drawing and bravura, a musical connection

I am back at figure drawing and the joy of the contour. 

No sketchy marks of approximation in this drawing. Just a bold line moving across the page, describing the model. When I wasn't satisfied with the drawing on the left, I started again to the right and addressed those aspects that did not satisfy me in the first. I held the same mindset with the second drawing: let a single line carry the form to completion.

With that thought, the word "bravura" came into my mind and was back in my own 40 year piano playing experience base.

Of course, when learning a new piece of music, there's a time for figuring out the notes and stopping at mistakes and correcting them (the "sketchy marks"), but sometimes a bravura play through is what's needed. Needed because it gives the sense of the bigger picture, the scope of the work, the whole.
Ever since I started art making in 2005, I have considered how art and music are alike. And I've hoped to find connection points between my art making and piano playing so that one could inform the other. With this experience in figure drawing, I have found a connection point. 

When I was learning this piece of music, even a rough play through was exciting! Gershwin Prelude No. 1 B flat major.

figures and Matisse

I am experimenting with figure painting and how I might turn a sketch from life drawing into a painting. This is a new piece and as I painted it, I was thinking of Matisse and his wild use of color and curved lines for figures.

22 x 30 acrylic on BFK

Here is an inspiring video showing many paintings of Henri Matisse. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have!

steps toward amazing

90 second gestures

90 second gestures

Gesture drawings are fast impressions of a pose or a mood, a quick map of the twist and weight of the pose. I think that these drawings are fun. Whimsical. Charming. Gesture drawings are my favorite kind of figure drawings.

15 minute drawing

20 minute drawing

When drawing the longer poses, I still want to capture the energy of the gesture drawing and then correct the shapes and angles of the drawing to match the model's pose. It's hard to know when enough is enough. In the 20 minute drawing, I was especially concerned to get the right alignment of the head to the shoulders and knees. Somehow, that made the model look more like an old fashioned television antenna! I wonder if she gets good reception...

25 minute drawing

I continue to look at ways to vary my mark making. All of these are done with the same piece of charcoal, the trick is to vary the pressure, to use both the side of the stick and the point to get a different character in the line. In the 25 minute drawing above, the model moved her head as I drew so that it sank lower to her chest. I smudged the old position out and drew in the new position as I saw it. These corrections make this one of my favorite drawings.

Figure drawing feels like jazz to me. It's all about improvising and responding to what's going on in the room and in me.

Chick Corea and Gary Burton "Eleanor Rigby."  The melody is well known (especially to Beatles' fans), but when these two musicians wrap themselves around it, amazing!

practice, etudes and figure drawing

Jennifer, 90 second gesture drawings

Practice makes a lot of sense to me. When I was just seven years old, I started a lifelong love affair with piano and practice was required. It's funny, I always enjoyed practicing. I liked the discipline of it. I liked the alone time. I liked figuring things out, spotting the hard parts, making notes along the way to guide me and to make it flow.

As I advanced in my piano skills, my practice pieces changed. At my peak, I was practicing with pieces like this Chopin Etude (Op 10 No. 4). It was a sure way to limber up creaky fingers and get blood moving!

With art, practice looks different from scales, arpeggios, and etudes. Practice in art for me looks like lots of figure drawing and figure painting. Each session seems to limber up my creaky observation skills and to get the blood moving toward interesting, dynamic, and more accurate drawings.

Jennifer, 90 second gesture drawings

Looking at these drawings today, I can see that I need to sort out the proportions of the model's behind. With music, I could slow things down, make notes of better fingering solutions, and isolate the trouble area for more practice. With drawing, I will not be able to slow things down, but I can use more sight-size measuring to increase my accuracy.

Jennifer, 90 second gesture drawings

Figure drawings are the etudes of art practice.

attitude

gesture drawing, 90 seconds

The energy and action of this drawing tells me something: don't work so hard! In 90 seconds, my charcoal and I described the model's pose and attitude (and very long neck!) but nothing is finished. Poor girl, she's missing her face, feet, arms and more. But, somehow, she's there. With attitude. 

I LOVE figure drawing!

"Walk On By" by Diana Krall.

figure it out

"I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle. " ~Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing.

nothing to lose

Sometimes the best results come from those times when I use a surface I don't care about. Since I have nothing to lose anyway (paper I would have trashed if I didn't use it), I experiment and splash and let it rip. In this case, BFK with fine grid of Artist's Tape and a great figure model.It doesn't matter what they tell you, you don't have to stay within the lines!

That reminds me of this old Isuzu commercial. Do you remember it?

30 minute drawing

The rhythm of a figure drawing group sets the tone for the entire session. At Hipbone Studio, Jeff Burke (owner, teacher, facilitator, and sometimes model) selects the music and keeps the time. He also makes sure that the pose offers something for everyone in the 180 degree drawing space.

First the gestures. 90 seconds a piece. Fast paced. Quick and loose. Then a few 5 minute poses. Wow. Five minutes feels like an hour after the 90 second poses. Then a couple of 15 minute poses. And last, the 30 minute poses. Three of them. 

In 30 minutes, it's possible to really develop a drawing. I had a nice spot for this pose and I took my time with it. Just vine charcoal on newsprint, but I can feel the person in the drawing. And I like that!

long term pose

I love using charcoal for figure drawing. It's the perfect, forgiving, medium for drawing, and I can make all kinds of luscious marks with it.

But, when it comes to the 30 minute poses, I also like to experiment with color. Here I did the initial drawing with charcoal and then painted in some of the shapes with watercolor.

Speaking of figures, I am crazy about the work of Dan, Danny, and John McCaw! Have you seen their work? Take a long, lingering look at it here!

And, speaking of lingering, take a linger with Patricia Barber. You will be glad you did!

liars can figure and figures can lie!

"Liars can figure and figures can lie" -- the opening statement from my Statistics professor. I think of that comment every time I walk into a figure drawing session. Not that they are lies, per se, but little exaggerations, inaccuracies, and interpretations of reality are in every figure drawing. I love it. Maybe these little lies make my drawings distinctive from others' work.

Newsprint and charcoal and a great model made for a great afternoon at Hipbone Studio. Exciting things are happening at my monotype class, too. Figure work there, too, and more to think about. Design, figure, story. I love it all!

Speaking of lying, did you happen to catch this TED talk, "How to Spot a Liar" by Pamela Meyer? Watch it and you, too, can become a better LIE-SPOTTER!

End of Figure Drawing Class

front row l to r: Carolyn, Sandra, Eileen
back row: Suzanne, me, Kitty

30 minute pose

Sign up for a figure drawing class for an entire year? You've got to be kidding me! But, the idea of getting a year of instruction and practice in drawing the figure was appealing (kind of challenging, but still appealing).

We started in January. I missed several months because of travel. Others started out with good intentions but fell by the wayside. The top photo shows the most tenacious of the group: these are the ones who made it to the end.

Using a combination of Nicolaides' book "The Natural Way to Draw" and her experiences from figure teacher Nicolas Carone (at Cooper Union), Kitty Wallis taught us much more than how to draw the figure.

She taught us how to see the figure. To feel the weight. To sense the tension. To see the angles and curves. To draw with sensitivity. To stop feeding the ego's need for pretty pictures. And to do the hard work of rigorous practice and draw the figure.

Endings are always bittersweet. This ending is no different. I will miss the weekly meetings and Kitty's instruction and critiques of my drawing. I guess now is the time to put into practice all that I have learned and draw. Draw. Draw more.

There's a saying among artists that if you can draw the figure, you can draw anything. I am still learning, but my final drawing shows that I have come a long way.

Focus

Instead of drawing the entire figure, we selected a portion of the figure and tried to create a dynamic composition in class last night.

How do you decide what interests you most in a pose? The light? The line? The shape? The combination of shapes?

Add to that the admonition to NOT chop off the model at a joint.

Portions of figures = good
Amputated figures = bad

A new challenge to bend my mind around. A new very interesting challenge.

Learning Curve

We added a new element to our figure drawing this week in my class with Kitty Wallis. Watercolor. Three colors: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and black. The object was to use these three colors to indicate form. The lightest shades for the parts of the figure that are closest to me, and darker as the forms move away from me.

This has nothing to do with the actual lighting on the figure, but everything to do with indicating form.

These three photos show my learning curve with this new idea.

The bottom photo shows my first attempt. Yikes! Ten minutes and all I got on the paper was a yellow ochre blob! A very little amount of weak burnt sienna and then PING, the time was up and model moved.

The middle photo shows a little promise in that I got all three colors on the page. My brains seem to get scrambled with the whole idea of ignoring the actual light pattern across the figure and translating distance into color. Ten minutes was over too fast.

The top photo shows my final attempt with this new idea. The pose was longer, too, about 20 minutes, so I had more time to consider the shapes and how the body related to me in terms of distance. Kitty kept telling me that I had the arms drawn too curvy when the pose was more straight. But, I saw the model's curves and droops and folds more than I saw the straight bones beneath.

I look forward to trying this again next week. There is nothing so challenging as drawing the human form, nor anything as rewarding.

Finding Music in a Gesture

Sometimes, when Kitty walks around looking at our drawings, she comments on what is working or not working with what is on our easels. I always value those moments.

A couple of weeks ago, she told me that I had captured what was lyrical about the model's pose. But, I had missed the harder edges that indicated the strength of the bones beneath.

I think that this one minute gesture captures both. Lyrical strength.

I like that.

Figure Drawing and indicating form

This week's model was very good, an actor. His poses seemed to be vignettes that told or implied stories. I enjoyed drawing him.

In these drawings, besides spending an inordinate amount of time getting the figure right, I was attempting to show form by shading the figure darker where the planes moved away from me. It's funny for me to see how little shading I did on these drawings, because at the time I drew them, I felt like they were nearly black with charcoal. But, the figures look right. The poses look like the body parts were placed accurately. I even managed to get the slouch right in the second drawing.

Like most art practice, some things go better than others. It a matter of doing the work. In piano it was scales and chords and arpeggios. Endless practice that was necessary for fluid playing. These drawings are my scales and chords. In the future, I will draw the concerto.

Try, try again!

Part of my struggle with the watercolor sketches is the lack of information from my charcoal drawings. But, something is happening here that I will pursue a little more.

Something new with figures

Last night's figure model was a dream! Kaj-Ann is a dancer and after he left our class, he was catching a red eye flight to New York to dance in an Off-Broadway show. His gestures were lovely, athletic, graceful, dynamic, gravity-defying!

I liked many of the drawings I did last night and wanted to try something new with them. I transferred a few of them to watercolor paper, pulled out my Charles Reid books and splashed a little paint. Not a big success yet, but the idea scratches an itch. I'm going to play with it more.

Weighted Figure

Something new at figure drawing class last week: the weighted figure. Nicolaides explains (in his book The Natural Way to Draw) a technique for indicating volume of the figure. Start with a stick figure, or imagine a metal armature and draw the shape of the pose in simple lines. Then, using the side of the charcoal, add the volume of the shape over the line drawing. I liked the feeling of my drawing with this method. Too often, I feel like I've drawing a beautiful dimensional head that's attached to a paper doll body. This approach helped me see the roundness of the form.

It Figures!

30 second gesture drawing
24 x 18, vine charcoal on newsprint

Self Portrait Contour Drawing

Contoured Katherine
24 x 18, ink on Stonehenge paper

I'm off to drawing class tonight with Kitty Wallis. This class is a one year commitment and I have missed more than I have attended since it restarted in January. Tonight will be my time to get back into the drawing groove. There is so much to learn!

Today I practiced with a contour self-portrait. Contour drawings appeal to me, probably because of the coloring book look. Or, maybe it because of the simplicity.

Once, at Hipbone Studios, I watched an artist do an elegant contour drawing of the figure model. A single line in ink, done with a graceful sweep of the artist's shoulder and wrist and finally hand. It was magic!