Waiting Room

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Thursday, 17th February 2005
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

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cornice

It's difficult to settle when you're waiting.

I'm tempted to draw the people in the café at the hospital but you never know what other people might be going through, so I don't like to intrude by starting to draw them. We've brought my mum for a routine appointment but I still can't quite relax here. I draw my cappuccino, starting with the froth before I allow myself a drink.The bouquets of flowers in the shop briefly provide a subject before we move on.

The only cluster of forms I can find to focus on amongst the clean lines of the airy modern atrium is the entrance (left) to the wards and waiting rooms.

I find it hard to relate all the cornices and angles and this is my second attempt at the drawing, which went out of proportion on my first try. That uplighter gives some theatricality to the detail but I don't have time to make a tonal drawing to show the effect.

The branches of the small tree (right) in the car park are shapes that I find more natural to draw. While I'm drawing I think of Ruskin's exercise in Elements of Drawing in which he suggests that you should draw the tree as if you were making a definitive legal map of a country in which parcels of land are divided by tributaries of a great river.

Imagine that if you draw the parcels of land (i.e. the negative shapes between the branches) even slightly too big or too small you'll cause a huge amount of legal wrangling amongst the owners of each plot. Next Page

cappucino
Cappuccino
daisy
Bouquet flowers
branches
Car park tree

 


Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk

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