Transcription
Hello all. Uh, I'm gonna take you through, um, some of the various materials or mediums of the artworks. And I'm doing this because your lesson, um, your next lesson is going to be about how the media affects the artwork. So the medium used might affect the visual appearance of the artwork, and it might even affect the meaning of the artwork. So I'm quickly going to take you through the main materials. We're going to start off with painting.
Fresco is probably the oldest style of painting, all right? And what you're looking at here is what we call a buon fresco. Ideally, make some notes so that when it comes to the work that you've got to present to your peers in class, you can have the notes behind you and remember them when you do your presentation to make it really good. So this is a buon fresco, and it entails the artist painting into wet white plaster, and that causes a chemical reaction, um, and it causes the paint then to kind of fuse to the wall. So it's on there permanently, and it doesn't change. Um, because frescoes are painted onto walls and ceilings, they tend to be massive, all right? They tend to be really big, and so, um, artists don't need to do lots of intricate detail. If you look closely at the hair of God the Father, you'll see, um, that it's painted, uh, with a bit of white, a bit of gray, and then about two or three dashes of black there and there, um, just to sort of suggest, uh, the hair flowing, um, and it's been done as simply as that. Uh, whereas, of course, you know, if you're on a much smaller scale, a very intimate scale, and, uh, the viewer was able to kind of get really close to it, you'd have to have a lot more detail in there.
Now, um, there tend to be kind of more limited colors with fresco than there are with other media. Um, you can kind of see this in a way here, but, you know, this is only one fresco, so it's not kind of demonstrative of lots of different, um, colors that you can get. Um, and Michelangelo's use of color seems to be quite harmonious here. He's using different shades of the same colors. You can, uh, model form with it, so there is the use of light and shade to model the figure. But [Music] you don't get perhaps as much detail in that as you do with other media. So one of the good things about fresco is you can actually see how long it takes the artist to paint something. We know that it took Michelangelo four days to paint Adam, and we know that because, um, he made his drawing or cartoon, um, on a piece of paper, and he then transferred the drawing to the wall because you can't just kind of pitch up and go, "Oh, today I'm going to paint, um, Adam." Okay? So we know we've got lines around each of these sections, um, drawing onto the figure, okay? So he took a day to paint his head. He took a day to paint his torso and his arms, um, and that's because we know this because when he transferred the image, um, onto the ceiling, he cut around the paper that he'd drawn his image on, and he cut around it with a knife. So he incised the lines onto the wet white plaster. So we've seen the lines that are incised, and that way we know it took him four days to paint Adam. The paint, he transferred the cartoon with God the Father, um, by pouncing, which is a technique that we kind of use today in a way when we do like a tracing and we put charcoal on the back and then we turn it over and we draw around the image and transfer it onto a brand new piece of paper. Pouncing involved making holes around the edge of the image and then pouncing charcoal through it. So when you took the image away, you ended up with lots of little lines and dots of charcoal, okay?
So fresco is pretty much the oldest form of painting in the West. This is a buon fresco, which means you're painting into wet white plaster. Another traditional technique is here on the left, which is egg tempera, and yes, that involves painting, mixing your pigments with egg yolk and painting onto wood. It's a much smaller scale than fresco, so you get a lot more detail in your painting, intricate details. You have to layer the paints so that you can maintain the bright and luminous colors, which of course you can't do with fresco. You just plonk your paint onto the wet plaster, and then the following day you move on to the next bit. And layering of paint, um, is done through thin, uh, semi-opaque or semi-transparent layers of paint. So sometimes it's opaque, you can't see through it. Sometimes it's transparent, and you can see what's underneath. And you use a kind of cross-hatching technique, which means that you're painting a bit like that with the brush, um.
Now, uh, the good thing about egg tempera is it also includes the use of gold leaf, so you get these fabulous gold backgrounds. And with the gold leaf, you can punch into it and create these fabulous halos around the figures. But it does dry very quickly, and once it's dried, uh, it's, you can't kind of do anything with it. It's, you know, egg is really, really hard to remove, um, and it's not as stable as other media. So you get bits of paint kind of fading, perhaps if the colors haven't been mixed properly. Um, I've put next to this work, Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which is a much more contemporary work where artists aren't sort of tied to, um, using, uh, the traditional materials that were the only ones on offer. So we've got here the use of acrylics, the use of oils, the use of emulsions. Chris Ofili also used things like map pins and resin. Here he's actually used elephant dung. So anything goes really with [Music] much more contemporary artworks. And we've even got here collages, so collaged photos from pornographic magazines. More about that as the course goes on. So, you know, this is a real mixed media piece on the right.
But here we have the big traditional paints that have been used, uh, since Renaissance times, and this is oils. Oils dry very slowly. They're mixed with linseed oil, hence the name. That means they can produce intricate detail. It also means they can produce fabulous textures. So here on the left, which is a traditional oil painting, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, fabulous detail there with the eyes and blending, um, the flesh tones so much that it really imitates the smoothness of flesh. We've also got the texture of the hair, the very fine texture of the hair, and that contrasts with the satin, the heavier satin of the robe that she's wearing. And then even here, she's wearing a veil over her hair, and you can just see the line of the veil there, just under her brow, and look, it kind of goes out here, so really thin, um, fabric of the veil. So you can even sense that. So oils enable all these different textures, um.
On the right, we've got a very different use of oil. So instead of like very thin glazes, uh, Jari Savile for her branded has applied the paint very, very thickly, and that's called impasto. And, um, that means it's really, really thick, and she can scratch into it, and she scratches these words into her body, kind of imitating self-harm. And so the words kind of become fused to her flesh, just like she's been branded with the words, and that's because she's used impasto paint.
Now we'll quickly look at the materials of sculpture. We've got marble on the left, wood on the right, and both of these are what we call reductive, and it means that they are carved into. Both of them show what we call undercutting, which is where the artist cuts right into the marble or the wood, but to create a very kind of hollow, dark section, which, um, really plays against the light, um, of the material itself, the medium itself, creating a contrast and creating interest within the work. So, um, marble on the left, Michelangelo's Pietà, highly polished, so very shiny. It's his most polished piece, and that polish imitates the smoothness of flesh and also draws the eye and gives us that contrast of light and shade. Marble is traditionally left white, but originally, back in ancient Greek times, it would have been painted, um, flesh colors and, and various colors for the drapery. Now, marble allows texture. So we have the fabulous heavy drapery that the Virgin Mary is wearing, and we have the very, uh, smooth flesh of the dead Christ. And behind them, we've got the suggestion of the texture of stone, which is the stone that she's sitting on. So marble does allow texture. It does allow fine detail, which we see in the face of the Virgin, and it's expensive, so it's generally reserved for heroic figures.
Now, wood, um, is not expensive because it grows on trees, doesn't it? Wood grows on trees, so it's kind of hampered by the ideas we've got to fit within the kind of tree trunk, but it's not expensive, and it's certainly not as heavy as marble. And we can see this quite clearly here in this section, okay, with the head of Christ, um, at this horribly distorted angle, and compare it to the head of Christ here in the Michelangelo, and you'll see that, uh, Christ's head kind of fuses with the Virgin's arm, and it needs to because otherwise it would be too heavy to hang at the angle of the wooden pier. So it's lighter, and that means it has, um, a less, um, of, uh, what we call tensile strength, but a bit more than marble. So marble has what we call low tensile strength, and tensile strength is this hanging things off the edge that are unsupported. So marble needs to be supported because it's heavy, it has low tensile strength, but it has high compressive strength, which means that it's very heavy. Wood also is heavy, but it's not as heavy as marble, and you can have bits jutting out of it. And wood tends to be painted, so unlike marble, wood would tend to be painted with, as we can see here, the flesh colors and the colors, um, that relate to, uh, the meaning or the message of the artwork.
So, let's take a little look at the final material that we're going to look at. And the final medium is bronze, and it's what we call constructive. So marble and wood are reductive because they're carved, but bronze is constructive because it tends to be made from a clay model, and the shape is modeled, so it's constructed. It, it has the finest of details, um, and it's generally cast hollow, so that would mean, um, it's probably about the same strength as marble, the same weight as marble, sorry. So this is how it's done. You start off with your plaster model, or it might even be made out of wax. You put molds around it, um, like so, and you can therefore cast it in sections, like so. You take your clay model out of the mold, and you pour wax into it, and the wax just lines the inside of the mold so that you end up with a hollow wax figure. You then add your sprues or flues, and that's these bits here, okay? And that's what you're gonna pour, um, the bronze into. Um, so you cover your, um, hollow wax model with a ceramic cast, which is here. Um, you pour the wax out, you heat it up, you, the wax is poured out, you pour the bronze in, and the bronze goes into that very thin lining of wax. You end up then with a bronze sculpture with all the flues around it, which you then cut off, and eventually you end up with your bronze sculpture. As you can see, the process is really technical. It can go horribly wrong, and so bronze is very expensive. So bronze, like marble, both expensive, are reserved for heroic figures.
And here we've got two different treatments of bronze. We've got David on the left with a very, very smooth figure, highly shiny, so a high patina or patina that we also saw with Michelangelo's Pietà, so a high shine or patina. Whereas on the right, we have The Risen Christ by Jacob Epstein, which is, uh, probably made from plaster, so the kind of plaster that you would, um, get in bandages that you wrap around your arm when you get a broken arm, okay? So these bandages, which are there to suggest the shroud of Christ, but they add a massive amount of texture. So bronze enables more texture. It enables even more detail than marble. Marble, um, very fine detail because the actual figure that's being modeled from, uh, is made from clay, and you can therefore create a lot of detail by cutting or incising into the clay. But as you can see here, bronze also has what we call high tensile strength. And when I say you can see that here, you can see it most in the figure of The Risen Christ with the arm, which is pretty much unsupported, and incredible line of bronze there, which you could not carve in any way from a piece of marble. And that is totally created because of the properties of bronze, which enables something as thin as that to be made.
So hopefully that gives you, um, a little explanation about, uh, the materials and how they work. And you need to look at your artwork and think, "How has this material affected my artwork? How has this material perhaps affected the meaning of my artwork?" So good luck in class, and I'll see you during the lesson. Thank you for listening.