Life Studies



I thought I would post a new drawing today. This is a sketchbook page, from around October 2016, with two studies from a life drawing session at Indiana University here in Bloomington. Like the sketch from yesterday, it is drawn in pen. This drawing has clearer form description, and closer resemblance to the model, than the sketch from Copenhagen that I posted yesterday.

Some viewers may find it a better drawing, and others may not. And some may not care to assign this kind of relative worth. But if you do want to think about which you think is better, I think it depends on whether you prefer to see free expression of an artist’s feelings, or a more nuanced presentation of external factors.
 
My usual approach when I am working is to push from the former to the latter. I start with how I am feeling at the time, all the time, to some extent. Then I keep working to include more and more of the external information that I see. Or external information that I imagine, based on memories of things that I have seen. As a process this makes sense to me. You start with acknowledging where you are, and work toward where you want to go.

Working from direct observation of light on form, preferably natural light on living form, is fun and exciting for me. Looking at the world around me is a source of deep fascination. However far I manage to travel, in a day’s work, or in a particular painting, from my inner feelings at the moment, to expressing the wonderful world around me, tends to vary from time to time.

I am thinking about a fascination with the world that I see in that wonderful painting by P.S. KrΓΈyer, that I had revisited yesterday. For me, that is a work that rewards return visits, one of many paintings in museums that I have seen in person and would like to see again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Am I Doing This?

Image
Why Am I Doing This? I have decided to write a blog about art and travel. Things that I like to think about, and talk about, tend to fall under these categories, so it seems to make sense. Why am I doing this? One reason has to do with something that contemporary artist Vincent Desiderio has said about art making in general, that it is a process of self-enlightenment for the artist. Bo Bartlett, another major contemporary artist, with whom I had the good fortune to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, spoke of an idea that I think is similar: making art is a way to wake up. But art serves the viewer, as well as the artist. I hope that this blog, like my artwork, may be interesting and useful to other people. I am working to link this to my Facebook account, which will, I hope, help more people see it. This calm little interface on Blogger that I am now using is more to my taste than is the dense web of information that a Facebook page has to offer. So if I
Read more

Birthday

Image
This is a detail of a painting I am working on. That rectangular shape is the start of a birthay cake. My mother made a cake for me when I was three or four, at the end of the 1960's, or five months into the 1970's. There is a photo of me sitting at the table in the apartment my parents were renting on Montgomery Ave. in Ardmore, with my mother standing nearby and another young person, who I cannot now identify, looking off to the left. The photo is square, the original Instagram, but black and white, not murky 70's color.   In this painting I started painting the cake and the white table cloth in green because I felt like it. I wanted to have my feeling supersede any intrinsic requirements the subject may have presented, for the sake of my ongoing connection to my work. Sometimes when this allowance is made surprising connections are made, or depths are revealed that feel true to the subject. And sometimes the self-satisfying decision can just express my feeling, whic
Read more

William Brymner, Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence

Image
This is a sketch from William Brymner’s painting Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence, from 1905, and a reproduction of the painting.  The piece caught my attention during a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2017. The subject matter was unusual. A girl sits on the sand, or dirt, wearing what I guess was everyday dress in 1905, and holds a stick in front of her dog. Is she restraining the dog from greeting the viewer? Or is she protecting the dog from us? In the painting she has an expression I would describe as angry or frustrated. I find that my sketch adds more sadness. In the original work she faces the viewer more directly. In the painting she is connected to the land by similarity in value and color, and is held down by a horizontal land form in the middle ground. In my sketch I lightened the light on her hat, separating it from its surrounding values and perhaps connecting it more closely to the sky. I like the comma in the title, separating the protago
Read more