Not Heroic, Nothing Much

Wherever you are right now, if you look up and around you, you’ll find a still life worth drawing.  Oh, no, you say? It’s all ordinary, everyday stuff. A coffee cup, a coiled wire, a pair of glasses, a crinkled Kleenex…

That’s the point!  Look again.  Look at the space between these things, how their edges meet, how shapes repeat, the pattern of light and dark.  Looking like this can get you out of the verbal mode so that you arrive at a state of mind where you’re not naming anything.  You go visual, in other words.  Ah, then you start drawing.

The objects we draw in class are equally banal: an old bowl and some cloth remnant on a beat up studio table. Not heroic, nothing much.

Drawing by Linné Dosé, graphite, ~14” x 18”

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/trip-into-drapery/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/the-square/

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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