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Peacock form studies

A Nature and Form exercise: draw a peacock, then take away everything that is not the peacock, over and over, until what is left is a single black mark that still reads as the bird.

DISCIPLINE
Other
YEAR
2020
MADE WITH
Pencil, ink and gouache on paper
CURRENT STATE
—
A bold solid-black abstracted peacock mark on paper.
The end of the sequence. No tail, no legs, no eye — and still a peacock.

// Why this exists

Abstraction taught as a sequence rather than an opinion. You start from observation — an actual bird, drawn properly, with the tail and the crest and the weight on the legs — and then reduce in stages, each one losing information, until you find the point where one more cut stops it being a peacock. That threshold is the whole lesson, and it cannot be reasoned about in advance.

A loose observational line drawing of a peacock with its tail trailing.
Where it starts: the bird, drawn from observation, with everything still in it.
Two reduced peacock outlines in pencil, the detail removed.
Outline only. The first pass just deletes, and it is easy.

// What actually happened

Observational drawings first. Then outline only. Then the outline straightened into angles, which is where most of the naturalism dies and the silhouette has to start carrying the identity. Then solid black, where only the profile survives. Then the same mark again at small scale across a grid, because a form that works once may be an accident and a form that works twenty times is a form. Colour studies ran alongside in pink and graphite to test whether the reading depended on the black.

An angular, straight-edged reduction of the peacock form in pencil with hatching.
Then the curves are straightened. This is where most of the naturalism dies and the silhouette has to take over.

// What was delivered

Nine finished study sheets and a working set of exploration photographs: the observational drawings, three stages of reduction, the solid-black marks, the repeated grid and the colour variants.

A solid black silhouette of the abstracted peacock, narrower than the final mark.
Solid black, so only the profile is left to argue with.

// What I did

Coursework, drawn by me.

A grid sheet with several small black peacock marks repeated at different angles.
The same mark repeated small. One that works once might be luck; one that works twenty times is a form.

// What came out of it

The crest and the neck curve turned out to be load-bearing and the tail did not, which is the opposite of what makes a peacock recognisable in a photograph. The displayed tail is the thing everyone pictures; in silhouette it becomes noise, and the bird survives on the S of the neck and the three dots of the crest.

A sheet of peacock studies in graphite and pink, several at small scale.
Colour studies alongside, to check the reading was not depending on the black.

// Where it stands now

A finished exercise, kept because the method transfers to any mark-making problem.

A geometric study of the peacock's fanned tail built from repeated radiating segments.
The tail, taken on its own as geometry — and then largely abandoned, because in silhouette it reads as noise.

// What I'd do differently now

  • 01I reduced too fast at first and jumped from the drawing to a black shape, which produced a mark that could have been any bird. The intermediate stages are not padding; they are where you find out which lines were doing the work.
  • 02The whole set survives as phone photographs of paper on a desk, taken in one sitting in December 2020 rather than scanned. It is legible and it is not what this work deserved.
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