Céline Frown

The non plus ultra of drawing is the face. Well, maybe not of Drawing writ large, but almost certainly of drawing students. They approach the face more ferociously than anything else.  It has a way of talking back, you know.

Western Art is full of beautiful faces, meaning idealized faces. It’s hard for us not to be haunted by them: from the Venus de Milo to Botticelli’s Venus to Raphael’s insipid Madonnas to Michelangelo’s pouting Madonnas to Sargent’s gossamer heiresses.  In the 19^th century women started looking more interesting.  Think of Degas and Manet.

Imagine my delight at finding ads for Céline products (handbags, though you’d never guess) where young women, having left the house without running fingers through their shapeless hair and without bothering about makeup, scowl at us.  Take that! Now draw me and don’t make me pretty.

In this drawing by Maggy Shell, notice how powerful the eyes are even though no anatomy is indicated. No eyelid, no iris.  This face & head study goes deeper than mere anatomy.  You understand the anatomy without seeing the face anatomically.  Instead, what intrigues you is the expression. With an uncanny economy of means the artist draws us into the mystery behind the face.

Maggy Shell, Céline Frown, charcoal on paper, ~16” x 14”

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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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Raphael, Rubens and the Individual Approach

In my drawing class, I present demos on various techniques and then stand back to see who will use those techniques and to what degree.  The lesson on shading, for example, will make quite a different impression on different students.  A student takes what he or she can use at that moment—and feels like using.  That is, I think, as it should be.

One student, Gaby, has been using a careful shading technique for drapery studies that fill the page with a compelling presence and at the same time invite associations to anatomical features.  The illusion of three-dimensionality of these round forms is difficult to achieve and requires intense concentration and visualization.

Another student, Linné, working from the same still life set-up (see previous post) avoids the articulation of light-shadow-reflected-light and instead suggests the drapery with his own forceful lines. In some passages of the drawing, he goes into the sheer pleasure of markmaking and simply invents.  Mysterious humanoid forms emerge while at the same time clearly representing drapery.

‘Twas not ever thus.  Individual expression was not tolerated among the Renaissance and Baroque artists who worked with numerous assistants in their spacious workshops.  For example, Raphael (1483-1520) and Rubens (1577-1640) trained their assistants to specialize in certain aspects of a painting like drapery, clouds, water,architectural detail and flesh.  The assistants had to reproduce the master’s technique so faithfully that the whole tableau appeared to have been painted by the same hand–the master’s.  We tend to forget this—and we’re supposed to—when we look at these enormous paintings and frescoes.  Rubens’ paintings celebrating the life of Marie de Medici measure about 14 feet in height.  Raphael’s School of Athens fills a wall in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

Let’s not be overwhelmed by the achievements of these masters and let’s instead give credit to those unnamed assistants.  We moderns, lucky us, can study the techniques of those big guys from the past and then enjoy the freedom to find our own individual approach.

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

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