Half way through this term already.

“Just wait” Giacometti warned, “I’m going to wreck it now.”…Before long he said “it’s impossible. I don’t know how to do anything. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to work on this picture for another day or two, and then, if it doesn’t turn out to be any good I’ll give up painting forever.”

A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord

On day 6 I thought I would do a drawing, I started out by drawing a new set of buildings, based on a still taken from the video. I thought I would keep it quite spare but in the end did the opposite.

 

I had a drawing I’d done of a photo of young guy looking at his phone on the train, also a photocopy of a photo of me in the train window. I added these to the drawing of the buildings.  I tried to make these less substantial by cutting into them, cutting out chunks, so they blended into the drawing. Also drew over them.

   
 

So first I had this: which wasn’t bad.

  
 

Then I did more drawing, with charcoal, ink with pen and brush, ending up with something far too cluttered. 

I think I ruined it by trying to draw everything, not drawing it well enough. 

  

I photocopied it, brought it home and, thinking about reflections on the window, tried  out tearing strips of tracing paper and overlaying them. Better but still not right.

Going to try a couple more things – need to  look more at how reflections work on the train windows, also maybe tear up the whole thing into strips and paste it on to paper. 

Also Jon Ros made a couple of interesting suggestions about projecting the film on to the picture. Hope  I might find to do that on Sunday or Monday…