Wednesday 28 July 2010




Course work: Four 45-second gesture sketches.

Four blind contour sketches; I seemed to be having trouble concentrating on the process today. After running repeatedly off the paper on one, I did restart my line at a different location. Having now done ten of these, I shall assume that I have done the “…several…” or “…a few…” that the text mandates, but I think that, as with the gesture sketches, there is enough value in them to continue doing them in parallel with the ongoing work, perhaps doing some interrupted line blind contours. (Parenthetically, I must note that the illustration in the text appears more the gesture of a skilled hand than a single-line contour.)









Reading:



Michael Mattesi Force: The Key to Capturing Life Through Drawing

iUniverse Star, New York, 2004

Pp. 147-173



Personal sketchbook work: Three butternut squash, typically a winter vegetable here, but grown by a gardener friend in summer’s heat.

Continuous line check and log: This was indeed a frustrating exercise. I found that I often tend to overemphasize the size of heads, hands, and feet, while making the anteroposterior dimension of the head too small (a frequent flaw with my drawing, even when I can see what I am doing). Surprisingly, the temptation to look at the paper and see how the drawing was progressing was fairly easy to resist, although I found it difficult to imagine that my pen-point was at the point on the model that I was drawing at the time. What have I gained from this exercise? The knowledge that I can draw fairly short lines and angles with reasonable accuracy while concentrating on the model, and the knowledge that sometimes a less-than-perfect drawing conveys more feeling than a perfect one.



Thinking about artists who used line fluidly, one should certainly add Egon Schiele to the list: many of his drawings look as if they were done “blind.” However, I prefer the great swooping lines that the later Matisse drawings often exhibit: these also appear to have been done with more attention to the model than to the paper.



Total time: 1 hour 11 minutes