Alison Watt: Capturing fabric

After Visiting Alasdair Thompson's sculptures at the on form exhibition in Burford I have become increasingly intrigued by fabric and the way it hangs and looks in different mediums.  I have seen Alasdair do this in marble and now I am looking at Alison Watt who paints it on a large scale. Alison Watt is a Scottish painter. Her first works to become well known were dryly painted figurative canvases, often female nudes. An exhibition entitled 'Fold' in 1997 at Edinburgh's fruit market Gallery was the first introducing fabric alongside these figures. Watt became fascinated in painting folds in fabric and draperies of the kind often used as props by life models. Watts new painting evoked the human body in its absence. Watt paints these fabric pieces on a large scale on canvas using acrylic paint. Her paintings are thought provoking and intriguing. I have created an A1 page to express her work and I have added my own annotation:

The title has been created using cut offs of folded ribbon:

I have been drawn to Watt's vast drawings due to their presence. Her paintings tend to zoom in on the natural folds of the fabric and tend to be in white which gives a sense of purity and cleanliness. I have decided to use Alison Watt as I have become increasingly interested in fabric and I wish to draw it and paint it. More specifically I wish to capture fabric and preserve it like the artist Alasdair Thompson. Therefore I wish to use these two artists in combination and preserve fabric using plaster. On this page there are small examples of such preservation of fabric in plaster. I hope to create this on a larger scale and use garments in the style of Alasdair Thompson. 

However, by using Watt's work as inspiration I hope to become more comfortable when drawing fabric, specifically when drawing the folds in fabric as this I find is incredibly difficult. 

This is an example of Watts work, the folds are easily distinguished and have been created with delicacy and detail. Light and dark are easily identified and the colour pallet is the same throughout: black, white and grey. I'm attracted to the scale at which her work is painted on, this gives the fabric a large presence in a gallery room. As Watt has stated, she began drawing nudes and then became fascinated by the fabric in absence of the human figure. I feel I have taken a similar path to this artist. 

Also on this page is a small study in chalk and charcoal of one of the small plaster examples that I have created. I have started to draw fabric and I aim to draw on a larger scale.