Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, George Eliot, How Fiction Works, James Wood on September 21, 2015| 1 Comment »
In her essay on German realism, George Eliot says: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies…Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”
Quote found in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, p 171.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in Achievement, Composition, Illustration, Imagination, inspiration, Negative space, Still life, Technique and Demo, tagged art, background., charcoal, illustratio, invention, Maggy Shell, modernist, ribbon, stripes, theme-and-variation on March 8, 2015| Leave a Comment »
What the artist saw was a ball and a ribbon. A ball and a ribbon can make an interesting drawing, but the challenge with a still life like that is inevitably the “background.” There’s no such thing as “background.” That’s a modernist credo and I uphold it. In the modernist sensibility, every square inch of the painting or drawing has to hold the viewer’s interest. What to do? You invent. Maggy Shell invented the stripes.
She could have invented a wall paper of polka dots or hibiscus with hummingbirds. Why are stripes a good, possibly the best, choice? Because the stripes present a variation on the ribbon motif which is the largest part of the still life. What we get, therefore, is a theme-and-variation–always engaging, in whatever art form we find it: music, poetry, storytelling, painting, drawing, sculpture. This invention takes the drawing out of the category “illustration” and makes it art.
Drawing by Maggy Shell, charcoal, ~14 x 18.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Posted in Composition, Imagination, inspiration, Seeing, tagged art, artifact, hyperbolic plane, sculpture on March 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »
When you forget the yarn about angles in a triangle and exponential progressions (see previous post), the hyperbolic plane looks like a sculpture. I positioned mine in my dining room, in relation to a plant on one side and a painting on the other. The red curly hyperbolic plane relates to both. Perhaps it functions as a mediator, like a thermostat, hmmm. A discussion of when we think of an object as art and when we don’t can get heated because of strong opinions on either side. The question, “what’s the difference between art and artifact,” is really what the workshop was about. But you already suspected that.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in Composition, Illustration, Imagination, Life drawing, literalness, Master drawings, Technique and Demo, tagged anatomy, art, Barscay, composition, rhythm on November 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Yesterday was the ninth of twelve classes in this fall term. We had been working on all sorts of topics: drapery, still life, shading, three-dimensionality, hands, faces, contrapposto, composition, upside-down drawing, the works. All difficult issues. Why not add more difficulty, I thought, and give them the difficulty of choosing what to work from. I set up a still life and brought in images of faces & hands to struggle with. And then one more thing: pages from Barcsay’s anatomy book. To my surprise, most of the class went for the challenges of anatomy. It’s the driest of topics, but there they were, eagerly gathering around the table where the xerox copies of the muscles and bones were spread out.
You get a work out when you try to draw all these muscles in their right place. It’s an accomplishment in itself and a valuable exercise that helps you draw more loosely and with more confidence when you face the live mode.
When the anatomical studies are placed on the same page, crammed together and made to partially overlap, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. The page (above, by Gaby Edgerton) is clearly about studying anatomy, but the rhythm created by these dense forms nudges the composition out of mere academia and into the category “art.”
Jenö Barcsay’s (1900-1988) anatomy book has been around for about forty years. I like to use it in class, because the illustrations lack flair and heroism. It’s actually a little boring (just the facts, ma’m) and that spurs a more advanced student on to invent a way of drawing and a way of putting the body parts on the page that perks us up because it feels a lot like art. Killing two birds with one femur.
(There’s some glare on the photo of Gaby’s drawing because I use a little instant camera in a room with rows of ceiling lights.)
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Composition, Illustration, Imagination, inspiration, literalness, Negative space, Still life, tagged art, counterpoint, documentation, image, invention, Linné, plant, questions, tension on August 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »
The difference between an image and a snapshot documentation of an object is that the image triggers questions in your mind that go beyond the factual. When you look at this drawing you don’t just say, I know the name of that plant. Yes, it’s a variegated philodendron. If documentation and naming were the point of this exercise, you would move on. But you don’t. You keep looking at this thing. You don’t really know why. It’s just that the image—that’s what it is—puzzles you, raises questions that you can’t even articulate. So here you are, you keep looking.
Why is the horizon line that defines the black background on the top pointed instead of straight? It was probably inspired by the corner of the room, though that was cluttered with easels. It’s an invention of the artist/student and it’s just right.All three inventions create tension and counterpoint. The viewer is suspended (like a gymnast) by the ropes of these dynamics. Questions will form in the mind, but their grammar will disintegrate. That’s how art works.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in Achievement, Composition, Illustration, Imagination, literalness, Negative space, Still life, tagged art, black, invention, inversion, perception, seeing, shoe, shoelaces on June 26, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Take a box or a pile of books. Throw some cloth over it, or a t-shirt. Put an old lace-up boot on top of this. Look at this pile, say to yourself “this is really beautiful, I’ve got to draw this.” Turn off your phone, grab a soft pencil and a piece of paper, sit down for a couple of hours and make a work of art.
I didn’t take a shot of the still life, but the above describes its simplicity. How ordinary. How intriguing!
It’s not about documenting the silly boot. It’s about, how can I see this in a new way, surprising myself in the process. As you look at Gaby’s drawing, remind yourself that the boot and the laces were black. She invented the inversion. She chose the placement of the boot way on top and its radical incompletion. The laces set up a paradox: we are reminded of the arbitrariness of their real-life softness and at the same time they appear to support the thing at the top, which we identify as a shoe with the help of the crisscrossing at upper right.
The drawing plays with your perception. Shoe-notshoe. Laces-notlaces. Form-content. As an exercise in seeing, notice repetition of forms, rhythm, positive-negative space. When you’ve said everything about the drawing that you notice, you will still be fascinated by it. You can’t talk this thing to death. It’s art.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in abstraction, Composition, Negative space, Seeing, Still life, tagged Alejandra, art, chair, get, negative space, non-chair, so-called, space on May 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Once again, I talked about the so-called negative space. I had set up a still life consisting of a white plastic chair, tilted on a little prop, against a red back ground. The assignment was to draw the chair (the so-called positive space) by not drawing it at all, but instead by drawing the non-chair spaces that make it possible for us to see the chair (the so-called negative space). This 
works best when the object depicted is symmetrical, readily identifiable and seen from a weird angle. One student faced the chair from a symmetrical view and that drawing didn’t work. But one new student, Alejandra, was positioned so that her view of the chair was askew. Perfect. She worked on 18 x 24 paper with pencil. The page is riveting. You just want to look at this apparition. You see the chair by seeing everything that is non-chair. The brain tingles. Such a simple exercise, so easy to conceptualize, and yet so hard to “get.” This is how art works.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in Imagination, inspiration, literalness, Master drawings, tagged art, cave painting, Chayvet Cave, consciousness, David Lewis-Williams, Werner Herzog on April 26, 2012| Leave a Comment »
When the movie came out last year, I thought it would enjoy a long run. It didn’t and I missed it. But it does well on Netflix, too.
The Chauvet Cave in southern France was discovered in 1994. It contains the oldest paintings ever found anywhere, more than twice as old as any other. The paintings were originally (32,000 years ago) put on rock face that was recessed in a cave. The cave at the time was readily accessible because it was not sealed. (20,000 years ago an enormous rock slide sealed the space.) The artist and his audience could easily walk into the dark “galleries” but to see the drawings they had to bring torches. The artist could have painted the rocks closer to daylight but he chose not to. He painted by torch light, farther towards the back. This tells us two things. It tells us a) that these lively drawings of animals were all made from memory and b) that art was removed from everyday life. These two points are related.
The persistent question for ethnologists and archeologists is, how did these people understand the world and themselves. We can infer from their artifacts and from indigenous peoples in our own time, like the Australian Aboriginals, that their worldview blurred the line between reality and dream, between thought and action, between wish and deed, between the subjective and the objective, and between the image and the concrete thing.
Who made these drawings? Could everybody draw like that? Could anybody pick up a charred stick and draw a running horse from memory? Was there a competition about who could get the anatomy most accurately? No. This was something only a few individuals were able to do. Or were even inclined to do. In the case of Chauvet Cave, we have one 
individual artist who left his fingerprint with a distinctive little finger, recognizable throughout. He was six feet tall. This information gives me goose bumps. An individual. He picked up his charred stick and his torch and walked to the back of the cave and drew these animals in motion—from memory. There was no need for this. Drawing did not fill his belly or build his muscles for combat, the better to survive. Drawing was a removal from the necessities of everyday life. It was not about survival, but about a new form of consciousness.
You can be sure that when he took his family back there, the folks were mystified and amazed that anybody could do this. They thought the horses and bison were real. What the artist himself saw was different: he saw the lines he himself had made and at the same time he saw the evocation of the animals in these lines. He was at the threshold of modern consciousness, which is a self-consciousness.
Herzog asks one of the archeologists why the cave artist made these drawings, was he perhaps like us moderns, and the archeologist answered with the cliché about the desire to communicate with the future. The answer to Herzog’s question, I think, is yes, the cave artist was like us in his confrontation with his own consciousness. His worldview, like everybody else’s at the time, blurred the line between reality and dream, between thought and action, between wish and deed, between the subjective and the objective, and between the image and the concrete thing. We still do this. The guy with the crooked little finger was probably terrified by his ability to conjure such images of reality with his charcoal stick. We are not so terrified any more. We have developed techniques that allow us to squarely look at the workings of our imagination, our ability to create symbols and images that manipulate the behavior of our fellow humans, who still can’t tell the difference between thought and reality, between the subjective and the objective, etc. We are now looking at how our minds invent “reality.” The guy with the little finger got us started on that path.
Well, some of us. It’s hard to think about this. Mr. Little Finger knew that. That’s why he walked back to the dark part of the cave to do the work. He drew from memory (a), an interior activity, that’s not concerned with mere survival (b), which is what consumes the energy of most members of the species. Confronting consciousness is not for everybody. It is the job of artists.
You want more goose bumps? He was right handed. That’s my opinion, because he preferred to draw the animals facing left and that’s the natural way for a right-handed person to draw. The hand he showed us in his hand print (above) is the hand that made the drawings.
(The best book I know on this subject is “The Mind in the Cave,” by David Lewis-Williams. He addresses this question of consciousness and avoids the clichés about spirituality and hunting.)
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Posted in Illustration, literalness, Technique and Demo, tagged art, French, illustration, not art on August 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »
A Chicago area French teacher is working on her PhD and writing bits of 
conversation to illustrate points of grammar and idiomatic usage. To spruce up her presentation she asked me to come up with some illustrations.
The distinction between illustration and art is one of the themes running through this blog. It’s also a major point, if not THE point, I make in my drawing and painting classes. All right class, why are these drawings not art?
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
Portrait of the artist with art, Evanston Art Center benefit, 2010
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 | Keven Wilder on Hilary Hahn practices |
| Keven Wilder on The Process |
| Keven Wilder on Is This Hard? |
 | katherinehilden on Knead and Draw |
| Keven Wilder on Knead and Draw |
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 