In the Middle

It’s a privilege to look at this drawing. It’s exquisite in the purest sense, serene and composed. There’s no excess, no fussing, no posturing or wrangling for effect. It seems to have flown out of the artist’s hand.
Notice that the center pot is not shaded while the flanking two pots are shaded. The center pot is large and holds its own by virtue of contour alone. If it were shaded, it would be too heavy and insistent; it would dominate the drawing as if didn’t want to get along and it would have too much pull, too much weight. As is, it’s big and still harmonious. How did the artist make this decision, to lighten up in the middle? Did we have a lecture about this, a statement of principle, before the drawing started? No, not at all. This sort of thing happens when you’re focused on the drawing, without critical chatter in your brain, in a purely visual mode. You can’t force this. It’s a state that can occur after a couple of hours of drawing. It happens. Drawing comes from drawing.

(Drawing by Barbara Heaton, graphite)
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Stage Set with Circular Forms, Part 2

How long does it take to draw a still life like the one in the previous post? Three hours. This does not mean that graphite is being deposited on paper uninterruptedly for three hours. Much of the time is devoted to looking, considering, deciding, trying. The big decision, of course, is when to stop.
I tend to like a work at a very early stage of its development. That’s probably because of my love of abstraction and so a few lines on the page already speak to me. As for the love of incompletion, that’s an attribute of a romantic sensibility. I’m one of those.

In this second “stage set” Gaby again produced a fine drawing, this time with more delicate markmaking and with more devoted attention to shading . I’ll show it here in two stages, the one that starts the post being the final one. Final, not only in the sense of three-hours-are-up but also in the sense of “it is resolved.”

What’s particularly effective in the drawing is how the rectillinear edges on the left were worked out to contrast with the round billowing forms on the right.

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