Sargent in Leaps and Bounds

This is the work of a beginning drawing student.

Oops. Something just dropped on your keyboard. That’s your jaw.

I can offer no explanation for this astonishing performance. This student practices at home during the week, we know that, but she has not had this kind of homework before.

This drawing was done in the second half of our class period, with about an hour left to work on it. My instruction was to copy the Sargent drawing, not in a fussy way, but in the forcefulness of Sargent’s hand movements, i.e. his gesture in handling the graphite.

Each student had a xerox copy of the Sargent drawing taped to the top of her/his drawing board so that the eyes moved up and down from Sargent to drawing paper. Up and down is better than sideways, feels better on the eyes.

The student worked with a Cretacolor Art Stick.

Progress in drawing skills does not proceed gradually, but in…leaps and bounds.
And what a leap!

You can pick up your jaw now.

Are you inspired? Practice!

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American who spent most of his life in Europe, particularly Rome and Paris. Here we have his 1908 portrait of the Irish poet W.B.Yeats. Again, the object in this exercise was not to plagiarize the Sargent drawing to make it auction worthy, but to lean into the drawing tool the way he did.

Drawing by Shweta Nagdeve

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Drawing from Nacho Duato Ballet

There’s nothing like drawing from a live model.  It’s inspiring and invigorating and you can see the forms clearly.  In a pinch, if you feel the urge to draw but can’t get anyone to pose for you (good luck trying to find someone who’s willing and able to sit still these days), you can draw from photos.  But photos are so 20^th century.

Instead, I recommend that you draw from YouTube.  Name a person, a topic, or an event, and you’ll find it on YouTube.  If you want to practice drawing faces, pick one of the thousands of clips of talking heads.  Run the video and decide which angle you’ll draw.  Stop the frame.  Voila.  Your model is sitting for you.  If you’re in the mood for gesture drawing, find a sport or a ballet.  Stop the frame.  You can be sure, no model would ever hold these poses.  You will get a work out, guaranteed.

Above, a page of studies after a ballet by Nacho Duato, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkC0hHat_ik

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Gesture

Artists who work from the figure talk a lot about “gesture.”  When you’re “getting the gesture down,”  you’re talking about putting life into your drawing of the figure.  Life-vitality-movement- dynamic-drama—hey, even attitude.  This is not something that comes later, with a touch here or there.  This vital quality has to be in the very first strokes you put on paper.  In other words, you have to grasp the gist of the pose at a glance.  Psychologists have a word for it: “Gestalt.”  When you see the Gestalt of something, you see the whole thing, you don’t scan bit by bit.  Rather amazing, when you think about it.  We do this all the time, when we recognize a face, for example, or when we recognize a person in the distance by his gait.

If seeing in the Gestalt mode is such a natural part of our everyday perception, what’s the big deal?  Why would we have to make a special study of it in drawing class?  The short answer is, I dunno.  All I can say is that when we start to draw something or somebody we are seduced by details.  This seems to be a universal experience.  The beginning drawing student inevitably wants to draw some detail, like the eye, the lips, the ear, or that luscious waive of hair over the forehead there.  Part of my job as a teacher is to dream up exercises that get the student to see the whole ball-o-wax, to grasp the gist of the gesture.

In drawing class today, we faced this gesture challenge, yet again.  Looking at magazine photos, the student had to get the gist of the pose down in a few sweeping, rough lines.  This involved proportions, of course.  Seeing this way can be disconcerting at first.  It takes practice.

Here’s a page by Karen G.  Notice the literalness in drawing #1. It’s correct, but rather stiff and lifeless.  In #2 she went for the gesture in just  a few lines.  Wow!  It’s all there!  Then, repeating those gestural lines, she developed the drawing further in #3.  The crossed-over leg is too long, anatomically speaking, but it doesn’t matter because the vitality in the figure triumphs over anatomical correctness.

This page, just three drawings,  documents progress in seeing.

Have I mentioned…this takes practice.  But the models to work from are all around you: open a magazine.  See? there’s no excuse.

Below, two more drawings and “models” from today’s class:  Linne D. and Vera C.   Top, a page of  studies I did while sitting next to students and drawing along with them.

Click on images to enlarge.

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

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