Take the A-Frame

This person is powerful, authoritative and in control.  Not because of who she is (we don’t need to know) but because of how she sits.  More important than her pose is how the drawing sits on the page.  It’s the composition that conveys authority: the stable triangle.

The artist/student worked from a photo I had found in The New Yorker.

This woman clearly wants to intimidate us with her stare, her full-frontal symmetry,  the loosely clasped hands ready to attack, the machismo in the spread legs and feet firmly planted for maximum balance.

Despite these theatrics, the photo doesn’t work.  She’s ridiculous. She wants to look tough but, look, she’s a shorty—those platform shoes!

I know, Victoria, queen & empress, barely came up to five feet and Alexander, the so called Great, was a runt, but photographers, painters and sculptors had tricks to make them look grand anyway.

That trick is composition. The most authoritative and  stable compositional trick is the triangle. This is nothing new.  If you look at the dozens of madonnas that Rafael painted you will always find him squeezing the figures into a triangle.  Here are two examples.

You can be sure that he started his drawings for the paintings by roughing in a triangle, just as I’ve done here in green.

For our exercise in class, working from that New Yorker photo (magnified on the Xerox machine), the students started with a tall triangle on their page. Way at the top, a short horizontal line marked the chin line.  A little farther down, a horizontal line marked the end of the torso which coincided with the knees.  The assignment then was to fit the sitting figure into that A-frame.

In this drawing by Jeanne Mueller you can still see the lines of the A.  I encourage students to minimize erasing and to leave in preliminary outline and guide lines.

The drawing becomes powerful because of the composition.  Compositional thinking will free you from the temptation to obsess about details.  Notice that there’s no need to articulate  those staring eyes.  There’s no need for harsh outlines. The line quality is actually fleeting and open.  Look how asymmetrically the hair is drawn.  We don’t need any literalness or precision.  The power is in the composition.

Take the A-Frame and your drawing won’t derail.

Raphael, 1483-1520

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Leonardo da Vinci Goofs Off

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) could draw, no doubt about it.  He knew anatomy, for example, and made anatomical studies from human cadavers.  This must have been very unpleasant, given the absence of phermaldehyde at that time. It was also against the law, forbidden by the all-powerful Catholic Church which taught that the body housed the soul.  Leonardo’s curiosity knew no bounds.  He set out to dissect decaying bodies to find the place where the soul might have been located. The fact that he got away with this attests to his tremendous fame in his own lifetime and the high esteem in which he was held.  He was unassailable.

There are no paintings by Leonardo in any permanent collection in America.  (The one at the National Gallery is disputed and I don’t think it’s a Leonardo.)   So, when a Leonardo painting makes it into an exhibit, it behooves us to pay attention.  When I saw his “Madonna of the Yarnwinder “ at the Art Institute of Chicago this spring in the French Renaissance exhibit, I did a double take and paid attention.

Let’s pay attention here. We know that the upper body of the Madonna is facing us symmetrically (1 and 2). We can see that it’s not turned because her cleavage is in the middle.  Her right arm is tightly pressed against her side (1) and her hand is tilted in a way that is anatomically impossible.  Try it. Her left knee (4) has to be connected to the femur which has to be lodged in a pelvic socket.  Now, where would that be? At 3? Impossible.  Does the femur follow the dotted line?  Also impossible.  How does he get away with this?  He’s Leonardo and nobody questions his abracadabra.

Notice the bulge over her left thigh, concealing his sleight of hand.  Saved by drapery!   Once you see this, you’ll wonder at his sense of humor.  Granted, he had to get the Madonna and child into a triangular composition, that was standard for the time since the triangle is supremely stable and dogmatic stability is what the client wanted. But I think there’s humor here.  He’s pulling our leg as he pulls that woman’s leg right out of her pelvis.  At some point in his career, painting yet another Madonna must have gotten a bit boring and he might very well have felt the need to amuse himself.

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Early Renaissance France

This is a very moving exhibition, at least for me.  I’ve been twice in one week and will go back many more times before it closes May 30.  Around 1500 and a few decades before, this new sensibility emerged in France and it feels like home base to me.  It has a delicacy and grace that I miss in the Italian art of the same period where men are heroically muscular and women are passively dull. By comparison, these French ladies and courtiers enjoyed their playfulness and its possibilities.

I was fascinated as soon as I walked in last Friday. In the second room of the exhibit I was already completely enchanted (sorry, I don’t usually talk like this) by a modanna & child from 1470 called Notre Dame de Grasse.  She’s a girl with a delicate nose, dreamy eyes and a pouty innocent upper lip. The baby, with wavy hair and the same pouty upper lip, is scampering on her left thigh.  With one hand she keeps him from sliding off and with the other she lightly holds on to his foot under the blanket.  But her head is turned in the other direction.  She’s distracted by something, maybe a butterfly or a deer at the edge of the woods.  She is, you see, very young,  a girl of thirteen, no more.  The sculptor must have been very brave to create such a human, fallible, this-worldly image.  1470!

Not only photography, but sketching is also prohibited in the exhibit.  Ouch.  What’s a sketcher to do?  The urge was too great.  I went through the exhibit. Then at the end where the catalogues are laid out on tables, I looked for this little madonna from Toulouse, but she was not reproduced in the catalog.  So, I sketched from memory.  Got some of the basics down.  Went back, for a detail like the book she has tucked under her arm.  Then went back again for a third time.  So, it took three takes.  This is a good exercise, drawing from memory.   Recommend it highly.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/current.php

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

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