Drama on the Page

You might think that this is a sketch, to be elaborated on later. You might think this is a hasty scribble on the back of an envelope, a reminder of the rough composition so that the artist would later work out details and make a “presentable, salable work of art.”
So wrong.
To be able to see like this!
This is a very advanced form of seeing.
It’s not about documenting the shape of the pots. The photo does that. It’s not about proving that you’re diligent, that you put in the time and now you’ll price the drawing according to the time you slaved over the drawing. There are people who think like that. So master-servant 16th century. And if you think your five-year-old can do this, well, you need to come to class.
What makes the drawing so great is the form. Not the shape of the pots. The form of the drawing! Seeing form is like reading between the lines in a story, reading deeper than the narrative. It’s seeing through the shapes, seeing deeper than what’s illustrated. The artist here is not illustrating pots. She is creating a page that stands on its own.
She creates a tug between positive and negative space. We expect the pots, being graspable things, to hold our attention. The ground they stand on is supposed to just passively support objects. But notice that the shape of the ground is more emphatically articulated than the objects. It’s dark and has a stepped shape of its own. The shape of the pots is predictable and our expectation projects more information into them that is actually given. Even though they are presented in casual curves and ellipses, we read them clearly. We as viewers are engaged in completing the presentation. A good thing. We also notice that the whole page is a dialogue between the severe,angular, rational edge of the black ground and the curved, flamboyant, irrational lines of the identifiable objects. So good.
Back to the sketch idea. The drawing, above, was preceded by a more elaborate working out of this motif. The artist put in some folds of the cloth that covered the table. In other words, details. This is also an interesting drawing, but not as exciting as the one featured here. The artist had to wrestle with details, with the impulse to represent more literally what she actually saw,  to attain the view of form that marks the stark drama of the final drawing.
Drawings by Maggy Shell, charcoal on paper, ~14”x18”
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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Karen G.

Karen is one of the two students who followed my direction about this still life: Plan on doing two drawings. In the first, study the shapes and produce a representational drawing.  In the second, take off and play with form, with a deliberate departure from representation.

In her second drawing (above) she inverted some of the pots, took the pear that rested on top of the pots and put it on the bottom of her drawing and invented forms that were not in the still life at all.  The angular shapes on top may have been inspired by the corner of the room or the angle of the door.  The striped crescent is pure invention, for the sake of the composition. The drawing is explosive and dense at the same time. It’s a work of conviction and playfulness.  These are—intellectually—contradictory terms, but in a work of art they co-exist because in art we reconcile contradictions; we get at the whole ball o’ wax, also known as the human condition.

At right, the artist’s first drawing, quite literal and faithful.  This is the same view that she worked from for the second drawing. (above)

This post is the last in the series about drawings made in one three-hour session by seven students.  To follow the discussion of this still life, see posts for May 22, 23, and 24; and June 5,6, and 12.

 

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Vera C.

To set up the exercise I gave a simple instruction to the class: Plan on doing two drawings. In the first, study the shapes and produce a representational drawing.  In the second, take off and play with form, with a deliberate departure from representation.

Of the seven students in the class, only two students followed this suggested program.

Vera C. first produced a drawing in which the pots and drapery are recognizable as such (above).  The style of drawing, with the soft contour and the arbitrary shadows, is already an emphatic departure from realism.   In the second drawing (below), she interpreted the still life as–what looks to me like—round objects caught in a tornado.   It’s an apt image and it made me see this pile of familiar, oh so familiar, objects in a new light:  the relentless roundness of the pots does have this hypnotizing effect and we know that on the potter’s wheel they are “thrown” in a process that is messy, relies on centrifugal force (notice the tangential lines in the drawing that suggests this centrifugal force) and  also the centripetal, containing power of the potter’s hands.  The other stuff on the still life table, the drapery can also be seen as evoking this swirling, vertiginous feeling.

This is an inspired, stimulating drawing. It comes out of a modern sensibility in the sense that it draws us into the artist’s state of mind and her fresh perception of these objects.  (A pre-modern sensibility, say from the 16^th century or even the 18^th century, would direct our attention to the objects themselves.)

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Linné

As in Austin’s drawing (see previous post), this drawing by Linné goes for huge.  But with a crucial difference.  Austin’s pots look monumental, Linné’s are just plain big.  Austin gives us gravitas, Linné gives us humor.  What’s so funny here?  I’m not saying it’s a knee-slapping kind of funny, but I do think the high horizon lends wit to the thing.

Mind you, he didn’t see a horizon, he saw a little table with a rumpled cloth and some pots.  He invented the horizon.  Now, the placement of the horizon in a drawing or painting gives us a crucial bit of information:  it gives us the eye level of the observer.  When you’re standing at the beach looking out at the water, the horizon will be as high as you, meaning your eyes; when you lie down on your towel, the volume of the water will appear to have shrunken down to a sliver because your eyes are now very low.

I’m reminded of the beach because Linné has invented not just any horizon line but the horizon of some ocean, “the wine-dark sea.”  You know where you are in this drawing:  you’re strolling on a beach and ahead of you is this enormous pile of crockery.  How enormous?  Since Linné, the artist “looking at this scene,” is about six feet tall, that pot leaning on the right is about six feet in diameter.  The whole pile is about eleven feet high.  It’s an intelligent and funny image–in a sneaky sort of way.  It’s witty.

This is the fifth drawing from that still life of pots.  In the next post, I’ll talk about what instruction I gave to the class as I was setting up the exercise.

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Maggy S.

Here we see a deliberate formal choice in the different treatment of pots and drapery.  The pots have no contour lines while the drapery is presented in lines that define the crest of the fabric. The pots shimmer with texture, which carries emotion and immediacy;  the drapery lacks all physicality, presenting itself as an idea.  Even though the drawing is a cerebral play on formal elements (line, texture, contour, shading) the drawing still manages to be clearly representational of physical objects.

This drawing does not seem to be incomplete.  The lyrical drapery lines suggest that they are complete, not preliminary. When I said that the formal choices in this drawing were deliberate, I did not mean to suggest that the artist/student worked out the composition and textural dichotomies with categorical calculations.  That comes later, mostly from my theoretical mind.  What happens in class is that in the course of a three-hour drawing session, the artist’s mind works on a hyper-aware, intuitive level that encompasses both the rational and irrational.  This complexity makes the work interesting.

A note on how the still life was set up.  In an academic or classical still life, the pottery would be standing up as its function dictates;  there might be a flower in one of the pots and at the base of the pots would be an apple or lemon. In setting up this still life I deliberately avoided such conventions in the hope that a topsy-turvy still life would stimulate an unbiased, unstilted view.  It worked.  Every one of the drawings is different.  This is the third of seven drawings.  Students produced work of conceptual depth and  technical daring.

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Louise F.

The overall impression of this drawing is one of delicacy but at the same time the pencil marks are bold and clear.  There’s nothing blended or indecisive; at the same time the drawing is incomplete.  While the shapes are boldly drawn with a classical respect for light (notice the reflected light where the large pot meets the drapery underneath), the dominant feeling is romantic because of the incompletion. These dichotomies create a tension and puzzlement that engage the viewer.

This is the second of seven drawings from that still life produced in one class.  In future posts (soon) I’ll talk about the physical set up and the suggestions I made to the students at the beginning of the class.

For “Romantic”  see posts February 21, 2011 and April 22, 2011.

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by In Young J.

Of all the students in my drawing class, In Young J. did the most literal study of this still life.  An advanced student, she quickly blocks in the composition, mindful of perspective and overlapping forms.  This is easy for her.  She works in pencil, lightly working various passages over and over to adjust the relative values of the drawing.  She tends to hold the pencil way back and swing it lightly, as she tunes the values of her shapes.  This drawing occupied all her time in this three-hour class.

I did not take a photo of the set-up (but you can see an accurate representation here in In Young’s drawing)  for the simple reason that I had no time, being totally engrossed in the work of my students.  It was an exciting class.

How could this be?  How can a pile of pots inspire such good work?

This post is the first of seven about the work done by the seven students in that class.  Each deserves to be looked at and studied.  In tomorrow’s post I’ll talk about the instructions I gave to the class and the reason for piling the pots up in this random fashion. Stay tuned.

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