Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

People who still believe that art is supposed to imitate nature need to see these dancers.  If this is an imitation of nature, it surely is of the interstellar kind.  The anatomy is familiar; they are not a different species.  The movements, however, take us into the realm of the impossible, not just athletic impossibility [...]

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The Ellipse is in your hand

You’ll find a two minute video on YouTube in which I demonstrate how to swing your hand in the air in an elliptical path.  When you do, the ellipse on paper will just follow.  I invite everyone to watch this short video, because it simulates a class room demo where you watch over the shoulder [...]

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West Loop Galleries

Doing the galleries on a Wednesday morning is like walking on the beach when it’s raining.  You have the place to yourself. Ahh.  Just you and the great non-verbal mysterious IT.  You don’t have to explain anything to anybody, you don’t have to listen to anyone explaining anything to you, you don’t have to be [...]

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FORESHORTENING

When a figure is foreshortened you can’t believe what you’re seeing.  Literally.  You deny the reality in front of your eyes.  It’s just too weird, too funny.  That’s because the forms are compressed and overlapping.  So, instead of drawing what you see, you “fix it.”  You stretch everything out.  When you do that, you ruin [...]

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BEGINNER’S MIND

“I want something to look at,” she said, “and I want to spend time painting it.”    She wanted something close to Joseph Raffael’s watercolors, (>) though certainly not as huge.   She came to my plein air landscape class with the expectation of  spending  a couple of hours working on one watercolor, layering and slowly developing [...]

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Disoriented

You know a lot of words. And you’re eager to learn new words.  Always have been.  When you were four, you could say “camouflaged” and by the time you were six you could name two dozen dinosaurs.  This is what your brain likes to do.  It likes to be smart, likes to know what’s what, [...]

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The Kiss

In 1950 a young actress named Françoise Bornet and her boyfriend kissed in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris so that Robert Doisneau could photograph the kiss.  The photo became famous and brought Doisneau lots of royalty money.  Decades later, Bornet sued him for a share of the royalties, because she in effect [...]

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Perspective

It looks like a big deal, but it’s really very simple.  Whatever you’re looking at has to be seen as if it were trapped in a cube. One point perspective applies when one side of the cube you’re drawing is parallel to the bottom edge of your drawing paper.  The first step is to determine [...]

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Same Pots, Different Takes

During the Renaissance artists were trained in a master’s workshop to paint exactly like the master.  The commissions were often so huge that one artist, the master, could not work on it by himself.  So he trained one assistant to duplicate his way of rendering drapery, another for landscape, another for architectural detail, et al.  [...]

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IS THIS GOOD?

I didn’t take a lot of pictures riding  the CTA to  the Art Institute two days ago, but my eye seems to have been sharp that day,  a lucky day I guess, because I deleted very few of them.  I know, our topic in this blog is supposed to be drawing, but drawing is about [...]

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