Assignment 2

For this project I would have loved to produce an animal drawing but this was not practical at this stage and level of skill. So I wanted to produce a still life that had relevance for me. My original idea was to tackle one of the things that winds me up during my dealings with the general public on medical matters: That is the assumption that something natural will always be better for you than something produced by a pharmaceutical company. For example I've encountered clients feeding their dogs garlic as a 'natural flea repellent' without realising that  onions and garlic can cause acute haemolytic anaemia in this species. My usual response to this is that just because something is natural it doesn't mean it is good for you - would you eat deadly nightshade? 

I quickly realised that if I wanted to go down the line of beautiful but deadly I was going to end up drawing a lot of plants and flowers and I didn't relish this idea from the previous plants and flowers exercise. 

At work I had an idea - I saw one of the skulls which we use for explanation purposes (mainly for dental disease). I had been looking at Dutch still lives if the 16th and 17th century and I came up with the idea of producing a sort of canine vanitas drawing.  Vanitas paintings were intended to remind people of the futility of earthly achievements. Usually these included symbols of power, wealth and achievements and sometimes the remains of a meal alongside a human skull and other symbols of decay/ending such as wilting flowers or a snuffed out candle.

Obviously some of that theme is not relevant to dogs - dogs do not read books or circumnavigate the globe! Neither are they interested in money or jewels. However, there are certain resources that they do covet and will fight over if necessary such as a nice juicy bone. I wanted to also include some of the natural forms that dogs might encounter but which were toxic. I started off with oleander (contains cardiac glycosides and can case heart rhythm disturbances and death if chewed), onions and garlic (haemolytic anaemia) and grapes (acute renal failure). A included a large hide chew in the shape of a bone as this is something my own dog particularly loves (I gave it to him after the drawing was finished). I also liked the irony of a real dog's skull chewing on something that was a man-made generic 'bone shape'. The size of the chew bone proved slightly problematic as the it was Mac (large dog) sized and the skull I had must have been from a small terrier. In order to fit the bone in the skull's mouth the jaw ended up being dislocated.

I toyed with the idea of including a bottle of Pentoject (the anaesthetic we use for euthanasia in pets) as a comment on the fact that we humans control the life and death of our pets but quickly rejected that on the basis of ending up with too many man-made and not enough natural forms. (and the complications related to controlled drugs)

I decided to use soft pastels on a dark sandpaper background because of the chalky texture of the skull and the fact that I could use white on dark to represent the bright illumination of the oleander petals. 

I drew numerous thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook. I tried to include all the objects in various ways including suspending some of them using string. Once again I simplified and pared the arrangement right down. I found this made it less overcrowded and allowed some interesting negative shapes in the middle of the composition. I am still not confident about finding the best composition and floundered around at this stage for quite some time. In the end I realised that each new sketch was not actually taking me any further forward. I was procrastinating so I had to start the final drawing.,

By the time I started the final drawing my second lot of oleander sprigs was wilting, but I liked the way the wilted sprigs draped and drooped and I felt that this was in keeping with the vanitas theme. In fact, despite my problems with drawing flowers, the part of this composition that I like best is the flowers - especially those with the bright illumination on the bottom left. I have deliberately kept my treatment of them quite simple and I think this works well. I am less pleased with the skull. In this foreshortened view I have tried to model the skull and show its three-dimensionalty with colour and tone but to me it still looks a bit flat. I was afraid to work into it any further because I didn't want to obliterate the marks I had made on its surface. I also think that overall, the purple shades have got a bit over-dominant (the background fabric was blue not purple) but it does complement the yellow tones in the skull, chew, wall  and leaves.