Ribbon

So simple.  A wide, stiffly woven ribbon held up by some poles, the kind you’ll find in packages of blank  CD’s.  The ribbon is meandering through space, making hair-pin curves and casting lovely shadows. In reality it’s merely lovely.  In the drawing (the poles are omitted) the ribbon becomes animated, mysterious and sur-real.

Here’s another angle. You can draw right now, from this image on your screen.

We started class with this exercise.

Drawing by Maggy Shell, charcoal, ~ 14” x 18”.

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Inventing Stripes

What the artist saw was a ball and a ribbon. A ball and a ribbon can make an interesting drawing, but the challenge with a still life like that is inevitably the “background.” There’s no such thing as “background.” That’s a modernist credo and I uphold it. In the modernist sensibility, every square inch of the painting or drawing has to hold the viewer’s interest. What to do? You invent. Maggy Shell invented the stripes.
She could have invented a wall paper of polka dots or hibiscus with hummingbirds. Why are stripes a good, possibly the best, choice? Because the stripes present a variation on the ribbon motif which is the largest part of the still life. What we get, therefore, is a theme-and-variation–always engaging, in whatever art form we find it: music, poetry, storytelling, painting, drawing, sculpture. This invention takes the drawing out of the category  “illustration” and makes it art.
Drawing by Maggy Shell, charcoal, ~14 x 18.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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The Ribbon Doodle

That’s all it is, a doodle.  But it’s a good exercise in visualizing dimension. (Click on image to read the text.)  It looks simple, even silly, but it turns out to be tricky, especially when the ribbon starts winding with some abandon, like this:

I bring this up at this point in the blog, because we’re getting into drapery.  Everyone will tell you that drawing drapery can drive you nuts.  You look at the bulges and valleys in the fabric and then you look again and then again and before long you don’t know where you are in that meandering mess. Nuts.

The ribbon doodle is a simplified version of drapery.  I helps you visualize the drama of up and down, back and forth, visible and invisible.  That is exactly what you have to do to get a hold of drapery –in your mind.  You have to visualize the whole drama.  More later.  In the meantime, keep the ribbon smooth…don’t get tied into knots.  Practice.

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

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