standing somewhere different

I have drawn the objects over and over.  I am probably going to continue drawing them.  I had settled on a certain rough plan for them and have been attempting to sort out the specifics.  It could seem strange perhaps to an outsider, but I think the disposition of the objects is very important.  I don’t exactly know why but I feel that it is.

Why else paint at all if such things are not very important?

Anyway, I haven’t been satisfied with the arrangement of the group though I have been thinking about the question in different ways.  And I’ve made various kinds of drawings, not only studies like the ones above, but compositional drawings also.

If I wish to avoid having to paint over things —  to avoid changing my mind later when all the things exist in thick paint  — then I have to establish the locations of the objects now.  Once that’s done, I can go back to the canvas and continue creating the painting there — for I’ll still have tons of decisions to make even then.  It’s staggering the amount of choice that exists inside what might seem to be a fairly rigid framework.

Anyway, I sense that I am stuck.  And I want to get unstuck.  So I have begun wondering about seeing the objects from other angles.  Degas said that the artist should draw his subjects from all kinds of angles.  Turn the thing around, see it from the side, from the back, from above, from below.  Get on a ladder if necessary — happily I don’t think I’ll be needing the ladder.  But in other respects I mean to take his advice.

So far I’ve only recorded the idea photographically.  And now I write about it.  But I’m going to draw some of the things from different vantage points and see what happens.

I think this approach can work in many areas of life.  If you have a problem — even a personal problem — ask yourself if there’s a way of seeing it from a different point of view.  How does the other party understand the question?  Even if you cannot know, even if you cannot ask, you can still imagine.

Gladly with drawing, getting a different vantage point is easy.  You just position yourself in a different spot and draw whatever it is that you now see in the new place.

Even if I decide to go along with the original ideas (who knows?) I do believe that the additional wisdom gained from having seen the object from different points of view will be valuable in some incalculable way.

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drawing with friends

Today at the National Gallery of Art, drawing with my friend, I made this drawing after a Rodin marble sculpture.  Drawing faces helps get me ready for an upcoming project and it offers also a pleasant form of separation from my current painting. After drawing faces I come back to the frog teapot and other objects with a fresh eye.

I took a picture of the sculpture with my low resolution dumb phone.

The gallery’s superior photo and some information about the sculpture is available at the link:

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1009.html

I find myself thinking about all sorts of things while I draw.  Because the marble sculpture had such broadly generalized forms and smooth transitions, I found myself having to deal with line in as precise a way as I could manage.

But I found a small, very amorphous sculpture of a head in one of the display cases, a small unfinished study by Degas.  Drawing it, I thought about using an amorphous approach with the clay pencils.  I imagined that I was working with clay myself, that the patches of dark were slabs of clay.  And I saw the masses of darkness as inchoate shapes that suggest the emergent form rather than as specific features.

The picture at NGA’s website shows the object in more definition than I could actually see while looking at it through the display case, no doubt a characteristic of the particular lighting.

I try to give myself as much freedom as possible in these drawings.  You can feel a little inhibited when you’re drawing in a public place, but I tell myself that I can do whatever I want while I’m drawing — that I can ask any questions I please, use whatever method, that I can finish a drawing or not.  Drawing this particular object was a really pleasant experience.  It seems to me that Degas was telling himself that he could do whatever he pleases as well.

Information about the object is available at the link below:

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.93038.html

empty bowl

Even an empty bowl has something in it — it’s got air inside it, hanging there from rim to rim.  And light particles attach themselves to the air and gleam and glimmer inside it.  I’m not sure how one’s suppose to handle the topic visually, but I mix different pearlescent tints of white and hope for the best!

It should not be confused with real air though! — not according to the great painter Edgar Degas for he told us “l’air qu’on voit dans les tableaux des maitres n’est pas l’air respirable.”  [The air one sees in the paintings of the great masters is not the air we breathe.]

I guess that’s true of those figs I stole from ol’ man Snyders (more about that in a future post).  They’re only for looking at — you can’t eat them.

and another one

So when I painted the pond in oil the first time, I also made a drawing in oil pastel.  I am really in Degas territory with this one:  “il faut refaire la même chose dix fois, cent fois” – you must redo the same thing ten times, a hundred times.”

I must really like this motif.

Degas’s advice for housewives: dix fois at least

Degas’s advice for painters works for tidying too.  Indeed, it will be instrumental to the success of the Big Tidy Campaign of 2017 as my first exertions have quickly revealed.

If I want more of the above and less of the below, I am going to have to move various things around …

… maybe ten times — but surely not one hundred times —  in order to have space to do the reorganization.  For one has to move this to get to that, but then THAT needs to return temporarily to its first place while I deal with a new THIS.

It’s complicated.

“Il faut refaire dix fois, cent fois le même sujet.”  You must redo — ten times, one hundred times — the same subject.

Listen, Degas.  (écoute, Degas).  Ten times will be quite enough!

 

 

dix fois, cents fois: Degas’s advice for artists

Ten times is probably a good number for deciding if you like a thing.  And a hundred times is surely a good number for mastering it (or for beginning its mastery).

Degas thought you should repeat things the way that a ballerina repeats her dance steps or a musician practices a musical figure.  You gain skill and sureness with each repetition.  But sometimes you also gain ideas.  The differences between one repetition and another can sometimes lead to new ideas. Thus it’s a source of invention in art.

“Il faut refaire dix fois, cent fois le même sujet.”  You must redo — ten times, one hundred times — the same subject.

Certainly one hundred times is excessive if you don’t love the thing.  But ten times is a way of gaining skill.  And ten times offers enough repetitions to get to know the subject in a preliminary way — to learn it.  With ten repetitions you find out if you do love the motif — whether or not it’s the right motif for you.

And if after you’ve done the subject ten times, you wish to explore it further then you know that your love is deep.

You could do ten versions of this, and ten versions of that, and discover through the process what kinds of things matter to you.  Somewhere in that process you will find that the subject holds deeper meaning (even if you don’t know what that meaning is).  At that point you want to plunge in and really explore its every aspect.  Exploration leads to invention.

 

I have certain subjects that I return to again and again.  I did not begin them with the idea that they would become my particular venues.  I went into the subject innocently.  But I was heeding some call — even if I was unaware.

I am not sure how many subjects I have — some I’m keenly aware of — the koi, flowers, seashells, certain kinds of landscape.  If I did one hundred of each — GOODNESS —  that would be four hundred right there!

Degas is a strict task master!  But this is all stuff that one loves.  It would be wonderful to do one hundred repetitions of each subject!

Today I’m beginning the Big Tidy Campaign of 2017 and part of tidying is taking inventory.  I begin this inventory with an inventory of my thoughts — and of my fishes!

From Lascaux to your Kitchen Table

If you’ve visited a bookstore in recent times, you’ve undoubtedly noticed something kind of amazing happening and perhaps a little strange too.  Stacks of coloring books line the entrance.  Coloring books, once the special province of children, have become a passion for creativity seeking adults.  I didn’t notice the phenomenon when it first began.  The first books were probably like the lonely dandelion in a broad meadow.  I don’t know about you, but once I noticed this craze taking place (can we call it a craze?) the field was rich with flowers, abundant and luxurious with line and diversity.  I’m finding that these “wild plants” have sprung up in the book rack at even the grocery store.  I am wondering how soon it’ll be before coloring books and assortments of coloring tools appear in the dentist’s waiting room.  Soon, I hope.

I’m going to be teaching a coloring book class in the summer. It’s my way of finding a place in the craze.  As someone whose love of art began in childhood, I greet this movement with tremendous optimism. For a long time Modern Art represented arcane artifacts that need the docent’s explanation to render them intelligible to mere mortals.  Though we inhabit the Present we’ve never been presumed to understand Our Time without a decoder ring. Art is something that’s made by your betters and spoken of in whispers.  Just hush and listen to a story about incomprehensible geniuses.

Well, that was then.  This is now.  Society seems to have skipped over something, has leapt over the turnstile, and people are racing toward drawing and design with a vengeance — and it’s purely visceral. They are crashing the gates. Imagery beckons one and all. Give us your tired, your poor, your whatever.  Pull up a chair, feel the pull of the line: start coloring.  Who knows where it leads. Answer your craving for color and line. Indulge in craftsiness and fun.  It’s the modern version of the quilting bee.  You grab a bunch of people, you color, you gab, and everybody’s happy.

I think it’s a logical step from coloring the designs in a book to making your own.  I do believe it. And so I want a piece of the action.  We stand at the threshold of an innovation. If the coloring book should lead to lots of people learning to draw, to an increase in visual reasoning, I want to be at the front lines — pun gloriously intended.

Line has a very special cognitive place in the world of art. And coloring books are all about line.  Before all the “elements of art,”  before technique, before schools of art, before the dazzle of different media, before everything else comes line. Our ancestors in the depths of the cave drew bison with lines. I see the coloring book as the direct descendant of the cave wall.  Call me crazy, I don’t care.  I want to see what can happen when people take the next step — from coloring to draw-it-yourself. It’s a breath and a heartbeat away.  If you’re coloring in one of these books, you’re so close to something marvelous.  You might not know it yet.

Draw lines, young man, many lines; from memory or from nature – it is in this way you will become a good artist.

 

So said Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to young Edgar Degas. The ladies are probably leading this revolution, but lines are no respecter of persons. Come one, come all, come young and old.  Draw lines. You never know where it will lead.

I’ll be teaching at the McLean Project for the Arts this summer.  REGISTRATION is open!

[Above: Albrecht Durer’s Rhinoceros; Edgar Degas, a page of caricatures; Hokusai, sketchbook page of fishes; sample illustration of a lattice (physics); and a section of wall at Lascaux.]

Degas thoughts

I think about Degas a lot.  I feel like he’s my teacher.  He died in 1917 when my father was just a baby, but I still feel that he’s my true teacher because his works were the world of lines that I studied in my youth.  It’s natural, then, that I have strong feelings about his pictures and strong opinions regarding his techniques.
Sometimes you run across artists teaching students how to use pastel as Degas used it. And one thing that I note when I come across these forms of advice is how much they dilute Degas’s actual practice.  In trying to explain Degas, these writers are over-simplifying him.  So for instance when you look at actual Degas pastels, they are very loosely drawn.  He took great liberty in dragging lines of color across forms, and it wasn’t a lack of precision that led him to use lines so broadly since Degas had developed his drawing technique so exquisitely in his youth that he could draw anything he had an interest in drawing.  On the contrary, Degas’s evident carelessness in using broad effects was aimed at getting a great degree of visual incident into his pictures.

The textures of the marks take on a huge importance in his drawings.  Think about a great musician — and Degas knew and portrayed a lot of musicians.  A violinist or cellist at the height of his powers doesn’t just play the notes on the page: he interprets the music and in particular he interprets the sounds coming from his individual instrument.  String players speak of “colors” in the notes they play, and just as the musician listens for the depths of a sonorous tone coming from the full technique of playing so Degas is watching the pastel lines as they form on the page and is using the physical beauty of the materials as a strong element of the subject.

“Drawing is not form, but a way of seeing form.”

Le dessin n’est pas la forme, il est la manière de voir la forme.

Sometimes drawing isn’t even the form; it is the space around forms or the area of the paper that lies between one form and another.  Degas made the spaces between things a factor in the drawing.

His drawings are images of the things he portrays — the bathers, the dancers, the horses and jockeys, etc. but they are also the lines and colors that express visual ideas — the width of a line, its swell and taper, its passage over other lines in the hatching, the combinations of colors and their effects, the suggestion of motion in these lines — and it is not just the motion one might expect of the subject — dancers move, horses and jockeys move — but also our thoughts move, our eyes scan this picture, our feelings are in motion and the gesture of a line can relate to all these qualities.

Artists emulating Degas are always so much less bold than the man himself was. If we want to learn the lesson he teaches, we do well to take his lessons more to heart by striving for both the complexity and the daring that he sought.

The illustration above comes from the Kunstmuseum Basel.

 

When in doubt, draw

I think the best way to learn how to draw is to copy the works of great artists.  The practice of copying is better than an association with any living teacher (as wonderful as that might be) because you can learn aspects of what the great artist knew without having the great artist standing there nagging you.  (Degas does have something of a reputation, deservedly or no, for being a bit of a crank.)

Many, many years ago I began my habit of acquiring art books so that I would have good reproductions of paintings to look at, enjoy, copy, and study.  And now the internet offers an added opportunity to learn that is so amazing that it’s difficult to characterize how revolutionary it really is.

I just learned, for instance, that the National Gallery has updated their website and it’s possible to see enlargements of their paintings now online.  I made my drawing of Edgar Degas’s “Girl in Red,” using the enlargement at NGA’s website.  So I am able to peer right into Degas’s girl’s face in a way that I could never do in front of the actual painting.

I made some fast sketches too because I enjoy just putting down the visual ideas as they occur to me.  It’s fun.  There’s something very freeing about looking at something and taking aim.  Some people go to the Carnival and toss balls at the bucket hoping to win a prize.  I throw pen lines at a notebook, and it’s Carnival all the time.

The image changes in subtle ways.  Your hand goes to different places.  But then too, after a while, you have all these notebooks that you open, and have these faces that look back at you.

I make some drawings from memory too.  I think about the image after I have spent a long time drawing it, and the memory is physical almost more than it’s visual.  I remember the image in my hand.  Sometimes I draw with my non-dominant hand, though I didn’t yesterday.  Of course it’s easier to draw with one’s dominant hand.  My right hand has many more memories than my left hand.

I also think it’s good to draw late at night when you are too weary to fight yourself, when you can be persuaded simply to let a drawing be what it is, when drawing and dream meld together.

Can you imagine a person at the Carnival who just kept throwing balls at the target?  Someone would not give up!  There might be a hundred balls lying about that missed the target, but he was determined to win the prize!

Loved from Afar

There’s a famous Degas drawing, an étude pour Sémiramis, that I have always loved.  It’s made using graphite, watercolor and gouche and lives at the Louvre, I think.  A friend of mine saw the original once in an exhibition.  But I have known it only distantly from books.  Looking through one of those books yesterday, I decided to draw it quickly.  And I discovered to my surprise that I no longer believe he made it from life.  (Please note, that some art historian somewhere has researched the matter and published his opinions definitively whereas this question of mine is totally personal.)

I used to assume that the old masters could do anything.  And they could!  But even in their being able to leap over tall buildings with a single bound they still bent to earth and did things in ways that afterwards might strike us as normal.  And so it was that I now conclude that Degas made his drapery study from a mannekin.  In his drawing she has no head and her lack thereof relates to her having possessed perhaps an uncomely stuffed mannekin sort of head that the artist found uninteresting to study for his painting of Sémiramis!  (Evidently she lacked the pizazz of my Doll with Big Hair.)

So instead he concentrated all his attention on the drapery of a wonderful garment!  I wonder where he got that from?!

And ladies, I ask you, why don’t we all wear dresses like this today?  We could dress like rock stars, we could ….