Drawing at the National Gallery is always enjoyable, especially when you’re drawing with a friend. This time I made a drawing after Rodin’s “Bust of a Young Girl.” It’s very relaxing after working with so much focus on the Big Painting studies to be looking at and drawing something that’s not a flower — much as I love drawing flowers ….
Here’s a link to the Rodin:
I was at the U S Arboretum a few years ago when they were giving away old books. Most of them treated obscure topics. I found one book that I thought I could use for making sketches. It sat in the back of my car for a long time. When I cleaned my car, it migrated indoors. It sat in one spot, then another. After I started reading Marie Kondo’s book “the life-changing magic of tidying up” I figured it was destined for the trash pile. Something stayed my hand. This morning it “struck joy,” to use Kondo’s phrase. And I’m drawing one of the third or forth foliage studies I’ve made so far for a project that crept into my head last night.
This book feels kind of perfect for what I’m doing. I have felt so excited that I wanted to write about it and I haven’t even finished the first drawing yet. But it is so perfect. We are definitely striking joy this morning.
The book is so perfect that even the panels in it, the lines drawn on every page are as though designed to help me figure my foliage studies out. The text is minimal and offers simply some random extra texture on a related theme: flowering plants.
The Big Tidy Campaign of 2017 is on-going. It will be a while before I complete my household transformations. I continue with my regular work during interludes — and while my muscles rest from the exertions of much moving stuff about ….
Simonides of Cleos is reputed to be the first to discover that a seating pattern helps you remember things. I was using his method to remember where my koi were in the latest koi picture. I was making an idle drawing while sitting through a slightly tedious lecture and used the time to review the painting I had been working on the night prior.
Strangely enough I had quite a difficult time accounting for all the fish graphically, by remembering their shapes. And so it was the “seating pattern” at last the filled in some of the blanks. I didn’t get them all, but I got most.
I draw all the time now.
I have notebooks of every size. There’s always some kind of notebook in my purse, but if somehow my notebook has escaped from the purse, there’s always something else to draw on — a calendar or a scrap of paper. I didn’t used to draw as much and as freely as I do now. I regret that lost time since I get so much enjoyment from drawing, and the only reason I didn’t pursue it constantly in the past was inhibition.
The sooner you rid yourself of that inhibition, the better.
Notebooks are for thinking. The thoughts can be careful. Or they can be spur of the moment, stream of consciousness, blurry, furtive, haphazard, tentative, carefree, rapid, or exuberant.
Some of my favorite drawings are hidden inside notebooks.
A lot of wonderful memories are hidden there too.
I have a notebook that I’m filling up with pen drawings. Usually I crop drawings to eliminate the extraneous edges, but when you’re dealing with a notebook, to crop the picture is to ignore the notebook itself, and that I think eliminates a significant part of the charm. An artist’s drawing notebook, like other books, participates in a mystique of opening and closing. You enter another world, as it may be, in opening a book. Closing it, you leave. A book is rather like a door that way.
I like the area of space in the unused page, the way that previous drawings bleed through and appear like ghosts. They blur the edges of separation between the pictorial things and remind the observer that everything exhibited is ultimately just lines of ink on a sheet of paper.
I have several vases in the notebook now. Each drawing is a little world. And the notebook, therefore, is what? Door to a miniature alternate flower universe.
I’m doing something today that I don’t often do — I’m chilling out! And wishing you flowers on this lovely Sunday afternoon.
Squaring up: the technique of copying that uses a grid. Comparing the squares of the source image to the drawing underway helps an artist draw the relationships between visual elements correctly. It’s especially useful when an image needs to be enlarged.
And that’s why I used it. I was painting this bridge into a large portrait and needed to get the architectural structure right. I made this little version from a photo, then enlarged this image by making a similar grid on the canvas I was painting. So it had this very practical purpose.
Still I think the gridded drawing has a unique charm of its own. It turns each square into an abstraction and heightens the abstraction of the image as a whole. The order that it imposes is also comforting somehow. Having these grid lines here, I feel confident that this little bridge isn’t going anywhere. It’s locked down on the page.
[Top of the post: Little Bridge by Aletha Kuschan, colored pencils]
Drawing can take many forms. Drawings can record appearances using line. Or they can be largely tonal in their effects, creating patterns of light and shade. A drawing can be very evocative or sketchy. It can impress us with detailed and very descriptive qualities that persuade us that we are looking at something “real.” But drawings are always a bit artificial in certain wonderful senses: their monochromatic qualities take the image already one remove from ordinary vision — since of course we see actual things in color. Somehow the removal of color (as in moody black and white photos) from the very outset introduces an element of mystery. And sometimes, also, the sketchiness of images can make them somehow visually poetic.
I like drawing because of its simplicity. It is a most portable art form. An artist needs at a minimum a little notebook, a pencil and a pocket to store these tools. Alternately, a drawing can be very detailed, very vivid. It can include so much visual information that it sometimes competes with painting in its complexity.
Because of its directness and economy of means, drawing can be a flexible tool for wondering to oneself about visual questions. You might find yourself looking at something and pondering some quality — light, dark, a contour, a structure. And you just put down ideas about the thing in careless lines: you have a drawing.
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