6 posts tagged “drawing”

I invested in a set of gray ink pens before heading out, and finally did some doodles during the rainy weekend (and last week...). The armless/headless Greek sculpture lives in Kansas City- a long way from the Mediterranean and a long when as well. I took picts of it last year and drew from the laptop. The torso gets a bit long on the front view, but that's the fun of working in pen- there's no going back.
The pencil drawings are from June/July.
The two below are from a series of picts experimenting with poses for the Orpheus & Eurydice commission. Those picts are back in SLC this trip out, buried in a box. These were fun to work out, as they are fairly intellectual works: intellectual drawings may sound a bit odd, but these pieces are more about the background knowledge of structure and exploring that knowledge.
We had a small break in the weather on Friday afternoon and I took the truck up over the hill and brought down 4 trees with the chainsaw, sectioned them out, piled them in the old ranch truck, unloaded them, split them, and stacked them. That should keep the cold out for a while; it hasn't snowed since last week, but the nights are getting down into the 30s.
 

I was going through some ancient art boxes and found photos of a wonderful male model who posed for my Orpheus and Eurydice commission. Now each day I am doing a warm-up drawing from Robert Beverly-Hale's text, then creating a structural drawing. I leave for DC tomorrow, so I'll have to pick this up again next week.

These were the last few drawings of an hours worth of 5 minute drawings. In saving back the ones that come together it can get misleading if I look back through my saved sketches. It seems as though I can knock out a good drawing 8/10 times, when I've already culled 90% of the work. Which inverts the percentage, and then some. But getting one good 5 minute drawing out of an hours worth of 5 minute poses may just be what it takes to get a good drawing, or even a good aspect of a part of a drawing.

Yellow Cat, aka MrSir, aka Monarch of Cmonster sat for his portraits last week. Elizabeth's birthday was fast approaching, and the Sir and I and Cmonster (Carmine the German Shepherd) had come up with nothing so far. The Sir wanted to give her something personal she could bring to work- other than his hair on her dresses- we brainstormed a bit and Carmine wondered what was wrong with sending her out the door with some nice hair anyway...our brainstorming sessions are a low-wattage affair, so we went to our separate tasks of coughing up hairballs, barking at squirrels, excessive napping, and whatever it is the Sir and Cmonster keep busy with. Later in the week MrSir followed me around the house insistently batting at my legs and waving his paws from the top of the stairs and communicating with big silent meows: I knew he had thought of something important. He hopped up on the laptop keys and sat on the camera and looked out the window, then waved a paw at my hands as I typed along, then busied himself with smacking pencils off the desk. Then he hopped down, swept close enough to Carmine to make her shrink up and look away, then paraded from the room; knowing his idea was the only one worth a damn.
It was a good idea, for a cat, good enough that I could pass it off as my own.

While in Montana I drew from "drawings from the masters"- from one of Robert Beverly Hale's texts. These are about finding anatomical structure- where a tendon inserts near a joint, how the shoulder girdle moves and layered muscles expose- they are exercises in drawing by knowledge first and observation second.
Hale explains that many of the original drawings are done without models- there are so many subtle cues of gestural weight and balance, foreshortening- and that there is no one alive today who has their kind of ability. "They" being, not the elder race from Atlantis, but rather everyday fellahs like Michelangelo, Raphael, Tintonetto, and Rubens (in this group of drawings).  

I've been looking at Robert Berverly Hale's vid series from the 1980's at the Art Student League, and picked up a few of his books on drawing from the Masters, and have wound down each day by knocking out a few studies. It is one thing to draw from a 2-D drawing of the masters with Mr. Hale's help, and quite another to draw from life. Since models are scarce I'm working from my sculpture of Elizabeth, pushing the intellectual process a bit with anchor points, direction lines, major masses, to refine and adjust my understanding of anatomy in relation to creating a work with intuitive flow.