Stage Set with Circular Forms, Part 4

Because these boxes are not big (about 8-10 inches long), there was a Stage Set for every student, who could move to get different angles of the thing. During this class, Maggy did two drawings of the same box, from slightly different angles. As in the previous class, she saw forms, this time playing with the repetition of triangles and trapezoids.
Her second drawing is shown here, top. This is fun to look at. It’s witty, in that some things are clearly stated, and some leave you guessing. You can tell that she had worked through some possibilities and was committed to abstraction. Her first drawing of the same motif, at left, is more tentative. I recommend that students plan on doing more than one drawing, where the first one allows you to get your bearing on this subject in front of you and the second one will therefore by drawn with more conviction and daring.
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People Change

Things change.  People change. Sometimes from morning to night. Your view of a person changes, perhaps even from day to day.  That’s an old idea.  In fact, pre-Socratic philosophers said so, as in Heraclitus’s “You can’t step into the same river twice.”  But then in the 4th  century BCE the Greek philosophers invented an idea called “essence.”

We’ve been wrestling with this concept ever since. For centuries, Western artists thought it was their job to get at the “essence” of a person.  You can see this ambition in the portraits of Ingres (1780-1867). Do you see “essence” here?  I don’t.  I see only theatricality.  Dress-up, veneer, pretense.

Ingres was a superb draftsman.  Maggy and I would admit that he was more accomplished than she.  But what Maggy’s page of studies gives me is more exciting than a meticulous  Ingres portrait.  I find her studies (above) engrossing and true to life.  Not in the sense of portraiture, but in the sense of liveliness and, yes, truthfulness.  This is how we experience people:  they move, they reflect, they introspect, they doubt—and all within the few minutes we have their face in front of us.

Just to point out two techniques in this page of studies that convey the liveliness that I admire in a work of art:  1) repetition of vigorous pencil strokes (green)which don’t create the illusion of roundness and shading in the face, but exist in themselves, allowing the viewer to move through the page and interpret it as a work that emanates from the artist’s perception—not from the “essence” of the model; 2) movement of the viewer’s attention from #1 through #4, with each “take” presenting a different mood of the face, allowing us a glimpse into the complexity and intelligence of this individual.

Though it may look like scribbling, this is an advanced drawing.

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Harvest the Crop

This was the black lace-up boot on some crumpled up cloth, what artists in their rarified line of work are allowed to call “Still life with boot and drapery.”

So you have this boot in front of you and you think you have to draw it because, well, obviously that’s the object you’ve been given to draw.  A duh moment.

When Maggy had drawn the boot and surrounding drapery, the boot looked good, but the drawing didn’t.  Meaning, the page of her charcoal marks, didn’t “work,” meaning it was not fun to look at.  What was fun to look at, however, was her markmaking.  So,  let’s not give up on this thing.  She played with cropping by placing strips of white paper over her large drawing, trying to find a window that could stand on its own.  Voilá!

This is an invaluable step in your art making and in no way a judgment that the original drawing was a failure.  Look what it contained!  You just had to find it.

Now, this is fun to look at.  “Fun” is a sloppy word, isn’t it, but what it means is that your eye loves the texture and your attention is held by all these alignments and echoes.  Notice, also, that the page falls into quadrants (see also post 6.30) and that the vacancy at upper right (orange) adds tension to the other three quadrants.

Yes, but what IS it?  It’s an image that plays with me.  Why would I want a boot instead!

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Suddenly Brilliant

If you want to learn how to draw, you have to spend time drawing.  Well, duh.

What makes the learning process tricky is that your progress will not be obvious from one week to the next.  Tricky?  How about frustrating.  You can go for weeks doing, apparently, the same thing and you just want to throw your #5 across the room and pout because you don’t seem to be getting anywhere, repeating yourself in your scratchy little pencil marks.  That’s because you can’t pick up a reading on how furiously your neurons and synapses are trying to catch up with your hand. All those weeks, when you just want to cry, your brain is working it out for you.  Then suddenly, one day–whamo!— it all comes together and you look at the drawing you just made wondering who this genius is that produced this amazing piece of work.

My drawing class is called Multi-Level Drawing because it welcomes new students who have never tried to draw before and it also challenges students who have worked with me for a few years (the self-described “lifers”).   So naturally, I present basic demos for the

newcomers, like this topic on how to think about eyes and curved shapes. (The brown paper is 3 ft high and I use markers for the demos.) The lifers have heard it all before and start drawing on their own, selecting magazine photos of faces that I have spread out on a long table.

One of the lifers suddenly decided to switch from graphite pencil to charcoal pencil, which deposits much more black stuff on the paper with much less effort. Charcoal allows for a more assertive line and more accidentals, like smudging.   The drawing (top) was unlike anything Maggy had ever done before.  It’s animated and daring in execution. And it was fast.  Then, with plenty of time left in the class, she drew another face, with equal daring.

I can’t predict how the process will work for you.  But that bit about the neurons slugging it out in your brain, that part is sure.

At right, Maggy’s drawing from just five weeks earlier.  With hindsight, we can see the potential: it’s loose and suggestive, and at the same time anatomically correct. But still, there was no gradual progression from this to the masterful drawing she produced in charcoal.

It’s not a linear process.

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Up-Side-Down Face

This is a sequel to the previous post. One student, Maggy, really got into the Up-Side-Down thing—meaning, the value of this approach really sunk in.  So much so, that when the Caravaggio exercise was done, she was the only one in the class to draw a face upside down from a photo.  In the process, she noticed how asymmetrical the face was and was delighted by this discovery.  When you’re drawing right-side-up it’s harder to notice such things because you tend to equalize, to perfect.  That’s a no-no!   The expressiveness and character in a face lies precisely in asymmetry.

Being all fired up by the Caravaggio exercise and then by drawing a face up-side-down, she then turned the magazine page right-side-up and drew the guy again.  This was easy now, because her seeing was “true” and it took her no time at all, with very impressive results.  It’s interesting to compare the two versions.  The second view of the face, with the photo placed right-side-up, didn’t look anything like the UPS photo drawn previously.  So, it’s not a case of doing the same thing twice, not at all.  What matters here is the ease with which the second drawing came about and that was the result of the nature of the exercise itself.

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