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Still Life 2: Learning from Morandi

January 12, 2022

All photos are by Jo Hall from her everyday objects

From a medium sized sitting room in Bologna, overlooking a small courtyard with trees Giorgio Morandi (1890 -1964), lived and worked painting everyday objects. These objects inhabited his shelves and became arranged and rearranged for his drawings, oil paintings, watercolours and etchings.

He admired artists of the Renaissance, Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello and Piero della Francesca and also Cezanne, Chardin, described in Morandi’s words as “the greatest of all still life painters ” and Corot, who he though of as the master of stillness. This last seems of most relevance as Morandi’s paintings of simple things give a sense of timeless calm to the viewer.

Note hard and soft edges and where the handle of the small jug disappears into the shadows.

The author Horst Bienick wrote “Giorgio Morandi only painted jugs and bottles all his life but in these pictures he said more about life, about real life, than there is in all the colourful pictures around us.”

The quotes above are from ” Morandi” edited by Ernst-Gerhard Guse and Franz Armin Morat published by Prestel 2008. You will find a selection of Morandi’s works posted on the Morandi section of my Still Life Pinterest board, link below:

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jhall1282/still-life/morandi-giorgio/

All Morandi’s works are based on intense observation simplifying forms and understanding how light reveals forms and how shadows can hide form and soften edges so that one form melts into another. The photos are all of my everyday objects and were taken to illustrate this.

In a letter of 6th January 1957 Morandi writes, “The only interest the visible world awakens in me concerns space, light, colour and forms.”

The way in which Morandi simplifies forms is most evident in his pencil drawings. The line is slow and deliberate, tracing the contours of what he sees. Areas of tone are added with diagonal hatching. In the watercolours, areas of tone are washed in as seen, immediately simplifying the forms and lending an abstract quality to these closely observed works. Morandi pays equal attention to the spaces between objects and the shadows the objects cast, as he does to the care he takes with the objects themselves.

Dark and light tones, hard and soft edges, muted colours.

Try arranging a few everyday objects in different ways. make simple line and tone drawings. Where edges between objects cannot be seen treat them as one form. Look at the images below and note the difference that changing their arrangement makes. You may like to draw from these but if you can, find your own subjects and draw from life.

Notice the appearance of the egg cup in the images below and also what happens to the edges where one dark ceramic is close to another.

The egg cup appears darkly subdued into the shadow. The three forms together with their shadow could be read as one shape.
The egg cup has been moved forward and by its contrast with the surrounding shadow demands our attention.

During the session we will make either several watercolours or an acrylic painting in the spirit of Morandi.

Your paintings:

Still life
Acrylic by Mali
Drawing by Mali
Drawing after an Etching by Giorgio Morandi
by Ann
Still Life
Pencil over acrylic background by Ann
Still Life
by Ann
Still Life with Jug
Gouache by Sandra
Graphite drawing by Sandra
Mug
Gouache sketch by Sandra
Vase and Jars
Acrylic by Maricarmen
Bowl and Beakers
by Kate
Watercolour by Heather C
Drawing in 2B pencil by Heather C
Drawing in Pen and Ink by Heather C
Still Life by Anne
Still Life with Bottle and Jugs
by Anne
Bottles Egg Cup and Pie Support
by Pam
Still Life by Heather N
Still Life with Green Bottle
Oil by Virginia

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