Through the Xerox Lens

To get a fresh view of your drawing, you can enlarge or reduce it on the Xerox machine. It’s best if you make a drastic change in size. For example, here are some drawings by Gaby Edgerton. She made very small studies, only about 1½ inches high. Then she took them to a duplicating machine and blew them up to about 12” high. I’m showing the enlargements here. Where before, in the tiny drawing, you could only see the general form of the drawing, now in the enlargement you can see the drama of her markmaking. Where the small drawings looked rather delicate, now you can see that the lines are bold and energetic.
Working small can be quite easy. If you see your drawing suddenly large and impressive, you may be encouraged to work with greater daring the next time, whatever size you work in.————-

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Wölfflin and “Loosen Up, Everybody!”

In the recent posts about The Contour and Leonardo’s sfumato I said that a drawing can be described as “painterly.”  The difference between linear and painterly is this:  a linear style outlines the figure and separates it from the ground; in a painterly work, the figure and the ground flow into one another.  In studying Western art, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) noticed that the earlier art is linear and then in the 16^th century, the line opens up and the image becomes painterly.  You can find the whole theory in his “Principles of Art History,” a book that is surprisingly lively and readable, considering when it was written.

Contemporary art teachers wouldn’t go into that kind of scholarship—and I don’t, in class.  Basically, what we want to get at is, “Hey, everybody—loosen up!”  Easier said than done. The tendency for beginning students (as with our ancestors) is to firmly outline your subject.  Opening up the contour is far from being sloppy.  It involves a whole other way of seeing and thinking. You see the contour and visualize it as you draw, but you don’t state it directly.  This requires tremendous concentration and getting to that ability to concentrate takes practice over time.

Here, then, is Linné’s recent drawing from a model.  I sometimes blow up my students’ drawings at the Xerox machine so that they can appreciate their own progress.  It’s also helpful to isolate one passage, such as the head, in order to take it out of context.  Cropping your drawing like this helps you focus on the qualities in your drawing, rather than your representational skills.

Learning to draw can often be discouraging, but actually you’re better than you think. You develop not gradually, but in spurts and part of my job is to help you notice that you just made a spurt.

Yeah!

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

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