Jenö Barcsay and Foreshortening

Foreshortening is frightening.

But we see foreshortened shapes all the time.  When you look at a face in a front view, the nose is foreshortened; when a person sits in a chair in front of you, the thighs and forearms will be foreshortened.  So, how can this be frightening?

When you draw a foreshortened limb and you really have to look at that shape, it looks weird.  It’s so frightening, you go into denial.  Can’t be, your eyes say. Your drawing hand will aid and abet this denial, by elongating what in fact is seen to be compressed.

When I announced that we would do foreshortening next class, a student said, “sounds like surgery.”  So I brought flowers to place near the Barcsay nude we were going to work from.

Jenö Barcsay’s book Anatomy for the Artist, makes a fine reference book.  I have blown up one of his reclining nudes to three feet.  When it’s tacked up on a wall, I can be very specific in guiding the students in the seeing process.  How do you approach this thing?  Well, first, you need to find a unit of measure.  Take the head.  Whoa, the head is half the picture! So counter-intuitive!  But that’s how foreshortening is.  It will drive you crazy, unless you have a disciplined approach that measures and aligns various points with one another.  It’s the only way, you can’t wing it.

One student, Isabella, insisted on working out her drawing with chiaroscuro effect. Quite an accomplishment.

Like upside-down drawing, foreshortening has the effect of focusing the mind. The students who did not completely work out their Barcsay nude, still benefited from the rigorous seeing process, and then produced satisfying drawings using various other images to work from.

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Life Drawing–Digging Down

Representation in painting became superfluous and problematic shortly after the invention of photography in the 1830s.  By the end of that century artists, though trained in the discipline of representation, turned to abstraction and highly subjective experimentations with form and media.  Being a dyed-in-the-wool modernist, I share their sensibility. When I do representational studies I have no intention of exhibiting them.   I do them for myself, for the sheer pleasure of drawing.   In my life drawing group I sometimes experiment with materials that are difficult to control and sometimes, like earlier this week, I go with the intention of working representationally, of studying the anatomy and getting it right.

Well, not quite.  I gave myself an extra challenge–can’t seem to get away from the modernist involvement with the mess of the materials.   I had prepared the gloss paper (that I like to work on, 11 x 17)  with a thin wash of acrylic in sepia.  Then I drew on that with black China Marker, which I’ve talked about here before.  China Marker is waxy and cannot be erased.  The only way to remove a line is to scrape it off with a razor blade.  Now, when this is done on prepared paper, the thin acrylic layer also comes off, exposing the original white of the paper.  The effect of that is that the scraping, while functioning as the removal of the undesired line, is at the same time attracting attention to itself.  The scraping becomes part of the working process itself, in fact a kind of celebration of erasure.

You can be sure, that nobody in the 16^th century was allowed to think of erasure in this complementary light.  But we moderns (and postmoderns) see  process itself as occupying center stage.  The work is not so much about the result, as about the work-and-thought process itself.

It’s an idea that still meets with a lot of resistance, a hundred and fifty years later.  What developed in my life drawing session was disconcerting at first, but then it was exciting because I saw the philosophical implications of negation there.  It reminded me of Mark Tansey.  My exposing the surface of the paper and embracing the scraping process as integral to my work, is peanuts—literally just scratching the surface—compared to the work of Mark Tansey, who makes his monochrome paintings by scraping away the paint he applied to the canvas in the morning of his working day when he started making the painting.  He paints by removing paint, he actually unpaints.  Since oil paint dries in about six hours, that’s all the time he has to finish his unpainting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tansey

http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/275

For readings on negation as a philosophical topic, see Mark C. Taylor’s books.

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Life Drawing—“Atmospherics”

The drawing I discussed at length in the last post was done in China Marker on gloss paper, where erasing is possible only by scraping with a razor blade.  The same materials were used for this drawing, from that same drawing session, 1.17.11.   In this drawing I did no scraping, but only added the dark background later and then also deepened some of the work on the figure itself with bolder strokes of the China Marker—not in outlines, but in patches.

In the next drawing I started to experiment with the addition of perspective lines, carefully measured out on the drawing board.  The drawings, generated from a ten to fifteen minute pose, can certainly left as is, but I’m finding it more and more interesting to fiddle with composition later when I’m back in my own studio.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a before-and-after for these drawing.  I’ll be more pedagogically minded in the future and remind myself to scan in the drawing before it gets subjected to “atmospherics” and compositional calculations.

This last drawing is in pencil (6B) on a scrap of museum grade mat board, about 10 x 10.   Acid free mat board is a luxurious support for drawing because it’s very soft, spongy almost, and allows the soft pencil to dig in to produce a rich, juicy line.  It’s not intended to be drawn on, being rather like compressed lint and lacking fiber.  But it offers the added perk of not allowing for erasing.  Hmmm, that limitation focuses the mind.

More on fiddling with composition, atmospherics and developing a drawing…soon.

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Life Drawing and Line Lesson

The model in our figure work shop last Monday held this pose for ten minutes.  That limited time suffices to get the figure down but does not allow for any “atmospherics” like the enveloping black frame.  That was added later in my own studio, without the model, because the drawing needed it, I felt, for compositional reasons.  A few days later, today, I was still not happy with the way the eye moved through the composition and I decided to use this drawing in this blog to illustrate how ameliorating certain lines can greatly help the eye move through the page.  I happen to like that in a drawing; I don’t want the eye to get stuck on a passage or be blocked by some very insistent line.  To illustrate what I mean, I’m showing the same drawing here, with certain contour lines lightened, not much, but just enough so that as you follow the line it will at times become lighter or even disappear.

The drawing here at the left reflects those changes.  This final version should be more interesting to look at than the earlier version, at top right.  Is that your feeling also? (Click the  image to get a much larger view.)

To be specific about where the line was picked up, here’s a copy of the final drawing with numbers where I did the work.  Notice that the anatomy remains clearly stated, we lose nothing of the contour, when it is indicated by the black of the background pushing against the figure (#2 and #4)  or when the line is so pale as to be almost lost, as in #3.  The line at #1 had to go because it was too severe and demanding of attention.  It’s continuation at the upper right corner behind the head, however is another matter, a topic for a future post, which will involve Cézanne.

These changes still did not resolve the problems I saw with the drawing.  It kept reminding me of Ingre’s Grand Odalisque, one of his more ridiculous exaggerations of the female anatomy.  He sacrificed anatomy and credibility on the altar of composition, we can see that: what he was after here was a smooth upward curve like a cup.  The reclining figure thus becomes a vessel, a popular metaphor for a woman’s body in the 19th century.   She is in effect, a reclining version of his La Source, another kitschy male fantasy of the female body. (We must get to a discussion of kitsch one of these days!) Here, then, is the final-final version of this figure study.  If you’ve followed the above with any interest, you’ll see how the earlier problems are resolved by the final subtle changes.

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