January 25 Drawings

Above is last nights drawing from the weekly Studio Session. The photograph isn't the best, no sun here in MA today. I will take another photograph when we do get some sun as I like this drawing and want a better image of it.

We had quite a crowd last night which considering how cold it was (single digits) outside I found surprising. But inside it was warm, which I am sure the model was grateful for. With this drawing I concentrated on finishing the face and body of the model then filled in some details esp. around her head but left some other areas more sketchy. The side of the couch which I have been detailing I left only in outline this week, the cloth drapes at the far end of the couch I just sketched in. I have been told many times by my instructors that what makes Art individual is what an artist leaves out of a drawing or painting. So I have decided that drawing all the details of what I see (well I don't actually do that though I have been putting in more than I think I need) isn't that important.

While in Chicago over the holidays my Sister and I visited the Chicago Art Institute and after checking out the Fiber Exhibit in the new American wing we viewed the Gray Collection. I didn't realize at the time that the show would only be up until Jan 2. If I had I might have steered us there first and it was I really only looked at about half of the drawings in the exhibit. I "saw" the rest, but by then my brain was on overload and I wasn't really absorbing what I was seeing.  Oh well at least we did catch the exhibit while it was on view.

The drawings the Gray's collected are amazing and reflect seven centuries of art, from Picasso to several Renaissance artists. The one thing many of these drawings had in common was the purity of line used by the artists. I am not that good, I am not yet at the point where I can draw one line and have it delineate the shape and form of a human body. Picasso was amazingly good at reducing his drawings to a few lines.

Don't get me wrong I don't want to draw like Picasso, I want to draw like me. In fact I sometimes find his drawings too spare. An artists whose drawings I really admire is Jean A. D. Ingres. He is probably more well know as a painter but his family portraits done with pencil are amazing. You can see some of his family drawings HERE, and there are books of his drawings. At first glance you think he included a lot of detail in his drawings, but look again and you will realize that often only the faces and some of the clothes are really shaded and detailed. The rest is done with a few deliberate lines. A goal for me is to learn how to use more line and more general shading in some areas of my drawings. I have been developing my skills, now I feel I need to develop a style.

This next image is my 2nd Zentangle finished. It is actually a grouping of 4 squares all originally having the same "String" placed on the square only rotated or mirrored. After finishing the first square I began to find the strings too limiting so ended up drawing/filling in other areas and ignoring them. This has been a fun exercise and I am working on another, which is sort of taking on a life of its own. I am not sure how many more of these I will do. The results can be interesting but I think I find them a bit too unpredictable for my tastes. I am finding that with pen and ink work a certain amount of planing makes me more comfortable.

Enough for today. Please feel free to comment or ask questions. Hoping everyone is staying warm and dry.