talkin’ to myself

Notes to myself, some things to consider

after Matisse

 

for the next life class.

One is to work smaller. I could do a drawing at a comfortable size (apparent size) from anywhere in the room. Go back to the easel, copying my own drawing (that I just made) make the actual pastel at the easel location, enlarging the drawing to whatever size I want, inventing color based on whatever view of the model I have at the easel (even though it’d be a different view).  Down side is having to move back and forth between the two locations (which would be distracting for other participants). Up side: you’d have to rely heavily on memory and invention, good skills to develop.

Another option is working on smaller versions through the whole session, having less investment in a specific image. (No more larger than life size.)  Spread out the risk, less stress.  If one drawing turns out to be particularly good, you could enlarge it at home. You could, after you’ve done all you can in the pastel, also gather more information using another drawing that you make with pen in a notebook.  Advantage is that you stay put.

after Ingres

 

Another option is that you can be all que sera about it. If you get the back of the model’s head, draw the back of the model’s head. Let Fate decide. Stay with the larger format, do everything you were doing before, accept whatever you see from your easel’s location. Fully accept the challenge of the uncertainty.

after Degas

 

Or you could stand holding a notebook (no easel) and work in spaces between other participants’ easels using oil pastel (less messy than dry pastel). Down side: how much space is there, really, between easels?

Invest in one drawing — biggish, though maybe not larger than life size — or not very much larger. You could spend a lot of the time on the drawing as a whole. Working in vine charcoal to get the form right; then do pastel from that point forward.  Would be a way of thinking about the large lines of the drawing (like certain Matisse drawings), using erasure as an effect.  I’m sort of leaning toward this choice.  Thinking of Diebenkorn’s riff on Ingres. However, this option assumes you have a good pose.

after Ingres, imitating Diebenkorn

Also, giving more attention to drawing (at the outset) means being less spontaneous than what I was being before. The recklessness prompted me to make bolder use of pastel as a medium, but maybe it’s time to move toward getting a core for the motif.  Less about color, more about line.

(Paintings from life classes long ago.)

What to do, what to do ….

UPDATE: just saw this on twitter and am thinking now that if I put my own background behind the model (imaginatively) it matters less what the pose is.  So there’s another possibility.

Albert Herter “Woman with Red Hair,” 1894 detail

 

Owning It

I want to own an Ingres drawing, but they’re all already mostly spoken for and a bit out of my league financially those that are still floating about.

So I copy.

And then you own something.  Your thoughts about it that you made with your pencil and with your mind!

Art Quote du Jour

Le dessin est la probité de l’art.

Dessiner ne veut pas dire simplement reproduire des contours; le dessin ne consiste pas seulement dans le trait: le dessin c’est encore l’expression, la forme intérieure, le plan, le modelé.  Voyez ce qui reste après cela!  … Si j’avais une enseigne à mettre au-dessus ma porte, j’écrirais: Ecole de Dessin et je suis sûr que je ferais des peintres.

Drawing is the integrity of art.

Drawing does not mean simply reproducing contours.  Drawing does not reside solely in line;  drawing is also the expression, the interior form, the composition, the modeling.  Show me what’s left after that!  If I put a sign above my door, it would say Drawing School; and be sure, I would produce painters.

                                                                                                           — Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Highlights of Oh Nine

I’ll begin my survey with the big fishies of my secret Washington DC studio.

Here’s some of their friends.

A sea shell (hold it up to your ear and you can hear koi talking).

Another year of hero worship, lovin’ the greatest guy ever to hold the pencil — J.A.D. Ingres.

Hanging out at the easel with my pal, Alice the Cat.

Remembering catapillars climbing up children.

Me, the morning that I learned our hamster was a mother ….

And courtesy of Benedicte, the mother and children themselves ….

On which occasion, upon learning the number of hamsters-in-progress, I was heard to utter “oh nine!”

Some “here’s looking at you, kid.”

Blanca the Hamster gets a new friend, Pompi the Chinese Silky Chicken (thanks again to Benedicte as well as to Gabrielle Bryden owner of Pompi and author of their saga).

Then, there was also my moment in the sun, for which I thank the North Koreans (sort of, I guess).

More big fishies at the secret studio.

Some fun with clouds.

And here’s hoping that 2010 will be a time-path to some good stuff for you and yours.

It is hard to see her face

The definition of art is a somewhat amorphous thing.  Recently I chided someone for identifying “art” with whatever will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me.  I suggested that some things will have these qualities and yet will decidedly not be art.  Driving in rush hour, doing taxes, taking a standardized test, getting a root canal — all are challenging.  I guarantee the root canal will make you uncomfortable.  Perhaps a dentist will argue that root canals are art.  But, for goodness sake, let’s let the dentist make the argument.  Artists don’t have to do it for them.

What is art?  In the era when drawing doesn’t count, art has morphed into namelessness.  Everyone is an artist now.  Art is whatever you want it to be.  And still life beckons.

Let me suggest that art’s definition be reserved for the hard stuff.  Let an old master’s skill be an ingredient.  Better that we be striving toward it than grinning and slapping our own backs in self-congratulation. 

Life still beckons.  I say art is a mystery, and I will pursue it.  Better to ever pursue and never reach than to cheapen the journey with goo-gaws and touristy nick-nacks.  Can I persuade you to share in the longing?

Okay, I don’t usually rant.  But the ubiquitously recited litany that art will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me — it’s so “me, me,me”!  When did we lose our bearings?  When did we leave nature aside?  When did we lose our capacity to see inside the veil?

I copied Ingres (who knew what art is) and left the face blank.  I think she makes a nice metaphor for Art.  Art is she whose face is hard to see, the mystery that beckons, the life that needs transcription, a line suspended in air, a thought held in a breath, a definition that defies.

Loopy Lines

My kid wanted a drawing lesson today so I suggested she do what the old masters did when they were pups: copy.  Asked what she wanted to copy, she said she wanted to draw  “an old renaissance picture with people in fancy clothes.”  So I gave her a catalog from the Met, and she ended up choosing Ingres’s fabulous portrait of the Princesse de Broglie. 

She had some questions afterwards about aspects of her drawing so to answer them I made a super-fast “copy” of my own, the above.   I’m glad I can teach my kid to draw because drawing becomes one more tool a person uses for thinking about things.  Whether one becomes an artist or not is irrelevant.  When you know how to draw, you see things in a new way.  Moreover, drawing is a useful skill.  You can design all manner of things once you know how to imitate the image you hold in your mind.

Only once did a teacher show me something in art by making a drawing of it herself.  That was my high school art teacher Karol Thompson.  In college and ever after, every question one asked was answered with talk. 

I have the utmost respect for anyone who will answer a question by picking up the pencil and “telling” in lines and shades.  My daughter’s question was very focused and my answer — my loopy answer — was equally quick and free.  And that’s the way I like it.

All Dressed Up

Whenever I hear someone describe an artist’s work as “traditional” I always want to ask “which one?”  Which tradition do you mean?  (There are so many.)  The assumption in contemporary Western art is sometimes over-broad — so much that anything depicted in a manner that’s recognizable is “traditional.”  Yet within the most comprehensive reaches of the European inspired art, there are innumerable avenues for visual thought to travel.  Painting can be realistic, or “painterly,” or linear without being realistic.  It can portray everyday life, or it can portray very extraordinary, fanciful and imaginary themes.  It can be landscape, portrait, still life, mythological painting, and several genres besides, that don’t even have names.  It can resemble other artists of earlier times, and yet be very much its own thing — as Edouard Manet looks very 19th century French to us now, yet was a great aficionado of Diego Velasquez and other artists of the Spanish 17th century.

Skill is super important, but skill alone doesn’t make art.  An artist can be skillful and find himself or herself feeling needy.  The skill has to be put into something.   And the something is more than just subject matter — though that’s part of it — the something is an idea, an impulse, a meaning whose form needs to be seen.  When words fail, visual art steps in.  But it needs to have something to say.

When an artist is all dressed up with nowhere to go, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, though.  It just means you have a journey ahead of you.

[Top of the post:  the author’s pen and ink drawing after an Ingres figure — made in a very un-Ingrist way.]