Archive for the ‘drawing’ Category

Flat line

A drawing done in pencil on textured paper  at the Frederick drawing group. I wasn’t happy with the pose at first. The model’s head, arms, chest, and thighs were lined up horizontally and seemed quite static and unexpressive. But I found that the pose’s simplicity allowed me to focus on details like the soft shadows  and on each finger. Something about the angularity of the hand in contrast with the sensuality and roundness of the breast and thighs makes it look like it is from a different planet, but then maybe hands are.

Drawing Mary

More figure drawing from Frederick. It seems that I am settling on a technique that I can apply to future figure drawing. For the quick 5-minute poses, like the one on the right, I use an ink pen. Using ink forces you to think fast, since every mark you make is permanent and cannot be erased. Then for the long hour poses, like the one on the left, I use a graphite or charcoal pencil and use a lot of cross hatching to build up the shadow areas. Cross hatching is slow but allows you to change your mind as you work. It is a little bit like sculpting, I think, chipping away at the paper, until the form is revealed.

Figure Drawing

More figure drawing with the open figure drawing studio in Frederick. The model was new, at least to me, but seemed to understand that modeling is more than just sitting still but about finding a pose that can challenge the artist. I found that small gestures this model made, like  the arm wrapped  hugging tightly around the shoulders or the way the foot bent backwards on the stool, made each pose unique. I started with these areas and slowly worked out from there.

Back to the Drawing Board

I went back to figure drawing last night at the weekly drawing group that meets in Frederick, MD. Clayton Myer (www.claytonmyer.com) was the model. There was a plastic skull laying around the studio and we posed him in this contemplation of age and death. While we drew, Clayton regaled us with stories of his acting career and the time he played a boxer in an indie film.

Drawing on the Imagination

This is the result of a class I am taking called “Abstract Representation” taught by Jordan Bruns at the Yellow Barn Studio in Glen Echo, MD. Jordan is a new teacher at the school and maintains a studio there as well. I had been fascinated by his large swirling drawings and paintings that start with random marks or paint drippings but then turn into vast ancient ruins that don’t exactly obey the laws of gravity but seem real enough to get lost in. I started this work by covering a large sheet of heavy paper with a coating of powdered graphite. All the marks on it were made by erasing away the graphite to the white of the paper. I then went back in with more powdered graphite applied with a Q-tip. Somewhere along the way the random markings I made begin to turn into images–buildings,trees and clouds. Eventually this drawing coalesced into a scene of  a strange city at night. It is interesting how this process works; you start with seemingly nonobjective marks on paper and then suddenly memories and experiences start to come up. It seems the trick is to wait until the right image comes along, the one that won’t minimize the abstract power of the work but harmonize with it.

Bare branches

When I look out the window in the early morning from our second-story bedroom, this is what I see. Lots of bare branches. There is a row of trees several blocks away that forms a backdrop with a few lone trees closer up. These charcoal drawings are made up in the studio, not drawn from life..

An unusually narrow viewpoint

A head and shoulders portrait drawn from life. After a few quick 3-5 minute poses the model takes a pose for the rest of the session, often an hour and a half. That gives a lot of time for erasing and correcting the drawing but also a lot of time to overwork the thing. I basically knew when I started this that I wanted to focus on the model’s head. Specifically the shape of the head interested me. The model has a military background and the bearing and  close cropped hair that goes with that. But he also is an devotee of yoga, which I thought gives him a sense of peaceful strength. I saw this long narrow paper in pads at the art supply store. It forces you to think a little different about the figure because so much of it will be cropped off. But in some ways it is easier. Anything you do on it is going to be interesting.

Frederick Figure Drawing

One of the areas I am focusing more on recently is figure drawing. On Tuesday nights I join a group of artists in downtown Frederick while my wife attends classes at nearby Hood College. It is a great atmosphere in a large, classic unfinished attic in a turn-of-the-century building. I feel somewhat that I have been transported a century ago to Paris and that we are all wild bohemians; Picasso or Matisse could be joining us at any minute. Figure drawing is challenging because once you try for a likeness your have to keep your proportions somewhat accurate throughout the entire drawing. I taped two pieces of paper together for this drawing. It is much easier to get the feel of the entire figure when you can freely move you hand around in large gestures.

Larger than life

After finishing a drawing I tape it to the wall of my studio to let it sit around for a while. It takes a while for the true worth of a work to come through. You have to forget the reasons you originally chose to do it and let is stand on its own right. One thing I found interesting about this drawing and  on one thing you can’t see on this website is the size of it. I drew this self-portrait on large paper and the head is about 50% larger than mine is in real life. (Insert joke about my big head here.) I noticed that almost all of the drawings I felt worthy of keeping were also larger than life by about the same percentage. Somehow this takes the object out of the realm of reality and gives it a meditative quality, as if it looms closer to you and floats some where off the wall. Something like that.  An idea worth looking into.

A bunch of bags

Okay you are probably thinking, enough of these charcoal renderings of every day objects. It was fun to draw something with so many nooks and crannies, like painting drapery folds in classic figure paintings must have been. It’s not like you can really get them wrong and there are lots of shadows and highlights to play with. Maybe this work is a little retro since most paper bags have advertising messages all over them. I remember many years ago that I heard that if you gave your full attention to something its true beauty would shine through, so I tried that on a paper bag and it worked. The bag began to glow like some burnished metal.  This drawing is in memory of that experience. After finishing this drawing, I thought about trying to draw a picture of a paper bag on a paper bag. Now how ironic would that have been? But it didn’t really work and I threw it out.