Four Life Studies

For these two-minute life studies I worked with aquarellable pencil on gloss paper, 11x 17. Two minutes is enough time to work out some specific anatomical features. Compare these to the one-minute studies at https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/giacometti-and-me/.
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Giacometti and Me

These are six one-minute poses. I work on gloss paper with a water-soluble pencil. Later (hours or days later), I like to take out the drawing and spend some time clarifying certain anatomical features, especially hands, and then giving the space between the figures some depth, very often blurring contours with a shred of damp paper towel. I’ve done this many times before with these pages of one-minute poses. I like the way the figures appear to emerge from and disappear into a mysterious atmosphere, as sort of mist. But today, on a whim, I flipped the drawing horizontally (in Photoshop)and this allowed me to see something new. Yes, they were appearing and disappearing in

this mist, but now for the first time I saw how stressed these bodies are. They seem to be struggling. Their environment, this “mist,” seems to be grating against them. I didn’t see this in my original drawing.  Now that I’ve seen it in the left-right flip, I can also see it in the original.
I’m reminded of Giacometti’s drawings, whose figures are as brittle as their unaccommodating environment. In the sculptures, the environment has worn them down to a mere determined, persevering existence.

In my drawing, the poses themselves may be exceptionally torqued and therefore they’ve inspired this existentialist interpretation. I’ll try to be on the lookout in future drawings. In any case, the left-right flip has once again demonstrated its usefulness.
Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966.
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Two Studies

If I’d wanted to, I could have made an academically correct drawing with the proportions of the figure corresponding to what I actually saw. But I chose not to. More often than not, I choose to distort a little, trading anatomical correctness for statuesque drama. In this pose, about twelve minutes, I dramatized the figure to make it look as if seen from below, like a statue on a pedestal. The feet are big and the head is small. In other words, I foreshortened the figure. Why? It’s fun to see if you can achieve a certain effect by breaking the academic rules.
Then, during a seated pose, I got fascinated by the hands and the neck. I zoomed in for anatomical correctness. I repented, ha.
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Hand Study

When we have a model in drawing class, I sometimes can’t resist and I join in for a quick study. I love drawing hands.
Stabilo Aquarellable pencil on Gloss paper.
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Fast Figures, Forward

When we have a model, the poses range from twenty minutes to one-minutes.  I like to start the class with a couple of fives and only then go into the fast and furious ones.  One-minute poses are exhilarating and also terrifying.  Hence. the fivers at the start.

We’ll have a set of six one-minute poses.  I encourage my students to draw all six on the same page, allowing the figures to overlap.  This creates a visual intensity and adds the element of time, not only in creating the illusion of motion, but in the urgency of the crowded lines themselves.

I draw along—hey, it only takes six minutes to do six poses.  Students can then see what my page looks like, in all its raggedy incompletion.  While the next, longer pose is in session, I’ll work some atmospheric markmaking around the figures, tying them together and at the same time making them emerge out of and vanish into the invented darkness.  The scribbly anatomy studies then hang together as an image.

For studies like this I like to work with Stabilo on gloss paper.  Gloss paper has no texture and therefore no pressure is required.  Then, for the second stage of adding the dark “background,” the Stabilo, being water-soluble, allows for all sorts of smudging and atmospheric effects.

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Gesture Drawing Developed

These are two-minute poses. Between poses, there’s no time to switch to another page.  All six poses are scribbled on the same paper. I encourage my students to let the figures overlap because overlapping takes us away from the clarity of illustration and into greater tension and dynamic.

Above, the page I did in class.  Below, the page as I developed it later in my studio.  I used the Stabilo-All-Aquarellable pencil on gloss paper, 11 x 17.

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Life Studies

When we have a model in class, I sometimes draw along.  These are ten-minute poses.  I worked with the Stabilo-All-Aquarellable pencil on gloss paper. Height of drawings, 11”.

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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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Life Studies

These drawings were not demos.  I encourage my students to take risks when they work from the figure. When we have a model, I sometimes do some drawing myself.  I want to show how scribbly my own work is and how I leave every line without erasing.  The quest for perfection is paralyzing and perfection itself –well, we don’t even know what that is, but I can tell you it’s boring.

Above, three quick head studies in pencil, 11 x 17.

A figure study, pencil, 11 x 17.

Figure study in Aquarellable Pencil and watercolor wash, on index (non-glossy), 11 x 14.

Let’s crop that last one.

So much more immediate and engaging.

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