Vary the Contour

In whatever drawing you’re working on, try darkening the outline (=contour) of the shapes arbitrarily. If it’s a figure, darken the outline of the forearm. See how that affects your perception of depth. Or press your pencil down harder when you’re outlining one side of the face. Immerse yourself in how this feels.
In the drawing shown above, the artist indicates the upper arm with a heavy line, while the forearm is drawn faintly. We immediately get the sense that the upper arm is in shadow and the forearm catches the light. She achieves this effect without classical anatomical drawing, using gradations of shadow and reflected light. But you can see that her coarse use of lines is actually based on an understanding of anatomy.
Drawing by Gaby Edgerton, aquarellable pencil on gloss paper, 17”x11”
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Crop that Face, I Dare You

I promise, we’ll move on to other topics besides cropping, but the power of cropping cannot be underestimated.

This face was one of four studies on the same page. The model was a magazine add with strong shadows, selling jewelry of all things. In setting up the exercise, I stressed that we were not after a likeness of this beautiful woman, but were using her as a point of departure for expressive studies of the face.  We already know that beauty and expressiveness are incompatible, a major thread in these conversations.

The page as a whole did not work because the faces were too similarly drawn and were all the same size.  What to do?  CROP!  You can see the edges of the strips of paper we used in cropping.  The result is an expressive face.

But wait, there’s more.  What if we crop even more radically!  What if we slice the image through the eye on the right edge.  That’s the image at the top of this post.  It’s far removed from literalness, from illustration. Now we have a provocative image. It’s truly an image, in the sense that it is more than what it represents.

Let me point out just three things that make this image so rich.

*The left half of the page is all texture.

 *The contour of the face is varied, so that as we trace it we travel over three different “landscapes.”

 * One eye is in the middle of the page. Uncanny! There’s a study of this phenomenon (I can’t remember the author’s name now) that shows that portrait artists will compose their subject in such a way that one eye of the sitter is in the middle of the canvas.

 —————————————————————— Velazquez(1599-1663), Portrait of Juan de Pareja

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What Are We Warming Up?

By tradition, Life Classes start with a few one-minute poses. This is called “warming up.”  What does that mean and what are we warming up, exactly?

Warming up is what athletes famously do and have to do so that they will not strain a muscle.  Warming up for an athlete means going slow and easy, stretching gently and gradually increasing tension, weight and speed.  That makes sense.

But in an art class, warming up means going fast.  Drawing a figure in one minute, believe me, is fast.  It’s actually a bit scary, anything but slow and easy, as with athletes warming up.

Why, then, do we do it?  We do it in order to switch on our heightened seeing, which means seeing the whole figure all at once.  Psychologists call it the “Gestalt,” the whole thing, no bit by bit scanning. On the way to class, as we drive and walk, we’re scanning the visual landscape through which we navigate.  But to draw, we have to see intensely.  To switch on this intensity, we—POW!—we draw a nude body in one minute.  Then another and another, all on the same sheet of paper, because, well, because there’s no time to take out another sheet and position it on the drawing board.  What we’re warming up is the mind.

The result is a lovely play on lines,  creating a rhythm on the page.  What’s most important is that we don’t get continuous contour lines when we draw with this speed.  The contour lines are interrupted.  The drawing breathes. It suggests life and it engages the viewer.

Drawing by Gaby, graphite,  December 2012

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Wölfflin and “Loosen Up, Everybody!”

In the recent posts about The Contour and Leonardo’s sfumato I said that a drawing can be described as “painterly.”  The difference between linear and painterly is this:  a linear style outlines the figure and separates it from the ground; in a painterly work, the figure and the ground flow into one another.  In studying Western art, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) noticed that the earlier art is linear and then in the 16^th century, the line opens up and the image becomes painterly.  You can find the whole theory in his “Principles of Art History,” a book that is surprisingly lively and readable, considering when it was written.

Contemporary art teachers wouldn’t go into that kind of scholarship—and I don’t, in class.  Basically, what we want to get at is, “Hey, everybody—loosen up!”  Easier said than done. The tendency for beginning students (as with our ancestors) is to firmly outline your subject.  Opening up the contour is far from being sloppy.  It involves a whole other way of seeing and thinking. You see the contour and visualize it as you draw, but you don’t state it directly.  This requires tremendous concentration and getting to that ability to concentrate takes practice over time.

Here, then, is Linné’s recent drawing from a model.  I sometimes blow up my students’ drawings at the Xerox machine so that they can appreciate their own progress.  It’s also helpful to isolate one passage, such as the head, in order to take it out of context.  Cropping your drawing like this helps you focus on the qualities in your drawing, rather than your representational skills.

Learning to draw can often be discouraging, but actually you’re better than you think. You develop not gradually, but in spurts and part of my job is to help you notice that you just made a spurt.

Yeah!

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Still-Life, a Misnomer

It’s even worse in French, “nature morte.”  But there’s nothing dead about it!  In English we call it “still life,” not much better.  There’s nothing still about it, either!  Only the life part is true.

Imagine a studio/classroom: white walls, dirty sink, paint-splattered chairs and tables, a shelf in the corner full of bottles, bowls and plastic flowers and such.  The teacher pulls out a small table and piles some drapery on it along with bottles, an old shoe, a round ball of twine and for a touch of color, a plastic peony.  Well, yes, it’s not going anywhere.   But it isn’t still.  Just look at this drawing.

The artist saw these every-day objects as vibrant and lively. This is how an artist sees. It’s not just one thing and then another.  There are recognizable, distinct objects, yes,  but the artist perceives transition and movement. What speaks to the artist is not so much the shape of things,  but the lively interflow of light and dark.

Drawing focuses the mind.  When the mind sees this way, everything pulsates.  Still life, bhaaah!

To continue your study of contour and its adventures through the definition by line, omission and negative space, zoom in and follow the left contour of the white bottle in Alejandra’s drawing. The eye is engaged , surprised and refreshed.   An impressionist delight—true to life.

 

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The Contour, Lost and Found

When we work from a still life, I always remind the class that there’s a lot of stuff there and you can choose to draw the whole pile or you can zoom in and draw a select,  small passage.  In this case, a student just went for the tilted dark bottle and a bit of adjacent drapery.  How on earth do you make an interesting drawing out of such a clunky object?  Ah, but it’s not about the object it’s about how you draw it.  We had been talking about the problem of the contour, the topic in the last post on Leonardo and sfumato.  It’s not a problem, really, it’s just that you can set yourself the goal of drawing that old bottle without outlining it in a consistent line.  You can practice interrupting the line.  That simple.  At first, you may think this is awkward or arbitrary, but then you discover that since light comes from above, the upper part of the bottle will be lighter and if you lighten the contour there or leave the line out altogether, the bottle will look quite lively. Notice also, that part of the bottle is defined by the shadow in the drapery behind it, i.e something that is not-bottle and is not a contour of anything.

Once the bottle and its attendant drapery swatch were drawn, Gaby faced all that white “negative” space. What the still life set-up offered wasn’t all that dynamic, so she invented.  Are you allowed to do that?  Oh, yessss!   She invented bricks, curved ones.  The rectilinearity of the brickwork anchors the tilted bottle in a credible universe. The fact that the bricks are curved adds texture and an echo of the roundness of the bottle.

The result is a painterly drawing.  We’ve used the word “painterly” before in these posts (12.22.10 and 3.12.11), but it will get more coverage, soon, and this time in connection with drawing.

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Life Drawing and Line Lesson

The model in our figure work shop last Monday held this pose for ten minutes.  That limited time suffices to get the figure down but does not allow for any “atmospherics” like the enveloping black frame.  That was added later in my own studio, without the model, because the drawing needed it, I felt, for compositional reasons.  A few days later, today, I was still not happy with the way the eye moved through the composition and I decided to use this drawing in this blog to illustrate how ameliorating certain lines can greatly help the eye move through the page.  I happen to like that in a drawing; I don’t want the eye to get stuck on a passage or be blocked by some very insistent line.  To illustrate what I mean, I’m showing the same drawing here, with certain contour lines lightened, not much, but just enough so that as you follow the line it will at times become lighter or even disappear.

The drawing here at the left reflects those changes.  This final version should be more interesting to look at than the earlier version, at top right.  Is that your feeling also? (Click the  image to get a much larger view.)

To be specific about where the line was picked up, here’s a copy of the final drawing with numbers where I did the work.  Notice that the anatomy remains clearly stated, we lose nothing of the contour, when it is indicated by the black of the background pushing against the figure (#2 and #4)  or when the line is so pale as to be almost lost, as in #3.  The line at #1 had to go because it was too severe and demanding of attention.  It’s continuation at the upper right corner behind the head, however is another matter, a topic for a future post, which will involve Cézanne.

These changes still did not resolve the problems I saw with the drawing.  It kept reminding me of Ingre’s Grand Odalisque, one of his more ridiculous exaggerations of the female anatomy.  He sacrificed anatomy and credibility on the altar of composition, we can see that: what he was after here was a smooth upward curve like a cup.  The reclining figure thus becomes a vessel, a popular metaphor for a woman’s body in the 19th century.   She is in effect, a reclining version of his La Source, another kitschy male fantasy of the female body. (We must get to a discussion of kitsch one of these days!) Here, then, is the final-final version of this figure study.  If you’ve followed the above with any interest, you’ll see how the earlier problems are resolved by the final subtle changes.

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