artamaze by Katherine Hilden

http://katherinehilden.com

Sargent and Reflected Light

Posted in Achievement, faces, Negative space, Technique and Demo, tagged Cretacolor, John Singer Sargent, Kneaded Eraser, reflected light, W. B. Yeats on March 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

We copied the Millais drawing (see previous post) and Sargent’s drawing of Yeats in one three-hour class meeting.

The Millais drawing had a limited value range, meaning the shades of gray were close together and there was no deep black. The Sargent drawing, by contrast, gives us intense black and gradations of equally assertive gray.

Our aim was to emulate his bravura graphite strokes and to summon the courage to produce large areas of a #10 on the values scale, i.e. a true fearless black.

This power can only be expressed with a powerful drawing tool, one that can deliver the “fearless black and the bravura graphite strokes.” Therefore, the first decision for the artist/student is to choose the right drawing tool. A #2 will not rise to this occasion, as you can see:

This student did not give up, however. She stubbornly continued to work on the challenge at home. And this time she wouldn’t be seen with a #2. Instead she reached into her tool kit for the mighty Cretacolor #6 Art Stick. Ah, what a difference! Here’s the first stage of her new drawing:

Then she let the shock of hair cast a deep shadow over the forehead. The face at this stage has considerable depth. The second stage:

And finally, ta-tah, the Reflected Light at the right side of the face… a sliver of light at the very edge. Voila!

This sliver of Reflected Light was put in with that powerful, but subtle tool we met in the previous post: the Kneaded Eraser.

Now compare this finished drawing with the previous stages. Really look! Let each version pull you in and see the subtlety and power of that sliver of Reflected Light.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American painter who spent most of his life in Europe, particularly Rome and Paris. Here we were working from his 1908 portrait of the Irish poet W.B.Yeats.

Drawing by Mary Shieldsmith.

http://khilden.com

Knead and Draw

Posted in faces, Failed Effort, Negative space, Technique and Demo, tagged F.G.Stephens, John Everett Millay, Kneaded Eraser, Preraphaelites on March 23, 2022| 2 Comments »

A Kneaded Eraser is soft like dough. You massage it –knead it—until it has the shape of the area in your drawing that you want to remove or lighten. For example, if you’re drawing a face and you want to put a highlight in the pupil, you shape your eraser into a point and dab that on the pupil to remove the graphite.

John Everett Millais drew his fellow Preraphaelite artist F.G. Stephens in 1853. What makes this a powerful drawing is how Millais combines two opposites: a subtle, soft drawing technique with the presence of a strong, even confronting personality.

So, this was a challenging exercise. Faces are always challenging because of the emotion that we project into them. In this face students apparently got mesmerized by the piercing gaze and couldn’t believe how soft it was at the same time.

One student confronted the eye separately and drew it masterfully.

But then drawing the eye in the face was problematic. Isn’t that interesting! It’s not a matter of technique, but emotion.

Technically, the Kneaded Eraser was supposed to play the leading role in achieving subtlety. The shadow that covers most of the face was put down first. Then the Kneaded Eraser was scripted to make its entrance and perform. Look at me, I’m not just cleaning up, I’m here to actually DRAW.

Drawing by removing is a powerful technique. For a beginning artist it may feel counter-intuitive.

In the second drawing we did, the Kneaded Eraser asserted itself. Next.

https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&sxsrf=ALeKk00NtVLvp_9fxsvDJ3pTLcGm675gEw:1620835332636&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=The+Last+Supper&ved=2ahUKEwiqq_aRwsTwAhXJQs0KHQt3DGcQiR56BAgmEAI&biw=1378&bih=837

George W. Bush Holds a Brush

Posted in faces, Failed Effort, literalness, Semiotics, Therapy on May 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Isn’t it great that he took up painting, hired tutors and practiced! It’s an activity that can lead to self-reflection and insights into all sorts of things, like other people’s lives, how we conceptualize …cultural assumptions, uncertainties…

These paintings by Bush are not presented as a documentation of what he has learned so far, as evidence of effort. They are presented to us as finished work, as art worth looking at. When something is presented as art it’s ipso facto interesting and important to think about.

Let’s do a thought experiment: would my neighbor George have a chance of having his paintings shown in a gallery or published in a book? He has been painting diligently since he retired ten years ago. His portraits are indistinguishable from Bush’s.

Whether or not George, my neighbor, can get his paintings shown depends on what we know about George. What’s George’s story? Is he blind or paralyzed or recovering from a stroke? Is he autistic or dyslexic or epileptic? Was his father a Greek immigrant or an African genocide survivor or a Russian spy or a US president? In our present social climate and art world hype these questions weave the scrim through which we see images.

Try another thought experiment: you buy a portrait at a yard sale that’s just awful but it looks like oil paint and it’s the right size. You plan to use it as a waterproof mat in your mud room at the side door to your garden. As you take it out of the frame you see the signature “John Wilkes Booth.” You know he was an actor. Couldn’t he also have been trying to paint? It’s a terrible painting but you think you’d better have it authenticated because this could be worth something. Inept as it is, the name will override the awfulness.

A 2014 review in the Guardian agrees with me: [George W Bush’s] portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America’s trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It’s got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has attempted to render shadow and shape in stylish blocks of fawn and woodchip and cookies ‘n cream, but they don’t sit right and the whole head looks mildly crazed. Perhaps this mad look is what is meant by revealing Putin’s “soul”, but it seems inept rather than insightful.

No, wait. The Salvation Army stores used to stack their “art” in bins so that you could page through them. I had a student a few years ago who used to go there to buy awful paintings because she needed stretched canvas to re-use—much cheaper than buying canvas in art supply stores.

I went to my local Salvation Army store last week to see if they had anything as awful as the portraits by Bush, walked straight to the back and found all pictures neatly displayed. Somebody stood there facing the display, entranced by a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. It looked as if it had been painted on a slab of wood. I couldn’t get close because after about a minute the Entranced One unhooked it to take it to check-out.

The original is a fresco covering one wall of the dining room in a monastery in Milan, Italy. Leonardo labored over the perspective to create the illusion that the Last Supper is taking place in that very monastery refectory so that the monks would be edified by saintly company.

Along with much of High Renaissance art, this painting has been adapted in countless Kitsch mockeries. Here are some:

Sorry about that tangent. I didn’t mean to associate Bush with the Renaissance in any way, only wanted to clarify the reference to the Salvation Army.

Back to Bush. A more recent Guardian article, from 2017, refracts the whole portrait project in the context of Bush’s presidency, stating: In his new book Portraits of Courage, the subjects of the former president’s paintings are the very men torn to shreds, quite literally, by his own policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/06/george-w-bush-art-painting-portraits-in-courage

Painting can be therapeutic. If Mr.Bush engages in painting to heal his guilt, let him.

If “idiocy has its charms” (quoting that article here), please, Mr. Bush, show us how you worked through that stage of charming idiocy and then finally developed insights for us to contemplate.

We hope you heal, Mr. Bush.

There is, of course, plenty of commentary on Bush’s paintings, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yaSAiXkRtg

Next, let’s take a closer look at how Mr. Bush does not see eyes.

Posted in Achievement, faces, tagged Pablo Picasso self-portraits on October 25, 2020| 2 Comments »

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain.

A photo shows him at the age of six with his younger sister. She is obedient and he is supremely self-confident.

He drew all the time, even in school where he filled the margins of textbooks with drawings.

Here’s a page showing pigeon studies and a drawing of a bullfight, possibly done from memory, at the age of about 9.

When he was fourteen, his father, an art teacher and successful painter, handed him his own brushes and paints because Pablo had surpassed him.

Picasso’s self-portrait at fifteen:

He was a serious young man, here at eighteen:

In his self-portrait at twenty, he’s already mature:

This article appeared in The Conversation on October 9, 2020. The author is Sally Hickson, Associate Professor, Art History, University of Guelph

That Fly

Posted in faces, Semiotics, Surreal, tagged Hofer Family, Mike Pence, Persistence of Memory, Petrus Christus, Sally Hickson, Salvador Dali, symbolic meaning of fly, the fly, trompe-l'oeil, Vice-presidential debate on October 11, 2020| 2 Comments »

After this week’s vice-presidential debate in the United States, the fly that landed on Vice-President Mike Pence’s head was more of a sensation than the details of the debate — at least on social media. The fly has already been immortalized as a Biden/Harris fly swatter (sorry, they’re all sold out) and sparked a Halloween costume.

In many circumstances, flies are unremarkable. That’s probably why a French word for spy is connected to the same word for fly, mouche. When a fly becomes famous, it’s worth wondering why.

Flies have long held symbolic meaning in the history of art. In portraits made in Renaissance Europe, the presence of a fly symbolizes the transience of human life (buzzbuzzpfft!). In the great scheme of things, our lives are no longer than that of a fly. For me as an art historian, the fly was a moment to reflect not only on the history of flies in western painting, but to begin considering what the long history of this symbolism may reveal about why the fly generated so much buzz.

Humility, impermanence, illusion

Take, for example, an extraordinary little painting known today as Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family, painted in about 1470 by an artist from the German (Swabian) School, now in the National Gallery in London. Her elaborate white head covering highlights a perfect little fly, that’s settled on her just to remind us that our life, like hers, is impermanent.

The corollary is that we’re supposed to do the best we can with the time we’ve got. When it comes to time and eternity, as painter and poet William Blake wrote: “Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?” The fly is a little reminder of humility.

Painters could also include a fly to draw attention to themselves, demonstrating with their “trompe-l’oeil” (deceiving the eye) tricks that they could paint in a manner that seemed so real, a viewer of the portrait would be tempted to try to swat the fly away. The 16th-century Italian painter Giorgio Vasari, biographer of Italian Renaissance artists, tells a story about the painter Giotto fooling his teacher Cimabue by adding a realistic-looking fly to a painting.

Salvador Dalí, who was pretty much the lord of the flies (he painted them a lot) included a fly on the watch face of his painting The Persistence of Memory (now housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). He also used an army of ants to signify the decay of time and life’s impermanence.

All is not what it appears

Portrait of a Carthusian, the most famous portrait featuring a fly, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was painted by Petrus Christus in 1446. It depicts a bearded monk. The fly perched on the ledge in front of him signifies we’re entering a zone where all is not what it appears: we might say that what seems real is only an illusion. Or, perhaps the artist has enhanced “the quality of the subject’s ‘real’ presence by the fly resting momentarily on the fictive frame,” according to the museum.

Entomologist Ron Cherry has explored how insects have long-standing mythological associations with death. In Renaissance thought, which tended to blend medieval fabulist tales about nature with ideas about religion, flies were considered to represent supernatural power, mostly associated with evil and corruption, because they seemed to be spontaneously born from decaying fruit and rotting organic matter.

In the book of Exodus in the Bible, God mustered swarms of flies as punishment. They were harbingers of worse things, like pestilence and death. That’s a lot of deliverables for a bunch of tiny flies.

The point is that flies still remind us of unpleasant things, or as commentator David Frum noted, unpleasant things in a presidency we’d rather ignore — which is why, I suspect, given the administration’s record, some people found it so delightful.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The Conversation is a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories written by academics and researchers.

Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family,’ c. 1470, by an artist from the German (Swabian) School. (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Museum of Modern Art, New York City

‘Portrait of a Carthusian’ (1446), by Petrus Christus, oil on wood. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY

Original article by Sally Hickson: https://theconversation.com/mike-pences-fly-from-renaissance-portraits-to-salvador-dali-artists-used-flies-to-make-a-point-about-appearances-147815

SNL: Fly Debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI_lxFv203I&list=PLS_gQd8UB-hLlAHDdSUdIYLjk9WCDnjWx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)

Out of Focus? Oh, Good.

Posted in Achievement, faces, Imagination, inspiration, Seeing, tagged ambiguity, Medardo Rosso, out-of-focus on July 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

FigureRosso

At the end of class there’s never enough time, it seems, to transition from the rich web of associations that has been spinning in our minds to the rules of the road in the practical world out there. I sometimes forget to take photos of the students’ work and sometimes I’m too rushed when I make the rounds with my camera.

As you can see, the photo of this student’s drawing was taken in haste. It’s obviously blurred. You can barely make out the head and upper torso of a draped figure.

I do wish I had a clear shot of that fine drawing.

But I don’t regret having this blurry view. I immediately found it moving.

The feelings of incompletion and ambiguity have been threads running through the past few posts. Look at this photo for a while and observe what happens in your mind.

There are examples of mystery and “veiledness” that go back quite a ways in Western Art. My first association was to Medardo Rosso’s heads of children. Up next.

Drawing by Chelsea. Graphite on paper, ~12″ x 10″

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9B8ij0GGBI

Paul Giamatti is Drawing in his Quiet Quarantine Room

Posted in Cartooning, faces, Illustration, Imagination, inspiration, Therapy, tagged drawing therapy, Paul Giamatti, pleasure of drawing, quarantine, Stephen Colbert on July 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Giamatti1

“There’s really not much to do. I’ve tried to do a little writing. I’ve been drawing again, which I hadn’t done in many years, that’s been a wonderful thing, actually, having this time on one’s hands, to take up things again….A lot of my life I wanted to be some kind of artist, a cartoonist or some sort of illustrator…

All I can do is sort of weird funny faces…I just kind of do these faces…I got a lot of time on my hands….honestly, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing…I never really took any lessons….It’s been fun to do it again….it’s been a good thing.”

Giamatti is in a Zoom (or Zoom-ish) conversation with Stephen Colbert and he’s saying that this self-isolation has a good effect. He has rediscovered the pleasure of drawing!

At that point the conversation had a chance of going deeper into how drawing feels in the mind, how it’s developed over centuries, how it’s taught or not taught and such, but this is TV, so Colbert takes the shallow turn and suggests Giamatti could do a graphic novel. That’s ok.

Nevertheless, we had witnessed a subtle moment in American television: we heard a big star saying to another big star in the entertainment industry that being alone in your quiet room and drawing—that is a wonderful thing.

Yes, it is.

You can see that conversation at

Facing the Portrait with Henry Raeburn, 5

Posted in faces, Seeing, Technique and Demo, Upside-Down Drawing, tagged Henry Raeburn, paradox, Robert Brown of Newhall on September 16, 2019| 3 Comments »

KatRaeburn

If you squint a little, you’ll see two dark stripes. At the same time you see a profile. Stay with this. Keep looking at the whole page.

The mark making in the dark passages is so rich that you’re drawn (!) in to dwell on the intensity of that texture. The next second you’re reading the face with its clear profile and the hint of an eye in the shadow side. Your brain flickers like a strobe light, back and forth in this paradox.

This is uncanny, very powerful.

Drawing by Kat.

Here’s what I mean by “two dark stripes”:

KatRaeburn copy

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/facing-the-portrait-with-henry-raeburn-1/

Facing the Portrait with Henry Raeburn, 4

Posted in faces, Seeing, Technique and Demo, Upside-Down Drawing, tagged face, Henry Raeburn, lines, painterly, portrait, Robert Brown of Newhall on September 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »

HenryRaeburnBWusd Raeburn’s portrait of Robert Brown hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago. I admire it at every visit. It is painterly, with quick, sure dashes of the brush: look at the hair, the edge of the collar.

Of all the student copies of this portrait (up-side-down) this drawing, by Mary, is most “painterly.”

When we see lines in a drawing or a painting, our attention traces the line and we feel assured of clarity and rationality. Lines delineate shapes, orient us and tell us what’s what.

MaryRaeburn

Notice, there are no lines in Mary’s drawing. Everything is effect, shades of gray, nuance. Imagine navigating over your drawing paper without the guidance of lines. It takes intense concentration. This is quite an achievement.

When we draw portraits we are not satisfied with mere accuracy of facial features. We always read the emotion in the face. When you consider that this drawing was done up-side-down, is it not astonishing how such a process can result in such depth of emotion?

To review how this drawing exercise was set up, visit

To compare other students’ work:

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/facing-the-portrait-with-henry-raeburn-3/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/facing-the-portrait-with-henry-raeburn-2/