A chat with Amanda Lewis-Clements
Patrick: Come on. I’ve been asking you for your working process for bloody ages and nothing has come. Do you blame your other half? Or is that just you cop out!
Amanda: No, it’s not… (laughter) well because he said he wanted to do it! Then didn’t.
Patrick: What I’m trying to do is look at print making from the Japanese Prints, so influential on Monet and co., which were the first, with Albrecht Durer credited as the first to use etching, Spencer Pryse and early lithography continuing through screenprinters like Gerd Winner, to today’s new wave of wood carvers like Merlyn Chesterman and computer users like you. As I’ve told you before, you represent the now with your digital print origination. So, I can show how origination all through time has similar creative roots in drawing process, relative to changing technical processes
Amanda: . So, I can show you, okay, to relative process. Can I tell you how this drawing (waving a drawing at me) relates to my history. I can talk you through my process. Vector graphics are a form of digital art built from mathematical equations rather than pixels.
Patrick: Well that’s good because that hero of drawing, Albrecht Durer first wrote a study on mechanical drawing processes and was involved in engraving maps, an early example of information technology. In Durer’s treatise on measurement (1525) he shows four ‘drawing machines’. They build on work by earlier Renaissance artists Leonardo, Brunelleschi and Alberti as well as relating to his own studies. Its not just about the computer but all part of how drawing progresses from needing a cave wall through wood and metal to paint and canvas then digital screens
Amanda: So Okay, I understand the drawing part, that isn’t the issue between us. It’s the technical side. How you get it from a to b? So this is actually drawn on the computer, Each element in a vector image—whether a line, curve, or shape—is defined by coordinates and formulas that describe its position, direction, and curvature. Because of this, vector images can be scaled infinitely without any loss of quality. You can enlarge them from a small icon to a large poster, and they will always remain crisp and smooth. This makes vectors ideal for logos, illustrations, and any artwork that needs to be resized or printed at various scales
Patrick: Right, it is actually about the drawing, the human hand and eye bit. Do you do it on a graphics tablet or on an electronic drawing pad? Apparently, Durer was moved to look at systems after seeing Leonardo’s work, and using technical processes to help draw has continued since, although technical drawings have existed since the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians used written instructions for builders or to carry religious imagery. Among Turners friends, Cotman used a camera lucida (a portable version of the camera obscura), maybe even lent it on occasion for Turner to use in his drawings, to make his drawings accurate for watercolours, so you are right in the mainstream tradition in using technology to make imagery.
Amanda: I don’t use a pad. No, our artwork’s a vector system. This is my tool, a mouse, straight into the computer or tablet
Patrick: Okay. So Vector refers to a mathematical processing within the computer? So there’s no pad. There’s no e.g. Wacom graphics tablet? The tablet to draw on. You can actually use Adobe Illustrator or similar nowadays or any of the tablet programmes with a pen. Yes! Yes.
Amanda: So I start from the beginning. My process is exactly the same as when I painted conventionally. So, what I do is I build up layer and shape using layers of colour and layers of shape as in layers in Photoshop, for instance, like layers of transparencies, one behind the other. So what I do first is I initially design my palette, which I will have to place usually to the right of my arm. When I say design the palette, I mean, so it’s a colour palette that I’m creating, it isn’t related to different line thicknesses. You know what nor textures? It’s purely a colour palette. Yes. Okay. So I create a colour palette. That will usually be the first thing that I do before I start drawing anything because for me I want the colours to represent the feel that I want people to have when they look at the finished work
Patrick: I simply go along with that, as I want the colours to sing when I paint, but mine come from a tube or crayon. You are liberated by the computer in colour terms much as 19th century artists were liberated by getting colours in pig intestine tubes, ready mixed, rather than having to faff with mixing oils, binders and raw powdered pigments.
Amanda: You can say what you liked. Yeah. So, for instance, this one was very relaxing, trying to make it like you were there. Okay. So this of sunset over the Coastguard cottages. It was kind of fiery. Sunset setting Sun. So initially before I do anything, I work on my colours That could be 10 colours, it could be 50 colours or more but that is where I have special artist palette stuff. Yes. Each colour being a tube of paint if you like, exactly that, and a combination of the colours. So for instance, so you want to do mixing on the palette? Yeah. So if you want to blend a green. Yellow and blue, as normal, but you know what I mean, the process is there, similar. So that’s the first thing I do then. Um, Usually I take lots of photographs from different viewpoints and the reason I do that is so that I get scale of things in relation to each other approximately, which is obviously critical if you’re doing horizon lines for example, where you have two land masses that meet. If one is slightly off, it doesn’t work.
Patrick: So do you actually do your drawing over the top of a photographic image? A tradition from the Renaissance was to make an initial study on glass apparently and then to transfer, so there are again parallels. Parallels too with use of camera lucida by Cotman or the early use of photography in the late 19th century
Amanda: Not always no. So if that sounded like a, yes – no. I’m just call it to explain, yeah, to how I do it. So if I’ve got for instance, a lighthouse, and I need to get the shapes of the windows quite often, I’ll have bring up the lighthouse here on the laptop, and I draw then because I need to visualise as I’m drawing it. So just if as if I was looking at landscape
Patrick: I understand just as if you’re standing in the landscape with the sketchbook. Yes. but It’s actually on a laptop. Yeah. I understand but it’s important in terms of the generic development of processes that we contextualize it with the traditional understood means.
Amanda: So when you’re drawing on the screen, yeah, its exactly the same as you would do if you were sitting on a stool on a cold day outside, only actually a lot more comfortable, but in actions the same, yeah. But in in actual fact, if I’ve got something alongside what I’m drawing, I can get almost cocky. I can get the, you know, like the scale of things. It’s quite important that the scale in relation to each other is accurate.
Patrick: So it’s almost like, if you drew a grid, I understand. Yeah, it’s like that Renaissance technique of going out with a wooden plate on which you have a cotton grid and then a spike and you put your nose on the spike and look through the grid and relate to your drawing to where the lines cross. And you have a similar grid on your piece of paper. What’s important, in terms of what we’re saying here is, is the relationship between your technique on the computer and how it relates very directly to a technique that would have been used by Uccello or any other of the Renaissance artists 500 years ago. It’s in the normal traditional manner of working
Amanda:. Yes. Well, when I used paint ‘conventionally’ my style was very graphic, okay. And what I used to do was build shape and texture with layers of opacity of colour and shape. And that is exactly how I work here. So the constant flow of images off the TV screen, which is very graphic by its nature, is influencing physical seeing. Yeah. How people see, not just the art but generally how they see. So, one person that visited the gallery said to me, and I thought this was actually quite accurate, that the reason they loved my work is because I leave out the noise. Although initially looks quite minimal and contemporary. Um, quite often, I will choose something. And I will draw all the detail in there like the horses on the roundabouts of the pier. Exactly that there are no people; or perhaps, you know, all the detail on a cottage or a lighthouse but no people. For instance, I’m drawing the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry at the moment and I’m doing the detail in it, but no people. So that’s the noise you see, people are the noise. So I don’t add people. Yes, because it for me, I don’t want that in my artworks and I didn’t paint that way. And we’d all love it, if the world was a lot emptier. So that is it and it and an actual fact. If you look at my Illustration. So this is what I see as I create. That is what the machine or if you like the software, um, records my marks. Yeah. And each of the marks that I make Is a mathematical sum. So, it means yes, you can enlarge it. Infinitely.
Screenshot
Patrick: Similar to my process, working from drawings of the garden, into my sketchbook, then drawing them up on a large sheet of paper, and squaring it up and transferring it to transfer to a three foot by four foot canvas, except mine is all very traditional.
Amanda: Well it is.
Patrick: But with this, the vector is the point of that pencil. I used to give students definitions such as a line is the path of a point moving between two positions in space and your pencil has the point to record as it is moved across the paper. Similarly a plane being a whole line moving between two positions in space like a screenprinters squeegee and a solid being the plane moving making a solid – you get the picture…
Amanda: Now, that’s exactly what a vector is. It’s exactly the same, but in actual fact I don’t have to do that. I can just scale away. Okay, where you see the lines are bolder here. That indicates multiple layers. So, obviously I’ve put the line in the same place on each layer. And if you look at that compared to the artwork, you can see all. Although this looks very complex in here. Actually, what I’ve done is put a very top layer .So these symbols, well, it is but it is, For me, it is. It’s like drawing in a sketchbook.
Patrick: Everybody thinks they can collect marks. If you go to a college nowadays, you find they are keeping scrapbooks because it’s simpler. Yeah. But drawing builds a personal visual library and enhances your uniqueness, the marks you make betray your identity as an artist who sees what others don’t. Seeing what others can’t see is the role of the artist.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s all about mark making and my work method is just as traditional.
Patrick: That’s the process as in drawings where if you look at Uccello and see his use of perspective. You you’ll see great similarities between what he did using their ‘primitive’ perspective drawing techniques as images you make on the computer with your vectors, I’d say. I believe in the sixties Uccello’s work was tested against early computer aided design with interesting duplications.
Amanda: So, in vector terms, the process is the same in terms of layering shape, and colour, and opacity of colour. It’s for me it’s a lot more precise so you can get the precision when I’m outputting it. Yeah, to whatever medium be paper or aluminium. So when you’ve got your drawing finished, you can then set it to print at any scale you want because the scaling is done by the printer program and printing is not an engraver with a steel plate, or a Ravillious carving a wood block, but a magical digital printer. Now the scaling is yeah, yeah, you always scale you don’t what you would tend to do would be to create the artwork so that you could then output it. Um, But yeah, then that my process is exactly the same. But in actual fact, because I can put detail in its a lot more challenging which is why I prefer to work like this.
I can be quite complex in the detail of the odd thing that I select, like the horses on the roundabout. Which you wouldn’t actually be able to paint because you would need to be large scale to make the detail. Yes. Exactly. You know, you would need to scale it. I mean, if I’m drawing detail, it’s big on my screen and I can draw the detail in it using that, but you wouldn’t be able to do that on canvas unless you were drawing a massive artwork. You wouldn’t be able to make them out.
That’s it. Patrick, that’s all, alright?
Patrick: Yep 
Note: Amanda and her partner Stefan Mucha run a very successful gallery in Seaford. It only shows her work, which they print and frame, sending her work onto a global market. All the work illustrated is available from the gallery or they will deliver artwork through their global distribution network to order. Amanda is usually in the gallery and likes to talk art…as Stefan does
For further reading in drawing processes the best recommendations I can make are:
Drawing Systems by Fred Dubery and John Willats pub: Studio Vista
Man by Oskar Schlemmer, a Bauhaus book pub: Lund Humphries
For clear explanations of different print processes and the difference between a print and a reproduction I recommend almost unobtainable now, pub. Waddington Galleries:
Understanding Prints: A contemporary guide by Pat Gilmour, almost the bible for artists prints
I have reviewed/;looked at a number of artists, designers and institutions and they are all available in my archive – see the list
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