Bernini


My drawing from Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Camilla Barbadori, marble sculpture in the State Art Museum in Copenhagen. Here is a link to a photo of the actual piece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_of_Camilla_Barbadoni#/media/File:Buste_af_Camilla_Barbadori._Moder_til_Pave_Urban_VIII_Barberini.jpg

Bernini was a monumentally accomplished sculptor. I have been advised that I must see the Apollo and Daphne, in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_and_Daphne_(Bernini)#/media/File:Apollo_and_Daphne_(Bernini).jpg

Daphne’s prayer to be turned into a tree, to escape the advances of Apollo, is shown in the process of being answered in the affirmative.

Bernini made the portrait bust now in Copenhagen when he was just 23. My experience sketching from it was one of those times when I was really far off in my initial placements of things, but not so far off that I thought I needed to quit the drawing. The forms of the sculpture, and their interrelationship, became more deeply beautiful the more I studied the piece. I wanted to keep going with what I started.

Looking at the photo of the actual sculpture, I see that I completely invented the direction of the gaze.
 
My drawing may have been prohibited from too closely resembling  its model by some early decisions that I made, but I still felt on track to successfully capturing something important that I was experiencing in Bernini’s work. When I am working from life I often have feelings like this. Bridging the gap between the power and beauty of life that I see in the model, and what I have to work with in my drawing, seems like a fundamental part of the drawing process.

Drawing can be a meditative way to learn both about a particular subject of interest, and about myself. The drawing decisions that I make can seem to have a particular character, as I draw. Building on this character can determine the course of the drawing. While perhaps inaccurate to the model, this personally aware expression can end up feeling vibrantly real, well worth investigating. I’m thinking about Rembrandt as I write this, but that’s a subject for another blog post.

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