Summer Sketchbook 2016

Rhododendron (young leaves and stems)

Two studies of Yucca flowers

Colour palette

View from my studio window (10pm, East Court)

Royal Drawing School: A Private Selling Exhibition

January 23 – February 7 2016

The Royal Drawing School's US inaugural exhibition of drawings at Christie's New York runs alongside Master Drawings Week New York 2016 and Christie's Old Master and British Drawings sale. More info here.

Chrysanthemum

Chrysanthemum, silverpoint on pink prepared paper

by Michelle Cioccoloni (2015)

(detail)

Upcoming exhibition: Drawing in the Prado

Press release / MERCER CHANCE GALLERY is proud to present an exhibition of drawings by young artist Michelle Cioccoloni, a recent graduate of the Royal Drawing School, London. In 2014 she received the Richard Ford Award, a travel scholarship for figurative artists to travel to Spain in order to study the Spanish Masters. Michelle has recently returned from three-months of intensive practice-based research at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid. Drawing from the paintings in the museum's vast collection, Michelle was able to carry out in-depth study of works by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. 

During her time at the Prado, Michelle used drawing to investigate each piece, using the hand and eye to lead the mind toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of the artist’s conception. Translating paintings into drawings requires the artist to condense the painting’s structure and effects into a form that reveals the essence of it’s meaning. It is not a process of replication or simplification, nor can it be considered reductionist, since the artist seeks to chart the relations between the elements of a picture in order to arrive at its meaning as a whole. In that respect it is also perhaps a circular process; in a painting’s initial impact upon us, we perceive it as a whole - a dramatic perceptual event - then, through our prolonged study we break it apart in order to put it back together and learn its secrets. In her drawings Michelle has successfully combined these two modes of perception through a masterful and intuitive marriage of line and tone. Each drawing exposes the essential ideas expressed formally within the painting, whilst also conveying a feeling of it’s immediate sensational impact. 

Michelle soon realized that “the prevailing mood of the collection had a strong dramatic component, with extreme emotions, extreme passions... often the result of strong contrasts

between light and shadow. What most pictures in the ‘Spanish Manner’ seem to share is a sense of desperation”. You would imagine that creating sustained studies of these dark, psychologically intense imaginative worlds would take its toll on the artist, yet we sense  Michelle fearlessly squaring up to them, utterly composed, emerging with a piece of her own that is ruthless and direct in its enquiry, yet nuanced and beautiful in its execution.  

Working from Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’ was captivating and revelatory. Michelle: “I was able to linger over every face for quite some time and scrutinize every part of the picture. The longer I spent looking at them, the more contradictions I noticed, especially in the way [Goya] renders the forms and features.” The people in his late paintings are effortlessly, economically described, yet unquestionably there. Their form is utterly palpable whilst equally beguiling, distorted by motion and emotion into bizarre semi-human shapes. Michelle has investigated these forms by making a series of sculptural heads from her drawings, physically manifesting the strange logic of the artist’s imaginative vision. 

SPECIAL EVENT:  Artist Talk Sunday 14th June 6:00 - 7:30pm 

An informal tour of the exhibition with the artist; a rare chance to view the 

artist’s sketchbooks and hear about the distinct approach she developed 

during her three month residency at The Prado Museum. 

For press enquires, photo/interview requests and sales contact: info@mercerchance.co.uk 

Mercer Chance Studio Gallery, 253 Hoxton Street, N1 5LG 

Francesco

'Francesco', charcoal on paper

after Diego Velázquez (Francisco Lezcano, el Niño de Vallecas, 1645)

 detail (click to enlarge)

Glass dish

Michelle Cioccoloni, Study of a glass dish from the Qing Dynasty

Ink on paper (13 x 10 cm)

' I think we live more through the intensity of our affects than through time or space; we're never really present in time or space, since we can only be in one place at a time and only live through an hour once '

                                  

Louise Bourgeois, 1951

Venus in a Shell

Ink drawing of the sculpture Venus in a shell II (1932) by Henri Matisse on display in the current exhibition Henri Matisse: Cut-Outs at Tate Modern 

Venus in a Shell I

Venus in a Shell II

The two bronze versions of Venus in a Shell reflect opposing modes of sculptural expression that Matisse explored in other works at the beginning of the 1930s. The smooth surface, rounded volumes and generalized form of Venus in a shell I reflect the same formal concerns and curvaceous sensuality of works such as Tiari. Venus in a Shell II exhibits the rough angularity, carved planar surfaces and raw physicality seen in Large Seated Nude.

Large Seated Nude (1925-29), Henri Matisse

Similar juxtapositions of refined and coarse treatments of a subject appear in series or complimentary compositions throughout his career, beginning with Madeleine I and II and continuing through Reclining Nude II and III and the complete series of Backs.  

Backs (1955), Henri Matisse

Matisse’s rendering of the goddess of Beauty has its roots in both the poetic and the mundane. Preparatory drawings he made at this time to illustrate the book Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé echo the pose and composition of Venus in a Shell. 

In the drawings a curvaceous seated nude with arms above her head emerges from surrounding forms. The oft-noted source for this was a photograph Matisse had taken in Tahiti of a cloud formation that looked to him like a nude woman rising from a billowy source. 

The artist associated this vision with a poem by Théophile Gautier that described a sculpted cloud against the sky, rising like a nude maiden from the water of a lake and echoing the myth of the birth of Venus, who emerged from the ocean on a clam shell. One also finds this evocation of the birth of Beauty in the painting The Yellow Dress, in which Matisse represents his stunning young model as a chaste torso emerging from her billowing gown. 

The Yellow Dress (1931), Henri Matisse

For Matisse, this vision of the birth of Beauty also evoked the more quotidian scene of the modern bather. Studies for Venus in a Shell recall his earlier drawings of bathing women such as The Bath and Woman Standing in a Tub. The drawings represent the artist’s first attempts to come to grips with the formal aspects that he tackles in Venus in a Shell. Venus in a Shell II was the last sculpture Matisse modeled until 1949. It was at this point that he began cutting paper shapes with scissors. The cut-outs would become his primary sculptural vehicle for the rest of his life. 

Blue Nude (1952), Henri Matisse

La Nascita di Venere (1486), Sandro Botticelli

The Birth of Venus (1486), Sandro Botticelli

Seurat, a video essay

You can click here to watch a recent film I made about the artist Georges Seurat (1859-91)

Composition with 18 leaves

Medium: Burgundy ink on Saunders Waterford Rough paper

(detail)

Sun Red Plums

‘ Colours are absolutely interdependent. They interact, merge and generate new colour in such complex ways that to make them work, one has to think of them in groups, in clusters, in relationships and push them around until they become not only several things, but also simultaneously one thing, something which isn’t form or shape as such, but rather an activity, an activity which comes out at you, that can throw something off the canvas, suspended as it were between you and the painted surface. ’ -Bridget Riley 

detail from 'The Arnolfini Portrait' by Jan van Eyck (1434)

The National Gallery, London

Pear or Plum

Pear or Plum, ink on Saunders Waterford paper

Gold

'Remember I look at everything'  -Francis Bacon

Cylindrical gold bell (900 AD - 1600 AD) from Museo del Oro, Bogota, Colombia and on loan to The British Museum, London from October 2013 to March 2014

Dimensions of the object: 8.5 x 3.6 cm 
Ink on Saunders Waterford paper

Three Apples

Three Apples on a Windowsill, ink on Saunders Waterford paper

Fruits like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen. 

-Paul Cezanne

British Drawings: 1600 to the Present Day

There are some beautiful drawings on show at The Victoria and Albert Museum in a temporary display in Room 90. The exhibition British Drawings: 1600 to the Present Day covers 400 years of drawing practice and includes works by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Cozens, Rossetti, Spencer and Freud alongside 17th and 19th century drawing manuals and the sketchbooks of John Constable, George Romney and John Flaxam.

Isaac Fuller, Self-portrait (1670)

Isaac Fuller (1606/1620?-1672) studied in France, and became a portraitist and history painter. According to the first historian of British art, Baynbrigg Buckeridge, Fuller had 'a great genius for drawing'. This particular work relates to two similar self-portrait oil paintings, one in the National Portrait Gallery (London) and the other in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was probably made either as a preparatory drawing for a print, or perhaps as a work of art in its own right.

Frederic Leighton, Study of a Lemon Blossom, Capri (1859)

Frederic Leighton was one of the most celebrated draughtsmen of the Victorian era. As a young man he was influenced by John Ruskin’s advice to ‘go to Nature in all singleness of heart… rejecting nothing and selecting nothing’. Leighton trained in Frankfurt under Eduard von Steinle, a member of the ‘Nazarene’ group of artists which rejected conventional academic art as superficial. Steinle taught Leighton the importance of crisp outline.

Edwin Landseer, Drawing of an écorché greyhound (1817-21)

Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) was one of the most phenomenally successful artists of the Victorian era. His profound understanding of animal anatomy, upon which he built his career, was achieved through rigorous observation of écorché (skinned) specimens. In this he was encouraged by the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, who later claimed that Landseer had 'dissected animals under my eye, copied my anatomical drawings, and carried my principles of study into animal painting'. Landseer attended classes in anatomy run by the famous surgeon Sir Charles Bell from his premises in Soho, London. This drawing is one of a group of eight anatomical studies of dogs and cats in the V&A which Landseer made between 1817 and 1821, when he was still in his teens.

Samuel Palmer, Drawing (1824) 

Samuel Palmer was one of the most unconventional and experimental draughtsman of his generation. Drawings and inscriptions in a sketchbook he began in the summer of 1824 at the age of 19 document his intense, visionary approach to nature as he walked in the fields and woods of south east London, near to where he was born.

John Constable, Sketchbook

The exhibition continues until 13 April 2014

Also on in London: 

Emilio Greco at The Estorick Collection and Daumier at The Royal Academy of Art

380 drawings

The Drawing Year 2012-13 End of Year Exhibition

The Prince’s Drawing School, 19-22 Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3SG

6th December 2013 – 17 January 2014 / 9am to 9pm, Monday – Friday

Closed for Christmas and New Year between Saturday 21st December and Wednesday 1st January inclusive

Clover

View of Dumfries House looking West

Ink on Ingres paper

(detail)

The Tapestry Room (2)

Ink on Saunders Waterford Rough paper

Dawn

The Tapestry Room