Cubism Lesson: A Cubist Study using your own Photograph

These Cubist paintings from the early 20th century tend to depict subject matter typical of still life. Artworks with inanimate, common place natural or man-made objects such as food and cutlery.

Cubist artists painted with an unorthodox style of composition: patterns of dots, dashes and crosshatching; a range of sepia colours; sharp, curved, fragmented texture, dynamic diagonal lines, geometric shapes and tonal gradients.

Cubist paintings were created with the intention of showcasing a range of concepts. They wanted to simplify objects into geometric forms, to associate with mechanization and modern life. Picasso and Braque had lived through incredible achievements in western civilization such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and the construction of the Eifel Tower and must have felt a responsibility to reflect on these developments in their work. They wanted to break up objects and rearrange them in abstract compositions. To fuse the past and present, old and new, to represent objects in a greater context. To represent objects using multiple viewpoints. Look at an object with one eye and then the other, even Cezanne realized that each eye has a different viewpoint. The Cubists wanted to create multiple perspectives, simultaneity and multiplicity.

In this video I aim to show you a simple method of Creating a quick personalized Cubist Study using just one Photograph as subject matter. You could use more photographs from different perspectives but I use one in this exercise. Take a photograph of an inanimate object you would like to transform to Cubism. You can photocopy it black and white or you can use a filter such as Sepia tones to make the colours more true to Cubism if you want. I also boost the contrast and play around with the colour balance to make the colours resonate with this Cubist painting by Braque which I am using as reference material.

Print out two copies of the photograph and arbitrarily cut one of the photographs into horizontal strips and the other into vertical strips. Arrange the strips into a fractured composition and glue them down as you go. You will have awkward gaps, so there will be a point where you decide to use scissors to cut strips to fit into the gaps. Why not add a little of your reference material into the gaps too so a little of the original painting’s DNA is incorporated into your own work.

Once you are happy that your collage is adequately Cubist, the next stage is to make a painting study from it. You may have noticed that black paint is never used in Cubist paintings, but there are a great deal of dark tones present.
One option for creating these dark tones is to mix Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber Brown together. A great variety of off-black tones can be created in this way.

My next piece of advice is to draw the outlines of the shards of photograph using that off-black colour. This will help to construct the overall composition of the study.

When the rubrics for the composition are in place, this is your opportunity to work on your colour mixing. Deal with each fragment using mixtures of Ultramarine, Burnt Umber and Titanium White. This is just a quick study so I have decided not to be too precious over the details so I can have the composition finished within a single short sitting.
You may have opportunity to work on a larger scale or study more closely, depicting the patterns, textures and tones that you see in your photograph. In the meantime, here is a quick personalized Cubist Study to get you started.