6 minute read
How I Draw
HOW I DRAW
Curtis Holder
The winner of last year’s Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year shares his techniques, his honest approach to portraiture, and his shameless art shop confessions
LEFT Family, coloured pencil on paper, 120x120cm C urtis Holder was born in Leicester in 1968. He completed a foundation year, prior to his BA in graphic design from Kingston University. A postgraduate diploma in character animation from Central Saint Martins followed in 2005.
While working as a primary school teacher, Curtis entered and won last year’s seventh series of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year. His winning commission, a portrait of dancer Carlos Acosta, is now part of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s collection. www.curtisholder.co.uk
Art as therapy
Self-portraits are strange things. I’ve had to get into using photography, which is better for me because I have to really think about what it is that I want to draw. Drawing an individual is about a conversation, it’s a two-way thing. With a self-portrait, it’s hideous. It’s like going to see a therapist.
Why put yourself through that? That’s one of the questions I’ve been asking myself. I think to be a good artist and have a good life, you need to keep asking yourself questions about who you are, what you are, and where you want to go. Before entering the Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, I was a primary school teacher. I got to a stage where I thought, ok, either I’m going to be a headmaster or I’m going to be selfish and embrace that part of myself that I’ve ignored. I said, right, I’m going to stop teaching and I’m going to give this a go. It was time to flex a muscle I thought was there, but I wasn’t sure. What the show has done has fast forwarded my practice.
I did have a stint as an illustrator, but I didn’t put myself out there and say this is what I do, take it or leave it. I would be asked to emulate other people’s styles and that made me embittered. I had to stop before I confused that anger with a lack of love for the craft and all things creative.
For me, drawing has been my oldest companion. It speaks to me in a way that nothing else does and it reveals to me more about what is going on inside my brain than I could do sitting with a therapist. At times I find it difficult to articulate what I’m feeling through words, so I feel that my language is best expressed through the marks that I make. There’s a direct line from your eye to your brain to your arm and out through the pencil. There’s an immediacy and a comfort to that.
An honest approach
I’m in a same-sex relationship, and being black and male in a primary school is an unfamiliar situation for a lot of people anyway, so you have to have discussions at home that someone who wasn’t all of those things would probably take for granted. Most teachers, especially primary school ones, will bring their home life and private life into their teaching without a second thought. I had to think, right, what kind of teacher did I want to be? I didn’t want to be someone who holds things back because, for one, children can sniff that out in a second. I decided
I had to be very transparent about everything. At first it was very scary, but in the end very freeing. I think that openness spilled out into my art.
A portrait usually starts with a conversation – it’s about making a connection. And then turning those conversations into portraits starts by sitting and unpicking how I’m feeling. I then make marks in a sketchbook that interpret that feeling, just basic marks, scribbles. Over several small drawings, that grows into something more substantial and slowly it will transform into a composition.
Family was probably one of the most difficult drawings I’ve ever done. I basically had to trick myself to make that piece. I’ve been with Steve for 18 years and I’ve only drawn him once. I find it really difficult drawing someone who is really familiar, because your brain messes you up and makes you draw those things you think you see. I had to understand what I wanted to say with it. I had conversations with myself about what it meant to be confined with this person that you’re in love with and you’ve been with for a long time, and it made me question what was “family” – what was my “family” – and what that meant to me, and how was I going to show people who looked at this piece.
When I’m doing a larger piece, I tend to work with Derwent Lightfast coloured pencils. I use different ones for different circumstances. I don’t tend to vary the pressure of the
ABOVE Caron in Sunshine, coloured pencil and acrylic gouache on paper, 120x115cm
LEFT Friday, coloured pencil on paper, 85x105cm marks; I use similar strokes to build up the tone instead.
I don’t like to be precious when I’m working. Buying a single sheet of paper constrains me so I like the convenience of paper on the roll. I can draw as big as I want and then if I need to trim it down, I trim it down. I use a 200gsm roll of Fabriano paper – it’s substantial and it has just enough bite to the surface.
I will begin with a very rough under-drawing, usually in a shade of red because I draw a lot of people and it feels quite fleshy. It’s also something that I can work on top of. I like to leave all the lines there, because I like to show people the start, the middle and the ending.
Shameless experiments
The yellow wash in Caron in Sunshine came about through trial and error. I knew exactly what I wanted in my head. I wanted flat colour, but I needed to draw on top of it and also see the drawing underneath it. I experimented a lot with different types of paint and application.
I love talking to staff in art shops, especially Cass Art, because they’re all artists. I have very little shame, so I will go in there and say: I don’t know anything, this is what I want, how can I do it? I eventually arrived at acrylic gouache. I then started experimenting with an airbrush too – I watered down the acrylic gouache and it dried to a matt finish. I’m also experimenting with liquid graphite and liquid charcoal. I love the quality of those mediums. I don’t want to move away from drawing: I want them to enhance the marks I’ve made, not take over.
One piece that I fought with a lot was Friday. It was about three months from start to finish. In my initial sitting with Martin, we had a conversation about many things: connections, love, the past… He was going to visit a new partner overseas and they didn’t know each other very well.
After the sitting, he got the all-clear to go out there and he’s fallen in love. I thought, this picture is not finished, this doesn’t have the complete feeling. At one point, I thought I would have to discard the drawing, but I felt I needed to get the rest of this story first and see how it feels, see if we can work that into this piece.
I don’t know whether “complete” is ever a word I would use with a piece. But my mantra from start to finish is: what is the feeling I want from the piece? I will keep going if I can make that feeling more pronounced. Once I’ve got it, I will stop.
