Cass Art: Gareth Reid Interview
Cass Art caught up with Gareth Reid, Grand Prize winner of Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, to find out more about how he captures a sitter, his experience on Sky Arts and why he favours minimal colour in his textured, black and white drawings. He also had some really great things to say about Nitram Charcoal
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You regularly teach life drawing in our Glasgow Art Space - What advice do you give your students when approaching the figure?
My advice is pretty much: think about the mass of the figure, don’t focus on the outline too much. Don’t worry it’s only a drawing - correct, draw over, keep looking, use your rubber as a drawing tool, correct, draw over, squint, don’t start with the head, don’t worry about the details, balance, stand back, squint, check, get stuck in, make the figure work… aaaand repeat!
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You use sharpened charcoal to complete your drawings – do you have a preferred set of materials?
I use Nitram Charcoal, a hangover from my days in Florence. Unusually it comes in grades of hardness and I mostly use the H for the finer parts of the drawings on canvas. The advantage is that is can be sharpened to a very fine point and anything else is too soft to deal with the sandpaper-like roughness of the canvas. The canvas is just a basic cotton-duck, which I stretch, size and glue myself - along with another secret layer - I also use Unison Pastels which are totally beautiful to behold, but slightly unwieldy to use – they’re not really for very fine work!
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READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW HERE and read about the Sky Portrait Artist Win HERE