Chardin

The previous six drawings were derived from this painting by Chardin.  To help us see composition and form without being charmed by the color,  I had black-white Xerox copies for everybody to work from.

We immediately noticed that there was a triangle implied in the arrangement of peaches and cup (green line), giving these random objects a solid organization.

We had encountered the triangle in the Gainsborough landscape.  https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/markmaking-with-gainsborough/

While the arrangement of peaches from small to large takes your eye from left to right, the knife disappearing behind the peaches leads the eye from right to left into the middle of the composition. We also noticed the crack in the table top which adds interest to that horizontal line.

That was enough to organize the students’ seeing and, without further analysis, we immersed ourselves in the drawing process.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) painted scullery maids and piles of kitchen stuff. He seems to have been a quiet, stubborn character who paid no attention to the Versailles aristocracy at a time when satin and wigs were the only things worth painting. The style preferred by the aristocracy in the mid-18^th century is called Rococo and I’ll show one painting to illustrate the boneless frivolity of that aesthetic: Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress.

Now imagine an artist trying to make a living in Paris by insisting that a woman cleaning turnips was a subject worth painting.  She looks up from her drudgery in a moment of reflection.

How can you not like Chardin.  He must have had a “whadaya-lookin-at” sense of humor, depicting himself in some get up to keep out the damp weather without any regard for heroic pretentiousness.

 

Getting back to analyzing his still life, I could not find the Golden Section as such in this painting, but he has two perfect squares (pink and red) which hold this composition together and make it compelling to look at.

For a review of the Golden Section, see https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-golden-section-in-beas-painting/

For more insights into how still life paintings work:

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/sit-perfectly-still-be-moved/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/still-life-a-misnomer/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/still-life-momento-mori/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/still-life-with-doll/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/turbulent-still-life/

 

The six student drawings derived from Chardin’s painging:

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/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/4044/

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

www.katherinehilden.com

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Egon Schiele, Incomplete

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:

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

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/

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://www.katherinehilden.com

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

www.khilden.com

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Markmaking with Gainsborough

As some of you know, I recently moved to Indianapolis.  I am now happy to let everyone know that I have recently started a drawing class in nearby Columbus, In.  Columbus is famous for its world class modern architecture with a tourism center kept busy by an international crowd lining up to see those eighty (!!) famous buildings.  This city of 47,000 has a branch of Indiana University but it did not offer a drawing class for the public until—tatah!—I jumped in to fill that vital void.

Our Columbus drawing class meets in the library–designed by I.M. Pei.  The class, called “Drawing as Seeing,” has met only four times so far.  I’ll start by showing the work done in our third class. Ready?

Our topic was “Markmaking,” which is a scribble/shading technique that is as individual and unique as your thumb print.  After a brief demo with students looking over my shoulder, I sent everybody to their seats with a Xerox copy of Thomas Gainsborough’s masterful drawing called “Landscape with Horsemen.”  You can see it at the top of this post.

What happened in class was highly rewarding and led to the discussion of an important topic:  “incompletion” in a work of art.

The time allotted for this exercise was only an hour and that proved to be an advantage because it meant that students had to leave with their drawings incomplete.

I held up all the drawings and introduced the idea of Incompletion as a topic in modern art.  I suggested that it’s precisely because these drawings are incomplete that they are so engaging.

Incompletion in a work of art reaches us with evocative power. It engages us—paradoxically, perhaps—more than an image that’s carefully worked out in every detail.

The next drawing was done by a left-handed student.  I had copied him a mirror image of the original Gainsborough to work from because the left hand moves in a different radius than the right hand.

I reminded students that they had the option of leaving the drawing as is, “incomplete,” or doing more work on it at home.

In the next class, this teacher was gratified that none of the students had “completed” the drawing.  Every student seems to have gotten the modern bug.

We will get back to this Topic of Incompletion many more times.

We are off to a promising start!

Thomas Gainsborough, 1727-1788  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gainsborough

Columbus, Indiana https://columbus.in.us/architecture-story/

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

www.katherinehilden.com

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