NEW ARTIST INTERVIEW: TRISTAN MACDOUGALL | DegreeArt.com The Original Online Art Gallery

NEW ARTIST INTERVIEW: TRISTAN MACDOUGALL

 

What first drew you to train as a classical artist?

Soon after leaving art school I began to feel really unsatisfied about my place in the art world and the type of work I was making. This feeling reached its climax after doing a show in Strasbourg with some old art school friends around 2001/2. I looked at all the effort and energy I had put into making a piece of conceptual sculpture and felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness at the result. I mentioned to my colleagues that I was thinking about starting on a new body of figurative work, a few of them seemed genuinely shocked at this suggestion and dismissed figurative work being irrelevant. This response made me all the more determined to pursue this unfashionable path.
I began attending drawing classes in London once a week in the evening but I soon realised that a few evening classes weren’t going to give me the skills I so desired. My boss at the timevery kindly allowed me to take Fridays off work and I spent all day Friday at a life drawing class and working on figurative sculptures in my studio. This also was not enough, and after many hours of searching I found the Florence Academy of Art and realised that this was the place I really needed to be. The level of observation and quality of execution were far beyond anything I had seen at any other art schools or life drawing classes, I felt exhilarated that such a place existed and desperately wanted to learn the skills taught and nurtured there. I then focussed all my energies on getting there and a couple of years later I had finally saved enough money from my day job to see me through a year at the Florence Academy.

Icarus, 38 x 101 x 5 cm, £1,500

What was your most significant moment during your time in Florence?

On the first day we were told that we would be spending six weeks on a single drawing. This seemed completely absurd to me at the time and I quietly thought that these people must be slightly insane; the notion that you could spend 6 weeks on a single drawing was completely alien to me.
With training and practice this level of observation became second nature, I got a strong feel for the figure, and was able to manipulate my work to exaggerate certain forms in order to get a strong likeness in a portrait, a stronger sense of drama within a figure or capturing a subtle emotion.
There have been many other moments of crisis during my time in Florence, and since leaving, but by simply pushing myself I have gained a much better understanding of the subtleties of form and a greater sensitivity to visual observation. And far from being restrictive, I have found learning, pursuing and always pushing my skills has had a liberating effect on my artistic output and allowed me to create work I could never have otherwise created.

What do you find to be the most challenging thing about sculpting/drawing the human form?

For me, the most challenging part in drawing or sculpting the figure has to be at the beginning, when you confront a blank sheet of paper, or an armature and a bag of clay. I get a sense of vertigo or of drifting through the ether - I have set myself a task but there is no structure in front of me to realise the work. I have to carefully build or draw the structure myself. I usually spend a few minutes quietly looking at the figure or portrait and working out the strongest forms and where I need to start. Once I have a structure in place and begin to understand the relationships between the shapes and forms the process becomes like play. It really can be a tremendous pleasure, playing forms off one another subtly exaggerating or subduing certain parts in order to give greater emphasis. Another challenging part is knowing when to stop because this process can go on for ever.
Leonardo da Vinci once said: ‘art is never finished, only abandoned’, and I think this has a deep resonance with every artist, no matter of what genre.

Selene and Endymion55 x 55 x 5 cm, £1,500

Could you describe your process from an idea to a finished piece?

This depends on the type of work I am about to undertake. If it is a piece which involves a strong element of design or needs a strong sense of composition, as in my bas-relief work, then I will usually begin by spending several sessions sketching ideas in my sketch book. At this stage I will work directly from imagination and usually have anatomy books close by in order to resolve certain forms. I will do this intermittently over a few days or weeks and turn ideas over in my head in the meantime whilst also working on other pieces. Once I have a good idea of the composition I make a full size drawing, to the same scale as I intend the finished piece to be. At this stage I play around with parts of the design and I often do a second full size drawing.
Once I have a good clear drawing with most of the design elements set, I begin to model the clay onto a wooden board. This is the longest stage and can last several months. I will use my drawings as a main source of reference as well as using a model, photographs and life drawings. I invariably make alterations to the design at this stage since some features which seem to work in the drawing fail to work in three dimensions.
When the clay model is finished I make a plaster slip mould. This involves pouring plaster over the whole model, allowing it to set and then releasing the clay model from the plaster mould. After cleaning out the small pieces of clay I leave the plaster mould to dry out for a couple of weeks.

Once the plaster is dry enough I pour clay slip (liquid clay) into the mould. The slip flows into and finds all the forms of my original clay model. The dry plaster sucks the water out of the slip and leaves an even skin of clay within the mould. Once this skin is about 5 mm thick I leave the clay within the mould to firm up a bit, usually overnight. As the clay dries a little it will begin to naturally pull away from the plaster mould but, if it dries too much it will begin to crack, so timing is really important here. When it is ready I turn the plaster mould over, gently tap the mould and hopefully a beautiful clean clay form will pop out underneath, unfortunately many things can go wrong at this stage.
Next, I clean up this clay cast and then leave it to dry out for a week or so. If it is a large bas-relief, then I will cut the work into tiles in order to fit them into the kiln, I also like the effect created once the tiles are put back together again. After cutting the tiles I apply colour and let them fully dry out over a few more days before firing them in the kiln. I then mount the tiles onto a wooden board and use a coloured grout between them. Finally I have the whole piece framed.
As I’m sure you can imagine, so many things can go wrong at these different stages and it can be heart breaking and so frustrating opening a kiln at the end of this process to find cracked ceramics or strangely fired colours. Luckily these disasters are becoming fewer and further between.

Cleopatra35 x 27 x 7 cm, £600

What has been your experience working in a classical style at a time when contemporary art is moving further away from the figurative and representational?

I really love it. To have found something I love doing so much is a real joy. Having spent time at art school trying to push myself into a mould which simply didn’t fit in order to please my tutors it is an absolute pleasure to have found a way of working I simply love. I am glad that I found the confidence and drive to do this because I know many people go to art school full of dreams and confidence and leave feeling very small and lost and will often go off into a completely different field of work.
While I was at art school in the late 1990s the art world really did seem to be moving inexorably away from the figurative and, when I look back, sometimes I wish I had gone straight to Italy.
However in recent years, it seems that many people have become somewhat up with the contemporary art world and its adhesion to big business, big money and big names. I think that younger artists these days seem much more open to learning traditional skills and appreciate their value much more than my generation did. In the decade since I left Florence, several art schools teaching classical techniques have opened across UK, meanwhile the US the scene seems to be really burgeoning with hundreds of galleries and art schools focussing on traditional skills.
I personally would like to see a situation where classical and contemporary art education sit alongside each other. I think that this would be a fantastic way to generate artistic ideas and would create a new generation of exceptional artists. I firmly believe that learning these traditional skills gives an artist a greater freedom, to either continue down a classical path, or use their knowledge for more conceptual work.
 

To see more of Tristan's work, browse his portfolio here. For any enquiries contact isobel@degreeart.com

 

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