Art Works > Exploring Drawing Techniques and Drawing Materials: From the Ice Age to the present.

I think Vincent van Gogh's early drawings of Dutch Peasants in the Nuenen period are very powerful. They are very robust and catch the daily struggle to scrape an existence from the land. The workers in his drawings have a feeling of great volume and texture with the use of black chalk and Vincent's respect for them as human beings comes across to the viewer . With gnarled hands and bent backs and signs of early ageing they stoically work on in heat or the winters frost. I have reversed and combined two images to make a new composition, using sanguine pastel to change the colour of the figures. In our own times we are seeing crop failures due to Global Warming and farmers in emerging countries struggling to survive.