Two Fine Points of Drawing

This post is a reminder of a couple of sometimes overlooked niceties of drawing.  One is indicating, here and there, the thickness of something thin.  For illustration I chose a lower eyelid, the wire frame of a pair of glasses and a shirt collar.

 

 

Another is the follow-through/wrap-around of a form which girds another form, such as a sleeve around an arm or a collar around a neck.

Such niceties may be ignored, but the artist should know what he is ignoring.



French Fries and Potato Chips

In learning to cook Asian style, one of the first steps is the proper cutting up of vegetables.  The belief is that more of the vegetables' energy is preserved if they are cut in the direction in which they grow rather than across their path, something like the cutting of french fries as opposed to the cutting of potato chips.

A parallel exists in shading drawings with linear hatching.  This detail of a sketch by Titian illustrates how the hatching describes the forms and at the same time suggests a flow of energy through them.

This is a more elaborate example of the same thing:

Next is a life drawing with the hatching cutting across the upright form of the torso, creating a relatively static impression.



This torso in another life drawing employs hatching which flows up and down the length of the figure.  The result is a felt current of energy along its axis.

No one conveyed more power and animation in his work than Michelangelo.

 

Passion in Portraits Part 3

This concludes the series.  I chose these sitters because there is evidence in each of their visages of the qualities I seek in a subject: ambition, drive, mastery, intensity of purpose, non-conformism, exceptional sensibilities, among others.

Included here besides men in business are a medical doctor, an actor-director, a musician, and a playwright/combat veteran.

 

Passion in Portraits Part 2

During my forties I was supported by selling multiples - limited edition serigraphs and offset reproductions of my artwork.  That freed me to make portraits of sitters of my own choosing.

The pictures presented here are part of a uniform series limited to men, all drawn with a no.2 office pencil on white paper.

In this group, there is an attorney, a stock analyst, a rock star, a college professor and men in various businesses.

What they have in common is fire.

 

Passion in Portraits

During my twenties I got along largely by painting portraits.  My favorite sitters were the ones who possessed a keen intelligence and a deeply felt, piercing passion for something.  The portraits in which I succeeded in capturing that quality were among the best ones.

A student asked me how I learned to do it and all I could think of to answer was: "You can't teach soul."

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Ordinary, Everyday Gestures in Art

Making works of art which feature figures performing familiar, commonplace motions is a largely modern practice.  It is hard to find examples from before the 19th century.

Art works paid for by the state or the church employ mostly Significant Gestures - heroic, dramatic, godly, instructive.

In utilitarian arts such as pottery, a homely movement shows up occasionally.  This drawing of two women getting ready to bathe is on the inside of a drinking bowl made about 470 B.C.

A notable exception is a stone carving from a balustrade atop a temple in Athens.  The woman pauses to remove her sandal in order to humbly approach a goddess barefooted.  It dates from about 406 B.C.

The next example skips ahead in date past the entirety of the Middle Ages to about 1650.  It is a detail from a women's bath fantasy by Cerquozzi.

Rembrandt made many studies of ordinary, everyday gestures, though few were developed into finished paintings.  This drawing of a little boy being brought into the house, against his will, by a woman is from about 1635.

Degas, however, made a career of the practice.  He made fine pictures of people doing such un-heroic things as yawning, scratching, trying on hats, among many others.

New York artist Isabel Bishop made a lifelong occupation of observing and depicting ordinary actions

The first example was done in 1935, the third one in 1965.

Such things can be made into Significant Works of Art.

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From Tipsy to Blotto

1. I moved, no posts for several weeks.  While going through files containing decades' accumulation of sketches from life, I ran across quite a few drawings made in bars..  I was struck by how many of these sketches conveyed the precise degree of inebriation of my subjects.  For the fun of it, here is a sampling:


























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