More Drawing Bits

I’m starting to like the details of this drawing a lot. That’s because details are the easy part! The hard part is wrangling them all into a whole. Before all these learnin’s, I’d just draw until it looked done. Now I have more specific demands for the piece, I want it to do this and that, and NOT do that and this.

In multi-figure compositions, clatter and din are the biggest obstacles. There are all these players that have to be orchestrated into sounding like actual music, and quite frankly, it’s a little like herding cats.

Slow going, but it’s getting there. And the separate bits are shaping up.

Hatchmarks

I have always loved the hell out of the graphite pencil. When I was a kid in the USSR, we did graphite still life drawings as part of the junior art school curriculum. How people complained and moaned through those, and how I totally secretly dug them!

Later, in Canadian high school, I did a graphite figure composition and loved it, but for some reason stopped there. I came back to the pencil in Year Three of art college, when I took up old exercises out of sheer frustration with the reprehensible level of instruction in the college’s Fine Art department. I remember drawing something very tedious with a flower in it, and contemplating not being an artist due to the whole difficulty in earning money that this profession involves for many people. As I was thinking cowardly thoughts about defection, I hatched away for several hours, and suddenly felt a huge and overwhelming sense of peace, a sense of deep and utter rightness. Hatching away at a sheet of paper is the functional specification to which I was built.

It took a few years of flailing hither and yon to accept this truth and act on it, so after art school, I didn’t do much with the pencil until I did my first big, insanely ambitious multi-figure composition in the spring of 2004. The good news is that I have been drawing steadily ever since and show no signs of repentance whatsoever.

Just for fun, I pulled out a close-up of the hatch work on the First Big Drawing, and compared it to the piece I’m working on now. It seems that what I crave today is softness and a kind of smooth elegance, where you can’t see the marks at all. I wonder how this will evolve. I have been contemplating using visible marks again, but in a very different way, using the direction of the strokes to follow the form, rather than dominate as a single-direction slant across the picture.

What + How = Let’s Think About It A Lot

I have been an artist all my life. But ever since immigrating to Canada 18 years ago, and beginning studies at an art college, I have struggled with contemporary art and where I fit into it.

What I think of as contemporary art is not necessarily simply “art being made today”. In the 20th century, a lot of experimentation and redefinition took place, resulting in some art practices that I personally find ridiculous, bewildering, absurd, lazy and downright fraudulent.

It is beyond the scope of this post to make a more specific and concrete critique of contemporary art. The reason I bring it up is to say that as an artist, I had to sit down and figure out what kind of art animal I wanted to be. The thing about being an artist now is that it’s not at all a given as to what that means. Artists in industrial and post-industrial countries have a greater freedom to define their professional arena than they ever did in the past. It’s a great thing, but it is also a thing that can disorient artists at the start of their path, particularly if the artist in question doesn’t fit into the mold of visual art as it has been defined by mainstream art institutions after the 1970s.

What I came up with was this:
1. I don’t agree with the obsolescence model of art, meaning, with the idea that innovation is the most valuable and urgent task of any artist. I am not interested in art that is new, in its format or technical construction. I am interested in art that is unique, rich; art that has something to say; art that gives an eloquent and compelling voice to the way its maker sees the world. That kind of art is new by definition, regardless of whether its technical execution and format is based on a thousand-year-old tradition or on the latest iteration of a computer language. Art doesn’t have to be new. It has to be good.

2. The art I love the most is Western art – the painting, drawing and sculpting traditions of European civilizations. It’s not because I think that other types of art are lesser, or uninteresting. Western art is what I respond to most strongly from my guts, and what gives me the most pleasure as a viewer. It’s also the art of the places I come from. The two facts are probably linked, but in any case, even after seeing all manner of other art, paintings, drawings and sculptures of a realist and figurative nature are my strongest source of creative nourishment. Unfortunately, this source also comes with a package of problems.

In the 1970s, everyone in capitalist countries’ universities woke up to the fact that Western civilization is steeped in sexism, racism, colonialism and class oppression. Since that is the case, the art of this civilization is in many ways shaped by sexism, racism, colonialism and class oppression, because those things shaped the minds of the artists as well as the production and distribution of the artworks.

This critique was excellent, thorough, necessary and long overdue. But the 1970s were a decade of excess, and a lot of people went further than that and concluded that the art of the European civilizations was nothing but sexism, racism, colonialism and class oppression, and on top of it all, like, totally last month and bad-retro, and therefore had no value at all aside from being an instrument of oppression, and neither did the very activities of making paintings or drawings.

I don’t agree. First, I believe that the amount of oppressive crap on the canvas is directly proportional to the degree that the individual artist is an oppressive asshole. A lot of artists within the European traditions were humanist philosophers, consciously working to overcome the evils of their society. Some of those artists were even female, or non-white, or poor! There were also lots of simply decent people, with empathy and conscience that served to mitigate the way the evils of their society shaped their perceptions and beliefs. I believe that some of the things on the canvases are a contribution to healing the souls of the viewers rather than injuring them further, and a powerful, transcendent contribution at that. Western art has problems, but problems are not all it has.

Secondly, I think that the activities of making paintings or drawings are extremely necessary and fantastic, and that people have an intrinsic need to both make them and look at them. I am 600% sure that I am one of those people.

3. Therefore, what “being an artist” means to me is making paintings and drawings that involve human beings, objects and environments as their subjects, using the language of realism to do so.

In some ways, it is a relief to set these parameters, but in others it means I have a lot of work to do not just on the “how” of this kind of artmaking, but on the “what”. As in, what kinds of images do I want to make? As a self-proclaimed heir to the European art tradition, I have to deal with all aspects of that tradition, including the sexism, racism, colonialism and class oppression.

The critical thought that deals with those vile things exists on two levels, social and individual. On the social level, volumes and volumes have been written about them, and lots of intelligent and progressive people have given them time and thought. Even most recently, Cat Minou has marvelled at the way Tintoretto’s colours sing the beauty of the female body – a true female body with a belly and hips and not the starved pre-adolescent we are presently expected to be – and at the same time, the way he dehumanizes the women he portrays because in his pictures, they are nothing but bodies, bodies that don’t even have a response to being raped! Because the other fun part about Western art is how it’s all rape, rape, rape, rape, rape. Daphne, Europa, Danae, Lucretia, Ravished Nymph #1701. Can we have a break from rape, for maybe five minutes? Alright, here is some Annunciation. Sure, Mary was impregnated without her knowledge or consent, but it was to bring forth Jesus! Jesus is worth it! Plus, she is totally cool with the whole thing! And so is Joseph, and he was her husband!

In addition to the macro-critique, though, an individual, personal journey of critical thought is involved in addressing and transcending the crap aspect of Western art – how much the individual artist sees and notices it, and how they go about not making a further contribution to the crap aspect in their own work. In this respect, I think I have a lot of work to do, both with the sexism and the racism.

I’ve read a mountain of feminist art criticism, and being a woman with brains, I’m generally alert to sexist cultural bullshit, but I have also had a lot of formative experiences that conditioned me to accept being devalued and turned into an object as a normal course of events. It’s something I have to be alert about both in daily life and in my image-making.

As for racism, I have a huge, long way to go. Like many white people who have a conscience, I consider racism evil and wrong, don’t want to be part of the problem, and want to be part of the solution. Like many white people, I am also blind to what is called systemic oppression and privilege. Racism permeates every structure of our society and every particle of our culture, to the point where it becomes like water, and therefore invisible to us, the fish. It influences and shapes us as *conditioning*, as brainwashing. For people of colour, that means fighting racism not only outside, but keeping at bay the kind of internalization that causes a person to accept being devalued or turned into an object as a normal course of events. For white people, it means consciously and frequently thinking about racism and the various ways it’s present in the culture, and despite our best intentions, in our perceptions and actions.

People of colour have the issue of race shoved into their face 24/7 and our social environment makes it impossible for them to just be an individual, at any given time, for race to be beside the point and not on the horizon. One of the ways in which racism is evil is this sheer inescapability, the way it has to be dealt with every single time a person of colour opens a book, turns on the TV or leaves the house, let alone applies for a job or a mortgage. As a white person, I can look at Gaugin’s cool use of line and colour, and suspend thinking about how he portrayed Polynesians in patronizing and dehumanizing ways. A person of colour standing next to me at a museum and looking at the same painting can’t suspend, because she is patronized and dehumanized in the exact same way daily, because she is standing in an institution that until recently, denied her entry as anything other than a (naked) model, because she is the one being directly insulted by Gaugin as surely as if he is still alive and leching away at brown teenagers.

White people don’t have to live with this gauntlet or constantly fight against a sick deluge. And since we don’t *have* to think about it, we don’t. Not always because we are assholes. Sometimes, because thinking about race, racism and our daily, ongoing complicity in it, is painful and disturbing, and makes us ashamed, and deserved shame is not a nice feeling and takes emotional resources to confront, and meanwhile there are bills, and work, and errands, and the car broke down, and we have other sources of oppression such as sexism that do get shoved in our face 24/7 and get bumped to the top of the mental queue, and on and on and on…

So even the best-meaning of us have a natural tendency towards obliviousness. But as an artist and as an artist who is white and portrays people, I think it’s urgent for me to think about racism and how to make images that don’t end up being racist. Because I can help what I am conscious of, like not being disrespectful to the people I encounter, but I can’t help unconscious racism, which will most surely show up on the canvas as everything unconscious will, until that unconscious racism is made conscious, addressed and changed through awareness and knowledge.

I asked a media analyst and African-American journalist/blogger Harry Allen about what I can do in this regard. His suggestion was so simple, it made me facepalm: study the analysis on the subject, which is out there in droves. So much so that it’s silly that I haven’t done a lot of reading or studying of the history and writing of Black people, or thought very deeply about what the world is like for people whose skin colour is not the colour favoured by the dictatorship of race. Where I did get thus far is discovering very smart and thought-provoking blogs, such as Harry’s own Media Assasin Blog, Racialicious, Resist Racism and Womanist Musings.

Where it comes to the -isms of evil, the problem baggage of European art, I have a lot of thinking and a lot of *seeing* to do, of looking at the world and at the inside of my own head with eyes that are maybe wiser and more awake than the ones I have been using. In my studies for this past year, I have gotten a good way towards figuring out how to express what I want to express in my paintings and drawings. As to what I want to express, the answer will evolve as I do, but it is important to pose the question so that I can make a conscious choice as to which aspects of my artistic heritage I will give continued life.

Studio Mysteries Answers Questions

The purpose of this blog is in large part educational. Therefore, it cheers my little blogger heart to no end when I look at what search terms people used to get here, and see that some of them are in the form of a question. Here are some answers:

Q. “Is pubic bone below ilium?”

A. Yes. The ilium is the topmost bone in the pelvis. If you put your hands on your waist and move them down until they run into the pelvis, what you will touch is the ilium. Although it’s important to note that in anatomy, terms such as “above” and “below” are relative. The human body is capable of a great range of movement and often positions itself ass over teakettle. This means the artist has to analyze the relationships between major anatomical landmarks for every pose.

Q. “How to draw boobs”

A. How indeed. I suggest, “with lots of enthusiasm” and “by observing how they conform to the underlying form of the rib cage”. Breasts are glands protected by fatty tissue, resting on top of the pectoralis muscles in a bubble of skin. Female breasts have weight and drape over whatever they lie on top of. Kirk Shinmoto has a hilarious, though also crude and slightly awful analogy: think of balloons filled with water and nailed to a barrel.

Conversely, don’t draw breasts as though they are billiard balls. Even artificially augmented breasts are filled with material that is pliable, not rock solid. And solidity is what makes artificially augmented breasts look fake and weird. Breasts are soft. They are meant to be treated – and drawn – with care.

Q. “how rey’s anatomy do skeleton?”

A. In the 3D Anatomy/Ecorche class, we started with constructing a wire armature that would support the weight of the clay and keep the ecorche upright. We sculpted the skeleton on top of that. Because half of the ecorche would be eventually covered with muscle, we made the skeleton on the exposed half very detailed, and on the muscle half, rougher and more general.

Rey stresses that studying the skeleton is the most important part of artistic anatomy. There are a couple of reasons for that.

First, muscles and fatty tissue are very changeable. They look different in every pose, and vary a lot from individual to individual. The skeleton is immutable and though individual variations exist, they are much more subtle.

Secondly, similarly to breasts, muscle and fat tissue drapes. In a way, it has no form of its own, like a dress that assumes its final form only when the wearer puts it on. If you understand the skeleton, you understand how the underlying bones give form to what you see on the surface.

Thirdly, muscles attach to bones. If you figure out where the bones are and what they are doing, all you have to do is connect the origin and insertion points with a tear-drop shape and presto – you have the muscles. (Every muscle has origin and insertion points – think of it as a bridge from point A to point B. When you study muscles, you have to study what points of the skeleton they connect).

Big-ass Drawing, Progress Report

Working like a fiend on my death-by-drawing drawing. Spot the differences: top image is from my previous update, second image is from this afternoon. I feel like I’ve made miles and miles of progress, but on comparison, if anything, the second image seems more busy and scattered than the first. Which would be the opposite of my objective.

Now, where’d I put that drink?

Mapping The Land Of Golf Balls

It’s all very well to learn about bones and muscles from anatomy books, where everybody stands like a soldier at attention and conveniently has no skin. That is the first step in learning artistic anatomy – memorizing what’s where.

The second step is no less challenging, perhaps even more so. The second step involves looking at an actual human body, or even a representation of it in figurative art, and identifying what it is that you are looking at. To me, it feels like reciting the Bible backwards in a foreign language while doing a handstand. Just when you thought you got a handle on it, somebody takes it upon themselves to bend a limb and rotate it as if to mock every diagram ever drawn and labelled, and you have to discover America all over again while the native people point and laugh.

It’s week 8 of the 2D Anatomy course, and we are doing exercises that at first seemed competely impossible: taking a master drawing or sculpture, tracing its outline and drawing the muscles and bones within it. The first few assignments, I would look at a figure, and it would be covered with a myriad of completely random bumps, as if the model was wearing a pelt of golf balls. “Who are you, Random Bump # 317? I demand a valid identification!” I would shout, and the golf balls would dance and undulate as if to mock the very concept of sobriety.

Now it’s a bit better. I can look at the work of even the most beef-happy artist, like Michelangelo or Rodin, and identify at least a couple of bumps. And once you get a handle on a couple of bumps, you can get them to snitch on their neighbours! If bump X is an elbow, there are only so many possibilities as to what bumps Y and Z can possibly be. I correctly triangulated a scapula off a muscle the other day, and it was almost as much fun as ice-cream.

This is Rodin’s Thinker. His forearm is basically a sea creature family reunion, but hah! Science named them all. Score one for Team Darwin.

Actual Creative Project I’m Working On

It’s a really big drawing. About 5 by 4.5 feet. I was going to call it Family And Friends, but now I am thinking of naming it Big-Ass Drawing That Took Forever To Do.

The reason it’s going to take an ice age to finish is that I am doing the whole darn thing in pencil. Although this is the first creative piece I tried starting with a middle tone rubbed into the paper with charcoal. I absolutely fell in love with this technique and the kind of soft, velvety shifts in value you can have with it.

The other new thing I am loving is lost and found edges. I used to separate everything a lot more, and now I’m seeing how clearly you can show something with edges completely dissolved in places. The eye just fills in missing information, and if anything, it looks more convincing than something that is meticulously outlined.

Contemplating The Menu

I will never get tired of saying this: Los Angeles is a feast of art learnin’. My biggest advice to anyone  who is doing a self-directed study like me, is to set limits on how many teachers and how many courses you deal with at a given time. It’s so easy to overdose! I find that having two or three classes per term works great, an immersion level that propels you forward and generates momentum. But any more than that and all the new exercises and skills become much harder to absorb and retain.

Also, put together a teacher team you really like, and don’t let that team get too huge either. Here, especially, there are more fantastic teachers than you can shake a stick at. It’s absolutely painful to edit in any way, but  I think it’s important to focus and mine a select few for all the knowledge they got. Every teacher has a particular set of strengths and methodologies, and if you work with dozens, you will run out of brain room way before you get to benefit from those strengths in any kind of depth.

Looking back over the 5 months I have been studying in LA, I am stunned that it’s only been 5 months. It feels like years! Aside from adapting to a very drastic change in my living circumstances, I also took in an enormous amount of new information. Here are courses I have done so far:

• Head Drawing with Bill Rogers
• Academic Figure Drawing and Tonal Drawing with Rick Morris
• Figure Quick Sketch with Steven Silver
• Analytical Figure Drawing with Kirk Shinmoto
• 3D Anatomy/Ecorche and 2D Anatomy with Rey Bustos
• Still Life Oil Painting with Michael Siegel

I also took a one-day Drapery Workshop with Marshall Vandruff, and did a month of Head Drawing class and Quick Sketch workshops with Sang Bang.

That’s quite a lot in a few months! All on top of trying to obtain a driver’s license in Los Angeles, which is roughly on par with launching a space shuttle, in terms of sheer project magnitude.

So far I have signed up for three courses this fall:

• Analytical Figure Drawing with Rey Bustos
• Painting Fundamentals with Eric Pedersen
• Academic Figure Painting with Grigor Chillingarian

There is a long list of other courses I want to do. But I feel like I need to sit down and really process what I’ve learned so far, before taking on anything more. I have piles and piles of notes, techniques, methods and exercises that haven’t received their due (or their blog post) yet. I don’t want that pile to get any bigger. It’s already an insurance liability.

Tonal Drawing With Rick Morris, 2 Week-Pose, Week 2

Not finished, but this is probably the furthest I have gotten in a class assignment. In the unlikely event I have free time, I would like to finish it – right now the value range in the body is much lighter than the head. Her head dwells in darkness! (Oooh.)

Drawing Stages: Now Slightly Further

In my last Head Drawing post, I talked about the stages of doing a drawing from start to full finish, and how there are generally three. I haven’t learned how to get a drawing All The Way There yet, because in my classes thus far, I run out of time by Stage 2 or so. The last post, however, actually shows a drawing that is some way into Stage 3. So here is my revised list of drawing order:

Stage 1: The Blueprint. A linear drawing sticking down all the elements of the composition. Sometimes it’s called the block-in if only straight lines are used to describe the form, or a lay-in if it’s using curved lines.

Stage 2: The Cow Pattern. Defining light and shadow as 2D shapes.

Stage 3: (Haven’t named it yet, but that’s where the full value range and final finish happen.)

1. Laying in a mid-range flat tone for the shadow shapes.
2. Defining the dark value range by doing the darkest areas – those will have most of the dark range except for the very darkest tones.
3. Defining the darkest value. It’s basically the opposite of the highlight – rather than a whole area, it’s a shadow anti-highlight. Usually, but necessarily it’s in the area of greatest drama. Usually, but not necessarily it’s in the area that receives the most light as well.
   (The area of greatest drama may not have the darkest dark, but it should have the most contrast.) <– that right there is one of THE keys to an eloquent painting or drawing.
4. Defining the lightest value. Should be in the area of greatest interest.
5. To be determined! (Very determined).