in his unfinished, legless state, nor do I intend to interrupt the ‘Reading Men’ series by starting a new project. But it’s in a situation like this, where I need to give form to an idea without interrupting the workflow, that I dive into my sketchbook.
For me, sketching is often the precursor to a ‘final’ piece, its function being mainly preparatory. These works from my ‘Swimming’ series are good examples of this. In each case the sketchbook drawing was intended as the composition for a larger piece, and I was exploring form and colour with a view to translating the work into oil paint.
Sketch
Oil painting
Sketch
Oil painting
In other instances, though, the sketch feels like it satisfies the creative impulse on its own terms, and is thus a final work in its own right. That’s the case with this picture of a swan. I was inspired to draw it after spotting it in Cambridge, but have never felt the urge to take it beyond the sketchbook.
That’s not to say, of course, that pieces which were initially only intended as sketches can’t go on to become compositions for larger, more refined works.
Here, for example, a client commissioned a still life drawing based on my sketch of a silver butter dish:
Whether the teapot composition that’s currently preoccupying me turns out to have a life outside the sketchbook remains to be seen. But if creating the sketch alongside the drawing of Charles lets me satisfy two creative impulses simultaneously then the sketchbook will have served a useful purpose.