Drawing Sculpture

More precisely, drawing from photos of sculpture.

If you think of drawing as translating, then drawing from sculpture is easier than drawing from life, because the sculptor has already done the half the work for you. He or she has simplified the forms for you.

Taking this a step further, drawing from a photo of a sculpture means that two-thirds of the work has been done for you.  The photo takes the additional step of flattening the three-dimension orm into two and two dimensions is where your drawing functions.   Piece o’ cake.

Well, no, not exactly simple.  You still have to get over naming what you’re drawing because naming—the whole verbal mode—gets in the way. To that end, we turn things upside-down.  And to turn a Michelangelo sculpture up-side-down, it’s really handy to have a photo of the humongous thing, especially if the original is in Florence.

Drawing by Jeanne Mueller, graphite on paper, ~14” x 11”

Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1475-1564.  The Medici Chapel, 1520-1534

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain-by-betty-edwards/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/ptolemy-in-ulm/

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

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Waiting for Verdi with My Little Sony in Hand

Don’t leave home without it.  We think our lives are hectic but actually we spend a lot of time waiting.  At stop lights, in line at a store, and in theaters before the performance starts.  When waiting, you can just turn on your visual mode.  Wherever you look, there are strange sights.  Turn on your camera. Click.

I had such a wait before the performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Millennium Park in August.  It was hot and humid and people were busy sweating.  It could have been unpleasant, but I switched to visual.  I focused on Frank Gehry’s billowing band shell, on the tree line, on the tops of heads.  But, as so often, the most interesting things are right in front of you.

It’s not that this couple was interesting as a couple, it’s that zooming in gave me a composition that I want to look at, over and over.  I took four shots and am posting this one.  No cropping or color adjustments were involved.

I hope that others will also be drawn into this image: the curiosity about the couple, the carnival colors, the zig-zags of the fabric folds, the Y-shaped crease of her flesh echoed by the Y-shaped fold of his shirt; and the uncanny way our attention converges on the bolts:  the shoulder strap, the red V between the man and woman, the density of shapes at that point above the bolts.  The bolts.

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

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