from life drawing last week, here’s natasha. i suppose i should have paid more attention to the size of her foot, but i was clearly concentrating elsewhere. oh well. let’s see what i do this week.
17 Oct 2009 | 10:05 am | art |
i just got back from another few-week trip to outback central australia. what fantastic landscape! it was the first time i felt compelled to draw the landscape. when leading a trip with several workerbees however, there is very little time to do things outside of work. we did spend a fair bit of time drinking beer and creating new constellations, but at the end of each day my eyes were way too tired to really *see* and draw. so i have very few sketches to share.
here are three sketches. one is a really rough sketch of uluru just before it rained (i was too busy smiling, feeling super lucky, and taking photographs to draw the waterfalls). the color one is of a tiny part of Kata Tjuta, my first time using my new color pastels that i bought specifically for the Red Center. both of these i drew while sitting on top of our troopy (a tall 4wd). the last one is a sketch of two of my workerbees relaxing at the end of the day. i was quite pleased with the last one, having not done trees from life in >15 yrs. without further ado.
24 Sep 2009 | 9:43 am | art | No comments
” … the world is my concern only insofar as I have a certain debt and obligation so to speak – because I have been wandering about this world these thirty years – to leave a certain something in memory of me behind, drawings or paintings, out of gratitude – not made in order to gratify some fashion or other but to express an honest human feeling. That work, then, is my objective …” ~ van Gogh, letter #309, summer 1883
i received a very nice compliment about this 20-”minuter” from life drawing class tonight. thanks john.
some 10 minute sketches from life drawing class tonight.
2 Sep 2009 | 8:44 pm | art | No comments
… i present to you heston blumenthal, a present for my fiance, to match gordon. now sweetpea you can hang them side by side in your office.
heston has a really cool face. nothing is symmetric, not only is nothing symmetric, his nose is totally off centre and lips are crooked. so much fun to draw! the hardest part for me was the reflected light on the left side of his face.
i also had a hard time at first because i didn’t know his personality at all. i’ve been reading all these portraiture books lately and there is quite a bit of discussion about whether or not the artist needs to know the personality of the sitter in order to create an ‘accurate likeness’. well, theoretically i think you shouldn’t need to know your sitter (at least at this point in my life i believe that), but in practice i found it extremely difficult to draw his expression until i watched the first 35 seconds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvAJeJ5B5Ms , and then i got it. the quirky science chef. his personality reminds me of a bizarre article i read once about a restaurant chef who made everything using edible ink in an inkjet printer – super strange and i can’t believe that printed paper would taste as good as peking duck. but then again, i suppose if i had a money tree in my back yard, i’d like to see what it tastes like, and so i would book a table for an evening meal. ‘nuf said.
this portrait of heston was certainly done for the patron. my adventure with gordon ramsay (below) was fun and i did it for me, but this style isn’t quite what i am looking for. i’m much more drawn to the loose wispy broad stroke style like my “after picasso” or the “after van dyck” (both below). but, if i could make a living doing commissioned portraits in the style of heston and gordon, would i ?? definitely.
30 Aug 2009 | 11:29 pm | art | No comments
i’m taking this life drawing class. well, it’s more of a student study group than a class. the other students ask me “are you a first-year student, i haven’t seen you around before” and i reply, “no, i’m just a wannabe student”
the class is pretty interesting. the standard set is that we do 5-6 really quick 3-5 minute sketches to warm up, then a few 10-20 min sketches, then one or two 30-60 min drawing. a lot of the students are doing it just to ‘build their portfolio’ so they have more to show the teachers when they get assessed at the end of the year. i think that’s a shame, but not everyone absolutely loves what they do i suppose. that being said, i can’t say exactly why i’m doing it. i suppose one reason is that i absolutely love drawing and any excuse to get into a room where someone will sit still and let me draw the intracacies of their elbow is the highlight of my week.
i haven’t been too happy with any of my figure drawings, which is why i haven’t posted any of them. maybe i’ll try for simple portraits tonight (as i love), instead of the whole body, which i was finding super frustrating! i’ll post something again soon, i promise!
5 Aug 2009 | 9:32 am | art | No comments
so i’ve been working on some very big portraits, and i mean big.
(after Picasso)
it’s so much fun to work on such large paper! and in many cases, i still can’t keep the portrait within the bounds of the paper. i bought a cheapo pad of recycled brown paper A1 size (~23×33 inches) and was so excited about it, i came home and did about 10 sketches in an hour. here are a few – testing the size of the paper and my new tinted charcoal pencils …
(after rembrandt)
(after rembrandt)
this is after a picture i took of a woman in indonesia.
in the upper two rembrandts, i was really trying to fill the page with just their faces. for the indonesian woman, i started with the idea of doing many trials on the same piece of paper then the main portrait on the next piece, but i just kept going with the first trial. in some sense, i still see it as a trial. i really have to learn how to do necks.
we’re going to Malaysia tomorrow for nearly two weeks. i’m bringing two sketchbooks, many pencils and several of these tinted charcoal pencils. i’m so excited!!
6 Jul 2009 | 10:45 pm | art | No comments
i saw my art advisor yesterday for a few minutes and while we were talking, i confessed that i had seen the exhibit in the other part of the art school and completely didn’t understand it. there were many life-size photos of the same guy standing front on with an ‘absent’ look on his face. in each photo, he was wearing some type of construction worker outfit. many of the photos had been cut so that they were presented on two panels, or three. sometimes one of the halves (or thirds) was laying on its side. near these photos, which presumably had been arranged according to someone’s logic, there were three old tv sets showing action-shots of people christmas shopping, close up on KFC, and other such scenes. during all these activities, all the people had that ‘absent’ look on their face. there were two groups of 3 tvs dispersed amongst the portraits of the ‘absent’ construction worker. my art advisor said he thought it was supposed to be a study of the ‘mundane’ things in life, and that it was hard to capture ‘mundane’ with art.
so i spent the better part of today meditating on this idea – how to capture mundane with art (in a way that was more meaningful to me) – and this is what i came up with.
you might recognize this as a copy of Van Dyck, yes, the same one i said i liked so much that i might just do it again. the pencil sketch below is about 5×7 inches and done in ~10 min. this one in color is 22×30 inches and took about an hour. it’s the largest portrait i’ve done yet and i think is one of my favorites.
2 Jul 2009 | 7:41 pm | art | No comments
i finished sirius black a while ago, or so it seems, and haven’t found my new subject yet for the next major essencing (i’d like to make that a new word). i went to the portrait gallery last weekend, a wonderful place for someone like me to get lost for several hours, but i went specifically to see the Vanity Fair exhibit. i have to say, it was a great exhibit, but there were so many people, you couldn’t spend nearly as much time with the portraits up close as i had would have liked. so i sadly left the exhibit with the same number of blank pages in my sketch book. but i did find a few other portraits there that i would like to study. that will be the subject of a future post.
in the meantime, i have however stumbled upon a few other enticing portraits in other places. this was part of a painting underneath another painting, both by this Aussie artist Frederick McCubbin. a local museum magazine had a spin on him and apparently he used to re-use his canvasses. i thought the grace with which he captured the face of the young girl was quite striking. i can’t say that my 10-minute study did it justice, and i seem to have added several years to her face. i suppose i like this one more because of the memory i have of reading the article and seeing for the first time the xray of what can lie underneath a painting.
this one i *really* like. this is another 10-minute study of a Van Dyck – one of his “studies of an old man” or something like this. if i could draw like this all the time, i think i would. in fact, i liked doing it so much, i just might do it again.
and this is yet another 10-minute study of a Picasso, well, just the face in a much larger sketch of a man slouching in a chair. i just love his seemingly-unexplainable expression that we all know so well of “i’m tired, what do you want from me, do i *really* have to??” and the beauty of it is that he was able to use so few marks to get the point across ! each mark has a precise meaning.
this post reminds me that i promised myself i would repeat a copy of da vinci’s study of the angel from the virgin on the rocks after the art classes with the point of trying to use that as a measure of whether it was worth it for me to take art classes at all. i know that i can SEE differently now, and i know that i am observing differently now, and i know that i’m always super excited to get home to my easel to continue my current essencing, but do i really feel that my skill has improved? i think it’s very difficult to judge “skill” in terms of art and am not sure how its done at all. different art speaks to different people in different amounts, so how can i with only one set of eyes and experiences judge someone else’s art accurately? this in fact makes me really appreciate art teachers even more. (my art advisor gave me a frame for gordon this morning, what a nice guy! he has a solo show in august in town, yea! )
i did this much more quickly than i did gordon and i think it shows. overall, i think it’s pretty good – he’s certainly screaming rather than yawning, but it’s missing that sparkle and i can’t figure out what exactly and i guess you could say i gave up. also, i’m still definitely learning, esp hair and hands – his fingers were really crumpled and arthritic-looking in the picture, but my rendition of them is, well, as my boyfriend says, ET-like. i suppose i should add that i got the original picture of him from the movie by taking a (low-resolution) screen shot of the newspaper article on the crazy-bus, so it was a pretty tough model to work with. so, while i liked the concept more than the outcome, without further ado, here he is.
20 Jun 2009 | 4:47 pm | art | No comments
about a week ago, i opened up my blog here to be searchable by google. since then, i’ve had several ’strangers’ post comments of appreciatory nature. i’m so glad that people are finding this stuff useful and helpful and, perhaps even a few of them like my art :) i’ll keep the posts going as long as i keep drawing!
the tuesday night art class just ended tonight. we did an interesting self-portrait. the parts i found most interesting were to think about relative scale and overall composure of the piece. i took the view in the mirror purposefully at an angle to get a bit of the back wall for perspective and since the mirror was so small, the hands were much larger than the face. but also, the hands were drawing the self portrait that was much larger than life (lips bigger than fingers). at any rate, it was fun!
best of all, what i got out of this tues night class was a new drawing friend. she and i already have a ‘date’ to go to the gallery here in town and draw some of the portraits on display :) how exciting! no doubt i’ll be posting some of those on here! the only downside is that the gallery will restrict us to pencil-only, so no charcoal. but pencils can be lots of fun too.
to all you onlookers, thanks and come by any time !