artamaze by Katherine Hilden

http://www.katherinehilden.com

Enter the Artist’s Mind

Posted in Achievement, Master drawings, Technique and Demo, tagged 17th century, drawing, Incompletion, modern, preliminary drawing on June 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The idea of “incompletion” is so rich and stimulating that I want to stay with it even more.

This drawing is 7-1/2 inches high, made by an unknown Italian artist in the 17^th century. Notice how fast and scribbly these lines are. We are witnessing an artist thinking intensely and concentrating on the assigned theme.

Forget the client. The artist is not concerned about the client or anybody else liking this page. He is completely focused on the challenge of making this hang together.

This is why I love drawings—so called “preliminary“ drawings—above all, more than the painting that would be produced from it. It’s through the drawing that you enter the artist’s mind.

Look at the forcefulness of the lines:

These marks, made over three hundred years ago—spring from a modern sensibility.

http://www.katherinehilden.com

Working It Out in the Renaissance

Posted in Life drawing, Master drawings, tagged modern, Renaissance on May 31, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Why does this drawing feel modern?

Even if you’re not schooled in art history, you can tell that it’s not made in the past hundred years. It looks classical, you think, maybe Renaissance-y. Made around 1500 or 1600? Right, the artist is anonymous, but 16^th century is about right.

Then why the modern feel?

Because it’s obvious that the artist didn’t do this for anybody else. It’s not a finished product, ready for unveiling. The super-powerful client in his velvet robes never saw this drawing. In this drawing the artist was working for himself, he was working out the foreshortened upper arm. So weird. How did he get up the courage to tackle this weirdness? Because he looked at reality. The clear, well-defined, old formulae no longer sufficed. So, let’s see, what do I actually see here? Really? No identifiable muscles, not clear anatomy. Doesn’t make sense. Too confusing. But that’s what I actually see. Gotta draw what I see.

He confronted his own confusion.

When you look at this drawing you empathize with the artist as he stares at uncertainties. That’s why it feels modern.

So, of course, it’s incomplete.

On the subject of “working it out,” see also https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/working-it-out/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/markmaking-with-gainsborough/

Egon Schiele, Incomplete

Posted in Imagination, Master drawings, Romantic, Technique and Demo, tagged Egon Schiele, Gainsborough, Hilde Ziegler, im Kinsky, Incompletion, modernism, Sezession, Vienna on May 30, 2020| 2 Comments »

Before we look at #6 in this series of still life studies, let’s first take some time to wallow in the concept of “incompletion.” We’ve just encountered this concept in all of these five studies and, going back a few months, you recall, we looked at a series of drawings based on Gainsborough, also in the context of incompletion:

Now, here’s a drawing by the Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), a superb and prolific draftsman.

The shoulder and bodice are left incomplete. We can be sure that he left the drawing “incomplete” on purpose. He was part of the avant-garde, called Sezession, in Vienna at the turn of that century. This feeling of incompletion is central to the modern sensibility, which comes out of romanticism.

If you’re yawning at this point, I thank you, because it means that you GET modernism. No need to dissect its concepts.

So then, why bring this up? I bring it up because students inevitably admire incompletion in famous artist’s work, finding the incompletion energetic and engaging, but they dismiss their own work because, well, “it’s not finished.”

Why do you admire a quality in a famous drawing, but reject the same quality in your own drawing. Are you willing to look at this? Yes, you are.

Egon Schiele’s, Mädchenporträt (Hilde Ziegler), about 18” high. Dated 1918, the year he died in the influenza pandemic. Recently discovered, it sold at auction in Vienna’s im Kinsky, 2012, for $304,000.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-1/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-2/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-3/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-4/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-5/

http://www.katherinehilden.com

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/the-square/

Trip into Drapery

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Imagination, literalness, Master drawings, Roundness, Seeing, Still life, Surreal, Technique and Demo, tagged drapery, Leonardo da Vinci, Linné Dosé, Rogier van der Weyden, Surreal on September 2, 2016| 1 Comment »

Leonardo was about eighteen when he made this study of drapery. Doesn’t matter how old he was. He was making drapery studies when he was forty-eight, too. It’s not something you master and then you’re done with it. Drapery is mesmerizing, both for the artist working on it and for us, the viewers. It draws you into a universe that envelopes you and at the same time feels utterly alien.

The Leonardo drawing activates your sense of touch, convincing you that you’re inhabiting a real world, as if you were feeling your way through a cave with a bizarre topography that nevertheless completely seduces your senses.

You can snap out of the trance, however. And when you do, you’ll notice that some passages are unreal. He just made some crinkles up—out of whole cloth, so to speak. With your (momentarily) sober mind you can look at this passage, for example, (pink circle) and realize that cloth does not behave this way.

Leonardo lied. He created this fiction. Why? Because it’s fun to create fiction. He creates the illusion of reality but he’s actually playing with form.

Look at Rogier van der Weyden, who’s about fifty years earlier than Leonardo.

Are these green folds hammered out of aluminum? You know very well, cloth does not drape, fold and crinkle this way. Yet, here it is, captivating us, compelling us to its rhythms like a fierce drummer. (Ha, I’m looking at 15^th century drapery and thinking of Gene Krupa and Art Blakey.)

Drapery, in other words, is a wild thing.

Linné Dosé, whose love of form and composition lead to daring omissions in his choice of still life elements, came up with this cloth floating in space. No table to rest on. He apparently saw that shape, found it compelling and that was enough.

Now, when you see this thing sitting there on the page, it harmonizes with the behavior of drapery, but it also becomes something in itself. Your imagination kicks into the surreal. What is this? It looks like a critter, doesn’t it. You’re now in that cave with Leonardo and Rogier.

Leonardo and Rogier worked for clients who were all-powerful and dictated the subject matter to be depicted. The artist then set out to work as if he were saying, fine, I’ll give you your mythological characters, but I’ll go wild with the drapery. You can have your Magdalen, but the drapery is mine.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519

Rogier van der Weyden, 1400 – 1464

Linné Dosé, graphite on paper, ~12” x 18”

www.katherinehilden.com

Sunflowers

Posted in Achievement, Master drawings, Negative space, Still life, Technique and Demo, tagged 1900, decadence, Egon Schiele, Elizabeth Mendoza, modernism, sunflowers, Van Gogh on October 7, 2015| Leave a Comment »

They tend to droop and get weighed down by lunching squirrels. I cut down the tallest sunflower in my garden and brought it to drawing class. As a still life subject the tired sunflower offers lots of issues to work on: negative space, dynamic composition and the opportunity to practice energetic markmaking. But the greatest of these, hmm, is the problem of wanting to draw a flower as a flower, meaning pleasing and pretty. It’s a glorious, assertive flower. But, alas, it’s dying.
The glorious and assertive, but dying sunflower must have touched a nerve in Van Gogh. He painted it, many times, in all its raggedness and made it famous. You can’t go to the farmers market in early fall and not sigh ah-look-so-Van Gogh.
Twenty years later, Egon Schiele also fell for its decadent charm, celebrating decay even more than Vincent had done.
The two decades bracketing the year 1900 brought great cultural change. The 19th century was giving way to the inventions of modernism in every field you can think of, in the sciences and the arts. It was an exciting time to be alive and alert.
In Van Gogh’s Sunflowers we see the decaying half of the change.

In Schiele’s Sunflowers we see vitality and strength, in the midst of decay.

One student in the drawing class worked in a technique that held maximum potential to convey the dynamism of the dying sunflower. It’s a difficult subject, technically and emotionally.

Drawing by Elizabeth Mendoza, China Marker on gloss paper, 14 x 11
Vincent VanGogh, 1853-1890
Egon Schiele, 1880-1918
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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7.16.15 Rembrandt and Lastmann

Posted in Imagination, inspiration, literalness, Master drawings, tagged Andre Malraux, Pieter Lastmann, Rembrandt van Rijn, Stuart Gilbert., style, The Voices of Silence on July 16, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday was Rembrandt’s birthday.

André Malraux, in The Voices of Silence, talks about Rembrandt’s early work showing the influence of his teacher Pieter Lastmann. Here’s Rembrandt at the age of twenty.

Malraux talks about the “fallacy of a ‘neutral style.’”
“Its origin is the idea that a living model can be copied without interpretation or any self-expression; actually no such literal copy has ever been made. Even in drawing this notion can be applied only to a small range of subjects: to a standing horse seen in profile, for instance, but not to a galloping horse. This theory owes much to the silhouette, and underlying it is the assumption that the basic neutral style would be a bare outline. But any such method, if strictly followed, would not lead to any form of art, but would stand in the same relation to drawing as an art as the commercial or official style of writing stands to literature.”
Here’s a work by Pieter Lastmann.

Malraux continues: “A neutral style no more exists than does a neutral language; styleless pictures no more exist than do wordless thoughts. Thus the teaching of the plastic arts (apart from mere training of the hand) is nothing more than the teaching of the significant elements in a style or several styles (thus, in our own, perspective is one of these elements). Academic drawing is a rationalized style—what theosophy is to religions or Esperanto to a living tongue.… Though the life-stories of great painters show us pastiches as being the starting point of their art, none tells of a transition from the art school to genius without a conflict with some previous genius. Any more than the history of art can show us a style born directly from nature, and not from a conflict with another style.”

André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1953. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. p.316
Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-1669
Pieter Lastman, 1583 – 1633

Jan Gossaert

Posted in Caricature, Illustration, Master drawings, Semiotics, tagged Catholic, Counter Reformation, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Flemish, Hapbsburgs, Hieronymus Bosch, icon, Jan Gossaert, Late Gothic, Madonna and Child, Met, s-curve, satire, Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools, undogmatic on April 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

The Flemish painter Jan Gossaert (c. 1478–1532) was much sought after, as a portraitist of Hapsburg royals and as a creator of altar pieces for Catholic churches. When I saw this Madonna and Child at the Met last December I just about burst out laughing. No, I didn’t actually laugh out loud, though that’s permissible in museums, but I did stand there for a long time, gaping at this extravagant and, yes, funny image of what was at the time a sacred subject.
He was a very busy man and it’s hard to imagine that he had time to paint for his own entertainment. But it’s also hard to imagine this undogmatic Madonna and Child hanging in a Catholic church in the early 16th century, during the Counter Reformation.
Let’s consider one bit of the historical context. In the Late Gothic, the S-curve of the Madonna becomes very pronounced and the baby Jesus becomes playful and fidgety, pure baby.
https://www.google.com/search?q=late+gothic+madonnas&biw=1536&bih=851&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=lYwoVabCJca8ggTs04GgCA&ved=0CCAQsAQ
But Gossaert’s Madonna is over the top. He shows her playing with the baby, but it doesn’t look like a lot of fun, does it. The baby looks terrified and frantic and mom–sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up–is more interested in posing than in bonding with her child.
The heap of blue cloth that we are supposed to accept as her gown is so overdone—even for the convention of the time—that I find it comically bizarre. It seems to be the work of an obsessive-compulsive. Or somebody who had an ax to grind.
Maybe Gossaert painted this not so much for his own amusement but as a satire. Satire wafted in the northern air. It was a time of political/theological upheaval and Gossaert may have had clients who were eager to see satirical views of the establishment’s icons. Who else would have bought a painting like this around 1500?!
Two contemporary northern satirists were Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), who had the nerve to poke at the papacy, and Hieronymus Bosch (1450’s-1516), who made no bones about his disgust with the corruption of the Catholic Church and the general insanity of the time. Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) published his satire Ship of Fools in 1494. Here’s part of Bosch’s illustration of that theme:

We don’t have personal details about Gossaert’s life that would provide insights into his playful, very human and possibly satirical Madonnas.
For more Madonnas by Jan Gossaert,
https://www.google.com/search?q=jan+gossaert+madonna+and+child&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bIsoVfaQIIS8ggTD9IHACQ&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=1175&bih=829
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
http://facefame.wordpress.com
http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com
http://www.katherinehilden.com
http://www.khilden.com

Andrew Wyeth at the National Gallery

Posted in Color, Galleries, Landscape, Master drawings, Technique and Demo, Texture, Watercolor, tagged Andrew Wyeth, composition, De Kooning, Dutch Masters, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollack, National Gallery, tempera, watercolor, Wind from the Sea on January 5, 2015| 1 Comment »

Oh, Wyeth, I thought, I don’t like Wyeth. I had just walked in at the 7th Street entrance, said hello to some Dutch masters, Helen Frankenthaler, De Kooning and Jackson Pollack. And then there was a sign pointing to Andrew Wyeth watercolors. I was familiar with his paintings, admired them for their composition and austerity, but, really, Mr. Wyeth, all these individual brush strokes for dried grass. Hill and hills of brush strokes for dried brownish grass. Oh, well, I shrugged to myself, I’ll just go in and have a quick walk through.
My jaw dropped at the sight of the first piece, a pencil sketch he did for Wind from the Sea (1947). Then he worked out a watercolor of the same motif, the curtain blowing in the window. Oh, my!

His watercolors are wild! The brush stokes—big brush!—are furious, ruthless, raggedy, dripping, bleeding, dragged dry. The watercolors are large, about 20 x 24, and each looks as if had been done in a frenzy of concentration, in maybe 15 minutes. Here’s the quote I took down from one of the walls:
“I break loose…and there are scratches and spit and mud…that’s what gives them some quality.”
Some quality, indeed. And yes, he ripped into the heavy paper with a knife or razor blade, he stressed the paper to the point of wrinkling, and the mud was passionate mud. He probably did spit and sweat.
Then why are his paintings so, well, fussy. Individual blades of grass, individual threads on torn curtains. Maybe, after breaking loose in a watercolor or two, he got out his tempera and oils to calm himself down.
I have no idea how long I was in that gallery. I lost track of time.

Drawings and watercolors often don’t reproduce well in art books. The immediacy, the “spit and mud,” is lost in reproductions and prints.
What a revelation this exhibit was! It closed two days later. I will hop on a plane the next time someone puts up a Wyeth watercolor exhibit.
(Photography was not allowed, of course. I’m pulling images from the web here. Again, these only hint at the passion of Andrew Wyeth. I could not find the pencil drawing or the watercolor he did for Wind from the Sea and, in any case, no reproduction would do. Shown above is the tempera painting.)
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
http://facefame.wordpress.com
http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com
http://www.katherinehilden.com
http://www.khilden.com

Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

Posted in Cubism, Master drawings, Seeing, tagged Avignon, Barcelona, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, MoMA, New York, Night Fishing in Antibes, pentimento, Picasso. Museum of Modern Art, The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin on December 23, 2014| 3 Comments »

You’ve seen it hundreds of times in art books. And now there it is: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. In the flesh, in the canvas, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This famous painting, this icon, yes, icon, of modernism. You’ve flown thousands of miles to get to New York, you’re modern, you’re not shocked by this shocking painting, you’re cultured, civilized, you’re familiar with its origin myths and the various interpretations offered by art historians. You know that Picasso’s early sketches show a medical student entering a brothel, that the red light district in Barcelona, where Picasso spent his teen age years, was along a street called Avignon. You’ve studied every passage of this painting from reproductions in art books: the course handling of the drapery, the aggressive fruit bowl, the terrifying masks. And here it is and here you are. It looks just like the reproductions in the books. It’s big and you knew that all along. There is no surprise, there’s nothing new here at all, nothing to learn, nothing to experience. So there’s nothing for you to do but stand in front of it like a good tourist and do the touristy thing; you ask your friend to take a picture of you standing in front of Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon.
In 1936 in an essay called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin said when people go to museums now, they don’t go to see art, they go to see the original of what they’ve seen before in reproductions. There’s no surprise, no experience, no epiphany, no shock, no aesthetic experience. What they’re curious to see is the original that spawned so many reproductions.
That’s what I witnessed earlier this month when I spent a day at the MoMA. Les Demoiselles D’Avignon drew a crowd. I inched my way close to the painting’s edge and looked closely at the brush work. Very clean, very neat. No overpainting that would leave previous layers to peek through (pentimento). No reworking. No pencil or charcoal lines to lay out the composition.

A less famous painting of Picasso’s, Night Fishing in Antibes, was not mobbed and attracted only the occasional poseur. Famous because it was a Picasso, but not as widely reproduced. Hence a smaller crowd.