Eyewitness Account

I got a message from an articulate and witty old friend of mine who had read "Some Useful Exercises."  He included a vivid .memoir of a field trip on which I had taken my drawing class in New York City 40 years ago.  Here is what he wrote, in part:

Thanks for reminding me of the times we spent in the seedy, dim New York bowling alley looking furtively, sketching frantically, alternately trying pencil, then charcoal stick, then paper stub covered in graphite.  Look, remember, sketch, do it again.  Head up, eyes flitting, mouth open, drawing hand floating over the paper.

The gray wash brush studies were especially helpful in capturing fundamental blocks of the bowler's stance: torso, angle of head, angles of upper arms, lower arms, upper legs and lower.  No joints!

You directed us to select some moment in the flow of bowler's movement as the 'essence' of the delivery; for example, the moment the bowler releases the ball - one arm swung up and back, one leg bent and supporting, the other kicked back and poised in the air, the delivery arm thrust out toward the rolling ball.

In a flash it was over.  We'd study our effort in disappointment, wondering what we missed, why the sketch looked dead.  Did we kill it, or did we just not quite grasp how subtle it was and how immature our visual memory and mental extraction of everything at one time?

BOWLING!  OMG, can we really be talking about bowling?  That ponderous, oafish and clumsy pseudo sport!  And to think we were tying to learn the ethereal arts with such earthy stuff.

Little things matter - a lot.



Flat Foot Floogie

A jazz song by Slim Gaillard came out in 1938 called "Flat Foot Floozie with the Floy Floy".  Floy floy was current hepcat slang for some kind of disease.  Of course the lyrics weren't suitable for broadcast radio, so the song was rewritten, by Fats Waller, I believe.  After it was cleaned up for radio play, it made no sense whatever, but Benny Goodman's version became a number one hit that year.  The title had become "Flat Foot Floogie with a Floy Floy."

This year, when I first read about the new flatbed Fuji digital printer, I was reminded.....you know.

This printer has changed my whole attitude toward fine art reproduction.  Without getting technical, this printing machine, with a scanned in image, produces the highest fidelity to the original artwork I have ever seen.  Putting the original painted canvas side by side with the same sized reproduction, one needs a jeweler's loupe to distinguish one from the other.  The varnished print needs no glass, fits a standard frame, and looks like an original painting.

Shown here are the first four paintings, apart from my picture blocks, I have had reproduced.

Point Hernandez  18" X 24" hardboard

deLeon  18" X 24" hardboard

Rosalita  18" X 24" hardboard

Catalina  18" X 24" hardboard

 

Little Girl, Big Painting

The germ for my largest painting to date was an entirely invented figure of a little girl dancing:

Even photographs of people dancing don't always capture the feeling and the rhythm; one has to fake it.  This is where the limitations involved with working only from motion picture frames shows up.

Religious artists have to invent convincing drawings of angels flying or supernatural individuals ascending to heaven.  Myths often require drawing things which couldn't be observed in real life.  Here is an elaborate example:

So I invented a dancing child who conveys the infectious rhythm and abandon of jazz music

Vanderbilt University bought the painted study I made of her; it hangs in the collection of the

Black Cultural Center in the Gillette House:

I built up the rest of the picture around the dancer, furnishing it with a jazz band, some spectators beginning to gather, and more anecdotal incidentals than I would include today: boys running, a dog, baby buggy.

The whole scene was set in the dappled shade of an oak tree in order to further agitate the surface and liven the composition.

Some Useful Exercises

How do you do that?  How do you get on paper those fleeting gestures with a few lines of the pen?

An outfielder watching the action at home plate, hyper alert, poised to dart in any direction to intercept the ball; a musician or dancer, in thrall to the rhythm; a girl on the beach pausing to look at the sole of her foot, checking for tar; two people conversing, one expostulating with hand gestures, the other listening, rapt.

The broad answer is to practice drawing from the live, unposed, unaware model in the world around you.

Specifically, however, there are some techniques to help get started.  When I first realized how important it is to master the skill of rendering motions and attitudes truly, I was a first semester student at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.  Not much social interaction with my fellow students; the average age of a freshman was about 26.  Most were college graduates or veterans on the G.I. Bill.  One was a Rear Admiral with gray in his hair.  I was 17 and looked more like 14.  I ate lunch in my car in the lot behind the school.  Across the street from the parking lot was the playground of a neighborhood elementary school with a tether-ball set up near the fence.  Children playing tether-ball always stood in the same places and repeated the same actions of hitting the ball.  Over and over, the same gestures, even though the players changed.  It gave me time to observe and remember the violent motions, which involved the whole body, long enough to catch them with my pen.  Later, I discovered he same advantage at the bowling alley.

Drawing from any model, posed or not, is an exercise in memory.  The artist looks at the model, memorizing as much as she/he can, then looks at the paper and makes the marks which will represent the model.  Back and forth, model to drawing.

One instructor at the Art Center put us through an exercise which forced us to lengthen the time between observing and drawing: the benches and materials were set up in one studio, while the model was posed in an adjoining room.  The artist could make as many trips next door as she/he wanted, to look at the model, but the drawing equipment had to remain in the studio.  It is an effective method.

After a couple of hours of that, those students who smoked were badly in need of a cigarette.

This kind of hasty drawing usually has extraneous lines, some inaccuracies of proportion and few details, but, at its best, unmistakably conveys something which needs no caption or explanation.