Finding the Courage

I haven’t worked on the caricatures for my facefame blog since, oh my, January. In the winter and spring months I was up to here in printer’s ink, modifiers, press settings, the ol’ hot plate, solvents, exhaust fans and periodic printshop fatigue. Printmaking is not for the faint of heart or lungs. In five months I pulled (that’s how printmakers talk) 152 prints, and many more if you count the rejects. But more on that later, much later. This past week I finally summoned the courage to see if I could get back into the facefame-caricature mode. (facefame.wordpress.com)
I like reading Lorrie Moore. I pulled up the Google images for Lorrie Moore on my 24” computer screen, leaned the customary drawing board against my desk and drew her with the customary Stabilo aquarellable pencil. Twenty minutes, maybe all of thirty, and there was this intelligent, witty face on my paper. I was rather pleased. Well, I thought, the hiatus on facefame has just ended. I love drawing like this and there are plenty of writers and other artists (maybe even politicians in this presidential circus) that I’m eager to draw.
The next day, the drawing didn’t look good any more. It looked pleasing, you know, goody-goody. It said “look how well the artist controls the medium; a little ironic, but at the same time it has that classical feeling; being done in sepia, it alludes to the mighty Renaissance and who doesn’t love Leonardo and Michelangelo.” Time to put it aside, reconsider.
How can I bring this drawing into the 20th century, ok, the 21st? To do that, the drawing needs to be a bit edgy. Maybe adjusting the size will help. I took it to Kinko’s and shrunk it, from 14×11 to about 11×9. Now, loosely tracing that size to my aquarellable paper, I was less tempted by detail and literalness. I leaned into the pencil, deposited a lot of black stuff, smeared with a damp paper towel, textured the paper (in printmaking that’s called tone) and found my caricaturing zone. I knew I was in it when I drew her right iris with a flick of the pencil. That cranked up my courage and then adding the color patches was a sure thing, easy in the sense of “hey-it’s-my-drawing.”
This happens all the time, this wanting to please and then realizing the next hour, or the next day, that what you really need to do is summon your courage and do strong work.

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Does Not Make Nice

Same gloves as before (previous post), same old pot.  But what a different feeling!

While Linné’s drawing holds us with its tense composition, Gaby’s drawing grabs us emotionally.  She places the pot in the middle of the page and the gloves on left and right, giving us a rational anchor in symmetry.  Nice, thank you.  But the drawing quality itself does not make nice.  Her markmaking is frenzied. We can recognize the two objects on either side as gloves, but they might also be agitated organism.  It’s a compelling double-take, given that the glove is an analog of the hand.

Somehow she managed to make the whole thing look monumental (and I can’t quite analyze that effect), making the gloves surreal and spooky.  Notice the urgency of the deep black scribbles on either side of the pot/tower.  There’s something ominous about that background. (Maybe that’s where the illusion of monumentality comes from).

The whole page pulsates.   I keep looking at this page, drawn into its life.

The drawing, about 12” x 14”, was done in Aquarellable Pencil on gloss paper.

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Rembrandt Didn’t Have Paper Towels

I often think about Rembrandt and what he didn’t have.  He didn’t have central heating, for example, which is why he depicts himself bundled up all the time.  It was cold in Amsterdam much of the year.  He also didn’t have electric lighting to extend his work day. He painted by candle light. Imagine that. He was also a printmaker and did that without paper towels.  He had assistants, but still, imagine that.

Rembrandt didn’t have paper towels and he didn’t have aquarellable pencils, either.  He was a tireless experimenter and I’m sure if had had aquarellable pencils he would have used them.

A few weeks ago in my drawing class I gave a demo on how I use aquarellable pencils.  I work on gloss paper, which has two properties:  water does not seep in and certain pencils, like china marker and the aquarellable, glide easily on the surface. The aquarellable lines, as the name implies, can be made to bleed with water.  I particularly like the feathery effect made with a damp paper towel sweeping over the line or along the line.  The pencil is called Stabilo 8046, made in Germany by Schwan; it also has the words “paper, glass, plastic metal” on its side.  I use it for the drawings at http://facefame.wordpress.com

One of my students caught the bug and has been working with the Stabilo to great advantage.  Shown above is Gabrielle E.’s drapery study from last week’s class. The soft edges and blending effects are created with the sweep of a damp paper towel.

Art materials don’t have to be “classic” or expensive.  Forget bona fide art supplies.  Draw with a twig, a blade of grass, a shish kabob stick, the end of a used up brush, a paper towel; paint with a housepainter’s brush or a kitchen sponge.  Rembrandt used something called a reed pen, which at its finest was made of bamboo, but could also be a homemade tool made of indigenous reeds that grow near rivers and ponds.

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Life Drawing–Stabilo and Water

The Stabilo pencil is aquarellable.  That means water-soluble.  After I have some lines down, I like to make them bleed by running a water-loaded brush along them.  In that process, the brush will pick up some pigment, allowing me to continue sketching with a very pale wet line.  If I go over or through those wet lines with the Stabilo pencil it will produce a very gritty and unpredictable effect.  This is risky, but therein lies the pleasure of drawing like this.

The paper I use, as mentioned before in this blog, has a gloss finish, meaning the water puddles on the surface without seeping in.  The technique does not allow for erasing, but since the pigment is suspended on the surface, it can be pushed around, up to a point, within limits.

Sometimes I start the drawing with a clean watery brush, sketching out the main thrust of the gesture.  Then, quickly, while these lines are still soppy, I start working with the Stabilo pencil.  The water makes everything unpredictable. The head with braid (left) resulted from this quick, impulsive way of working,   Anatomical accuracy and likeness of the model are, of course, lost.  But instead, we gain what  we might call expressiveness, a sense of urgency and a feeling for the complexity of the human condition.

Top: Ten one-minute poses. Bottom: Foreshortened figure, and Reclining figure. Each, a 10-15 minute pose.

(Click to enlarge)

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