Category Archive

It’s been mostly hands in drawing class the past couple of sessions. Here are some from two weeks ago.

Hands are so complex and expressive that it’s almost like drawing the human body for the first time. I’m stiff and uncertain. I’m just trying to get my eyes and hands familiar with the forms, and while I am not technique-focused, Michael is right: when you’re making the drawing happen more than letting it happen, you sacrifice a certain responsiveness. More spontaneity may be on the other side of this immersion in a new focus, but it may not. I find it very hard to zero in on details without also losing the power of my own responsive gestures; I can feel myself getting picky and narrow.

I’m also trying to shake up my figure drawing, which has become more stiff recently. I don’t know if I’ll stick to hands today, but I’m going to try to work fast and let instinct come to the fore.

From today’s session. Many frustrations and excitements trying to draw hands, mostly, and in one pose, feet. Each is like a whole body itself.

Too big to scan in one piece, from last Monday:

Today’s model had captivating hands:

Today I was really wishing I could spend at least an hour on each pose. There is one session at the studio that’s one almost-four-hour pose, but it’s on Tuesday mornings and those are filled with important work meetings. Maybe some vacation week, though that would most likely be family time.

The breakthrough realization of the day was on shadows, which sometimes have sharp edges, sometimes soft ones. This is true even of small dimple-like shadows. Laying down the long edge of the charcoal and drawing the charcoal away from that point creates that clear edge better than drawing a line along the edge. I haven’t liked the smudgy, indistinct appearance of some of my shadows, and this really sharpens them up.

……….

I got so caught up in details that I lost track of proportions a little. Hard to keep all the balls in the air.

I was interested to learn that there’s a worker-owned art supply store in the city, so I checked it out after class, also enjoying the excuse to get dim sum, since the store is two blocks from Chinatown. Prices and inventory are good–it’ll be a pleasure to make it my regular source.

I could have happily spent two hours drawing this man’s foot. Most of the morning, I allowed myself to be lured off the path of focusing on one small area, but during this pose I zeroed in on something that I could give real attention for ten minutes. Attention, yes: the process is as much like mindfulness meditation as anything.

The first two hours of today’s session can most charitably be called a warmup. In the last 45 minutes I finally produced a couple of things I don’t mind looking at a second time. The miracle is that I enjoyed the whole three hours, regardless of what was emerging on the paper.

Maybe it’s all warmups. Potter M. C. Richards said: “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.”

Drawing sessions resumed Monday. It was so good to be back. This was my best of the morning.

My dad and I were talking about drawing–Dad is also taking an art class–and he quoted Picasso as saying he drew everything his eye saw. That wily Picasso. He mastered drawing what he saw as well as almost anyone on record (if you only know his abstract art, see what I mean here or here), but he knew perfectly well that drawing is also a matter of deciding what to include and what to leave out.

The two hands in these drawings illustrate my attempt to meet this challenge. Both of them are pretty sketchy. A few outlines, a few patches of shadow; much more is left out than put in. In the top drawing, a hand emerges out of those few marks, and in the middle one, it really doesn’t.

I’ve preserved that middle drawing, though, because it’s not a bad start at buttocks, a part of the body I find particularly challenging to capture on paper. Maybe it is that I find it hard to draw what my eye sees, so influential is the cartoon version in my head–and the cartoon version insists that a strong line delineates the two buttocks, which is seldom what we actually see. On this drawing I decided to focus on the troublesome area and I started to get somewhere.

We’re between terms at the figure drawing studio, and I’m getting itchy fingers, especially after reading Adam Gopnik’s interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker. There’s nothing keeping me from drawing right now, but I’m wishing for a nude model (guess I could get a full-length mirror…), strong light, and the discipline of the studio. We resume two weeks from yesterday.

These are from a roll of undated drawings. I’m guessing they’re from last fall or winter, though they might be more recent.

I notice how many different kinds of marks I’m trying here. Lots of experimenting–not wildly, but definitely trying angular marks with the long edge of the charcoal, smudgy ones with small pieces of charcoal, lines with pencil. My favorite thing in all four drawings is the hand on the first one.