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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.
I’m tempted to make this look better-proportioned than it is by splitting it in two and passing it off as two drawings. I got lost in the detail, as I do with hands, and didn’t realize until afterwards that I’d drawn her right hand so much larger than the left that they look like they’re from two different people. It’s okay. Good things are happening.
I couldn’t find my pencils as I was leaving for drawing this week, so I only had the box of assorted charcoals the studio has on hand, which doesn’t include any charcoal pencils. I’m sure I could have borrowed one from someone, but I liked the challenge of doing without one. I like this drawing because it gets into more fine detail than I’ve ever created without a pencil.
All 7-minute drawings, all charcoal and charcoal pencil as usual. It was hard to pick a focus on a lot of this session’s poses–the overall shapes of his poses were beautiful–but I forced myself to choose a section so that I’d be able to get into some detail.
(c) Anderson—Alinari/Art Resource, New York
(c) Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
Who’s easier to draw, men or women? At the first break on Monday, the man next to me and I discussed it. He thought men were easier–“more obvious,” and added that the Greeks found men more aesthetically interesting. I wondered whether that was because they liked all that visible muscle–it gives you more to grab onto (may I stress: artistically speaking). Of course, they loved to sculpt athletes. Did Greek women do sports in ancient times? He thought yes. I don’t think it worked its way into their ideal of female beauty. Even allowing for the fact that female athletes seldom develop the pronounced muscles that men do, Atalanta, on the right here, doesn’t really have a runner’s legs.
All of this musing was inspired by the new model. The studio’s been low on male models for a while, but this man started working this week, and he’s excellent. I wouldn’t call it easier, but it was a change and an interesting challenge. Last week’s weren’t that good, and having the rush of first-time readers due to the Freshly Pressed plug was like having all these people dropping by and me in curlers. So here are some from this Monday, a somewhat better hair day.
10-minute, including a rare foray into faces:
20-minute:
I can imagine myself drawing mostly the human form for the rest of my life. This was not the outcome I expected from devoting my sabbatical to art. I thought I’d mostly be making abstract collages, and while I did some of that, I’m feeling blocked in that kind of art, which is something to tackle eventually. I didn’t expect to find figure drawing so exhilarating that I would look forward to Monday mornings the way I look forward to Girl Scout cookie season. Every pose is a treat. No, I’m not doing it justice–it’s more like a religious experience. (Well, maybe Thin Mints are also.) I can’t really write any more about that. After Sunday my ability to express a spiritual moment in words is tapped out.
It’s so instructive to look at these (drawings from last Monday, 2/28) in thumbnail versions–it gives me a similar perspective to seeing them from across a large room. Three things I’m learning, looking at them, that I want to keep in mind when I get to the studio in a hour:
- A tighter focus is yielding good results–don’t try to take in the whole body. Keep working on small sections and really get into them in detail.
- Don’t use the pencil for shading. Stick with the broad side of the charcoal stick for now.
- Go straight to the shadows. That shadow along her right ribs and wrist in (e) begins to give the whole drawing the depth and aliveness that I’m going for.
From yesterday’s figure drawing session. The munchkin declared this “the most beautiful drawing I’ve ever seen!”
Me, I’ve seen better, even in my own batch from this day. I gave the arm too dark a line and could never repair it, so it looks nailed on like a Barbie’s; the shading on her stomach and right shoulder is also too abrupt. The outer line is heavy all the way, which flattens out the shape. Still, those are errors caused by too heavy a hand on the shading, and since my lifetime habit is to be too light, I think they’re errors in the right direction. And there’s a lot I’m happy with: the hand, even though it isn’t quite right, because it was a challenge; and the shading of the right knee and breastbone.
I asked my daughter what she liked so much about it. She said the black part around the edges, though she wanted to know why it got grey and stopped. I told her I’d run out of time. We had an interesting conversation as she asked why I put the black in and I tried to explain the concept of background.
Sermons in Stones 
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