Trip into Drapery

Leonardo was about eighteen when he made this study of drapery.  Doesn’t matter how old he was.  He was making drapery studies when he was forty-eight, too.  It’s not something you master and then you’re done with it.  Drapery is mesmerizing, both for the artist working on it and for us, the viewers.  It draws you into a universe that envelopes you and at the same time feels utterly alien.

The Leonardo drawing activates your sense of touch, convincing you that you’re inhabiting a real world, as if you were feeling your way through a cave with a bizarre topography that nevertheless completely seduces your senses.

You can snap out of the trance, however.  And when you do, you’ll notice that some passages are unreal.  He just made some crinkles up—out of whole cloth, so to speak.  With your (momentarily) sober mind you can look at this passage, for example, (pink circle) and realize that cloth does not behave this way.

Leonardo lied.  He created this fiction. Why?  Because it’s fun to create fiction.  He creates the illusion of reality but he’s actually playing with form.

Look at Rogier van der Weyden, who’s about fifty years earlier than Leonardo.

Are these green folds hammered out of aluminum?  You know very well, cloth does not drape, fold and crinkle this way.  Yet, here it is, captivating us, compelling us to its rhythms like a fierce drummer.  (Ha, I’m looking at 15^th century drapery and thinking of Gene Krupa and Art Blakey.)

Drapery, in other words, is a wild thing.

Linné Dosé, whose love of form and composition lead to daring omissions in his choice of still life elements, came up with this cloth floating in space.  No table to rest on.  He apparently saw that shape, found it compelling and that was enough.

Now, when you see this thing sitting there on the page, it harmonizes with the behavior of drapery, but it also becomes something in itself.  Your imagination kicks into the surreal.  What is this?  It looks like a critter, doesn’t it.  You’re now in that cave with Leonardo and Rogier.

Leonardo and Rogier worked for clients who were all-powerful and dictated the subject matter to be depicted.  The artist then set out to work as if he were saying, fine, I’ll give you your mythological characters, but I’ll go wild with the drapery. You can have your Magdalen, but the drapery is mine.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519

Rogier van der Weyden, 1400 – 1464

Linné Dosé, graphite on paper, ~12” x 18”

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/the-square/

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Leonardo da Vinci, sfumato and Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code reminded us of all the classes we slept through:  Latin, French, the Merovingians,  St. Paul’s Letters to the Ephesians, the Crusades, comparative religion, infinite series, et al.  Oh, and art history.  At one point Prof. Langdon explains that sfumato is the technique invented by Leonardo by which he softens the contour of a form to make the form look more three-dimensinional, rather than like a cut out delineated by a consistent line. (Fumo in Italian means smoke.) Sfumato eliminates the line as a way of distinguishing one thing from another. It means that everything is related to everything around it and the eye flows through the image and sees interrelatedness on the canvas as it does in real life. This is huge. It makes the image life-like and I would go so far as to call it a consciousness-raising technique.

Leonardo da Vinci (1453-1519) in his treatise on painting techniques repeatedly warns artists not to trace out the form with outlines.  This is an admonition that he himself only sometimes managed to heed.  Sfumato was more a goal than an achievement for him. He almost certainly directed the criticism at his younger contemporary, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), who was fond of outlining his delicate figures with a continuous black line. High school students love Botticelli but when we mature a bit, we embrace Leonardo’s idea more and more.  Sfumato.  It’s not that smoke gets in your eyes, it’s that the adult perception of reality grapples with interrelatedness—conceptually much richer and technically much more difficult.

Sfumato is applicable to both painting and drawing.  It’s easier to see how it would work with paint since you can blend and push the paint around to create soft effects.  But in drawing, also, the form can be liberated from the enclosing (strangling!?) line through the use of shadows and negative space.  More on that next time, with examples from students’ work.

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Leonardo da Vinci and Urban Decay

In “The Blot and the Diagram,” Kenneth Clarke talked about Leonardo’s intellectual range.  His formidable brain loved to analyze systems (diagrams); but he was also fascinated by chaotic forms (blots).  In his notebooks Leonardo tells us that he often would stop to look at a wall that was water stained, cracked or peeling.   He writes, contemplating such chaotic forms stimulates the imagination.

I think of Leonardo as one of us,  he shared our sensibility, with his insatiable curiosity and courage, his scientific approach; his playfulness; his openness to possibilities; his skepticism; his use of inconsistencies; his caricatures; and for the purpose of this post, his embrace of accidentals.  In this sense, Kenneth Clark says, he anticipated modern art.  About 120 years ago, when paint started dripping on a canvas, it was sometimes allowed to do so.  By the 1940’s dripping paint had come to represent an aesthetic in itself, with Jackson Polack it’s most famous representative.  An aesthetic of chance occurrence was edging out the old aesthetic of control.

If you’ve ever seen Urban Decay Photography, you know that it speaks to the modern sensibility.  At first, it may be shocking (never was to me, though) but then it sinks in and reaches you at a very deep  level of your  life experience. Where the old sensibility measured time teleologically, this new sensibility embraces time– how shall we say—mystically, as an element of constant surprise and potential.  And isn’t that where we live, from one moment of consciousness to the next and to get to the next moment, we have to let the previous moment die.

Decay.  Urban Decay.

What other kind of decay is there?  Well, obviously, rural decay.  But that’s too fast and predictable, since in a season or two the new crop grows out of the compost of the old.  But Urban Decay is slow and it’s not predictable, because it’s about ideas.  What we see crumbling is not just that wall, that arch, that mural, that tracery, that tile floor, etc, but the ideas, values and hierarchies these things once defended.

 

My shot of the CTA tracks at Wabash and Madison (above) has some of that reflection in it.  It has that reference to crumbling urban structures and the reminder that these structures are inventions, as man-made and ephemeral as the ideas and hopes from which they sprang.  But that shot illustrates one other element we find in Urban Decay Photography:  severe composition.  In this case, it’s three horizontal stripes, progressing from narrow at to top, to wider in the middle, to widest at the bottom, creating a progression.

This emphasis on form is what distinguishes Urban Decay Photos.  It is well worth your while to study this genre. Here’s a link, for a start:

http://www.pics-site.com/2010/07/11/urban-decay-photography/

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Carnegie Hall

New York City.  A driver in his car shouts to a pedestrian on the sidewalk: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  The guy says, “Practice.”

It’s a well-known joke.  But it’s not a joke.  That really is IT.  Practice!

Funny thing, though, everybody knows this about music, but when it comes to moving a pencil around, fuhgedaboudid.  Would you sign up for piano lessons and then not practice all week and just come in for your lesson?  Of course not!  But there’s something about the ordinariness of a pencil and a piece of paper, not to mention the ordinariness of a pile of pots or the ordinariness of your left hand or the ordinariness, even, of your face in a mirror, that makes you think this has got to be easy.  So when I say, “practice during the week!”  my students look at me as if my voice came out of the moldy 12^th century or any other alien worldview you can name.

Imagine my delight when I get to see the homework my drawing student Karen G. brings to class every week to show me.  Not homework, really, I don’t assign it.  She just carves out time every week to draw.  She draws the throw over a chair.  She draws the skirting around a little table.  She draws drapery. And lo and behold…drapery drawing can be learned and her progress in that skill is evident.  Seeing the intricacy of shadow-light-reflected-light becomes easier and faster with practice.  (See post about reflected light, April 24, 2011.)

This practice business actually puts you in good company.  How did Leonardo da Vinci spend his time? Errmmm….he practiced.  In art history, these drawings are called “studies.”   If the word “practice” sounds too severe or uncomfortable to you, you can use more elevated language.  You can silence your ring tone and tell yourself that for the next hour you’re engaged in making a work called, “Study of Drapery.”  Hey, play word games to make it easier, tell yourself jokes, whatever gets you to “Carnegie Hall.”

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Could Leonardo da Vinci draw, really?

You know at first glance that this is a fine drawing.  There are three possible reasons why you might come to that conclusion:  1) you’re seeing it in a museum, at Buckingham Palace, or reproduced in a book on Leonardo da Vinci and, therefore, you assume this must be worth looking at; 2) you’ve looked at a lot of art and you’ve trained your eye to recognize good work; or 3) you’re an artist yourself, at whatever level of accomplishment.

I’m, of course, addressing all of you who fall into categories two and especially three, those of you who really LOOK.

Since you’re taking the time to really look and enjoy this drawing, you’ll notice all sorts of lines that appear to be redundant.  Some of them are faint, but they’re there.  To make them more visible, I placed transparent paper over the drawing and traced these redundant lines.  Now, you are fully aware that this drawing of a young woman is by the great Leonardo da Vinci and you ask yourself, quite naturally, if this guy was so great, why didn’t he get the contour of the face right the first time, why are there three lines instead of one line that is sure and RIGHT?  And the neck.  What’s with all those lines!  Hey, Leonardo, you’re so great, just do it!  Get it right the first time.  We want to admire your greatness.  We don’t need to see your hesitation, your thought process, your scribbling, your explorations.

But we do.  It’s precisely because we see all those apparently redundant lines that we enjoy the drawing.   Let’s call them “exploratory lines.”  The great Leonardo is exploring.  His model has arrived, he sits down at his drawing board, he looks at the young woman and he goes into a state of, let’s call it, wonder.   He has drawn hundreds, thousands, of faces before, but not this one, not at this angle, not in this light and not today.  He can’t say to himself, oh, yeah, another one of these, I’ve drawn plenty just like it, here’s how we do this.  Uh-uhh.  If he’s complacent, he’ll blow the whole thing.  Instead, he feels that this is an adventure, an exploration.  He has to feel the uncertainty that’s at the heart of an adventure.  Drawing is like walking a tight rope. The uncertainty heightens his concentration.  Instead of thinking of how it’s supposed to look when finished, he enters the drawing process itself.  He’s not performing for applause; he’s completely absorbed in the work process itself.  He’s working it out.  That means he puts down lines that trace his thought process.  In that process his perception shifts and his hand follows.  The result looks like scribbling.  But it’s precisely the scribbling that makes the drawing exiting to look at.  Because when we see those exploratory lines we are drawn into Leonardo’s mind and his concentration at that very moment.

That’s why a clean line drawing of his equestrian statue looks boring and lifeless.  But the sketch in which he worked out the movements and showed all the tracings of his thought process, this “messy” sketch is exiting to look at.  The clean line drawing (again, a tracing by me) has all the information, but that’s not why we look at drawings.  It’s not information we want, it’s the glimpse into another mind, another sensibility.  To get that glimpse, we have to be invited to enter into the drawing process itself.

A hard point to get across.  My students want to produce neat drawings.  When I encourage them to scribble and leave the scribbled lines without erasing, I know I’m opposing everything the culture and their past schooling value.  This is certainly true of returning, mature students.  It is even more true of students in their twenties.  Why?!   When a teacher encourages you to be “messy,” why  can’t you revel in that freedom?   One young art major recently enlightened me:  most of us, he said, started drawing by copying Manga.   We will talk about the crippling influence of  Manga in a future blog.

In my class, I recently drew a model while my students stood around me and looked over my shoulder.  I drew with a waxy crayon (China marker) that makes erasing impossible.  That’s the point. Don’t erase. Let your hand move lightly over the paper, tracing your thought process.  As your perception shifts, so does your line.  Change your mind and leave the first impression under your new “take.”  As you get more and more into the process, your line will become more sure of itself.  It will take off.  Seeing takes time and seems to occur in layers.  Draw for the adventure.   Draw for the pleasure of the process itself.

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