We think we're so modern ... don't we?

I recently joined a local art society, and next week we're off to paint/draw a local church. (I can hear you yawning at the back ... stop it!)

To be honest I find the idea of drawing a church a daunting prospect, because there are so many clichés one can fall into. I find it natural therefore to want an angle on the thing, something to give me inspiration. This after all is one of the reasons I'm joining the society: to be challenged, and through it to test my vision of the way I believe things should be painted or drawn.

So I looked at Google images, as you do, and also Wikipedia, to learn a bit more about the saints who the church is named after (St Cosmus and St Damian), and low and behold I come across Fra Angelico's painting of the two saints healing Palladia, and then I skip through a few more of his paintings and find the 'Annunciation' and suddenly I don't feel very modern. The striking light and dark tones, giving dimensionality, along with well-timed repetition, not to mention those fabulously colourful angel wings blew me away.

It was painted in 1442-1443, and yet the stool on which the Virgin Mary is sat reminded me instantly of a technique I used to draw this chair using a vector illustration app:

The similarity I admit might only be evident to me. I am not asserting anything more. But there I was thinking I'd been modern in my use of light, shade and angularity to bring things into three dimensions when really I was simply repeating a technique which can be identified in a picture that is six-hundred years old and no doubt if I were to look further back and in more detail would find the roots entangled maybe in the very beginnings of visual art.

The thing is that I'm no art historian and I'm certainly not a visual artist. I had the task of creating some visual assets for an app and so had to feel my way through in order to bring something near-credible into existence. That feeling my way led to research and reading (primarily John Ruskin) while endlessly experimenting with illustration apps on the iPad: first Inkpad and then iDraw, with some deviations in Procreate.