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House of Two Urns
In Chicago we stayed at a B&B called the House of Two Urns. I sketched this view of the sitting room during the inevitable fit of insomnia.
The B&B was filled with art, but not kitschy Victorian art. The owners, Kapra Fleming and Miguel Lopez Lemus, are artists, and have hung their own art throughout the B&B, plus original paintings, drawings, and photos of and by their friends and fellow artists.
This is contemporary art, and while some of it is lyrical and lovely, some of it does not evoke warm and fuzzy feelings. Some of it is quite challenging, emotionally and intellectually. But that is why I chose this B&B, and we were not disappointed.
All that playing with charcoal paid off when I drew this portrait. It came together nicely.
We draw the same model in the same pose for about 4 20-minutes blocks of time. During the last block of time, Felicia talked about looking at your drawing and taking away what was non-essential. So I stepped back and really looked at my drawing, and used the kneaded eraser to give more form to areas and shape the strong light and highlights.
I feel like I am making some progress!
Related Articles
- Drawing the portrait: week one and two (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
- Drawing the portrait: Week 3 (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
- Drawing the portrait: Week 4 (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
- Winter of the portrait (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
I’ve been struggling to control my charcoal pencils. I keep making scratchy liney-lines, when what I want is a soft, rich, even tone. So I got out a piece of smooth newsprint and just doodled, trying to gain some control.
I’m not used to this technique. The pencil is whittled (I use a box cutter), stripping away the outer layer of wood, and leaving a slender charcoal twig about an inch and a half long. Then one side of that fragile stick of charcoal is flattened on a sanding block. This gives it a wide surface to make soft tone or expressive line.
But you have to have the right touch, and be in tune with your pencil. I keep losing the flattened edge on my charcoal. Then I have to scruff around in the margins of the paper until I can find that sweet spot again.
I need to do many of these kinds of sheets. Just play with the pencil and exercise my arm and eye.
Related Articles
- Drawing the portrait: week one and two (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
- Drawing the portrait: Week 3 (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
- Drawing the portrait: Week 4 (mockingbirdsatmidnight.wordpress.com)
Graphite sketch after Reubens on Strathmore Smooth Bristol Visual Journal
The model was clearly upset. She couldn’t sit still, let alone maintain a pose. It was wiggle, sift, sigh, and sink for the entire time.
Graphite sketch after Reubens on Strathmore Strathmore Smooth Bristol Visual Journal
It wasn’t my place to ask her to leave, and besides, I think we were all trying to be kind—she seemed to be roosting in a nest of problems—so I had to just deal with it.
It’s hard to keep my imagination down (I can imagine 20 ridiculous things before breakfast!), so I ran with it, and pretended I was commissioned to draw a portrait of a rich, troubled, doomed girl (Paris Hilton came to mind). My imaginary patron was her doting Fortune 500 daddy. And I tried to find the things that a daddy would love in his wonky daughter, and express them in the portrait.
By the end of the evening, I was ready to return the hypothetical advance to the hypothetical daddy, and my heart was aching for this poor, clueless model.
James Gurney has a good post on activating your imagination while creating academic models. I loved his suggestion: add wings!
I voted, although I’m not sure I really liked any of my choices for leaders. Propositions? Equally as difficult, except for 21. Yes to save California State Parks!
Today is going to be another torturous hot day. So hot that even I, who rarely wear anything other than jeans (although they are nice jeans) am wearing one of those flippy cool sun dresses so commonly seen during these dog days of summer.
I originally drew the little cartoon above after a wedding shower. I was so impressed by all the pastel dresses, strappy high heels, and perfectly arranged coifs that as soon as I returned home, I had to get as much as I could remember into my journal. What a lovely painting it could make.
But today it seems like a perfect illustration of a summer day, sipping iced drinks, gossiping with your friends, and looking beautiful.
In The Art Spirit, Robert Henri says, “The most vital things in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory. The memory is of the vital movement.”
Often, when setting up a long pose, I see the moment I want to capture right away; sometimes I have to watch the model for a while, even talk a little with him or her, to find what I’m looking for. And then, after the long days of model and artist assuming the same position, the pose loses that crystalline moment that interested me to begin with. I must remember to continually restate that first found emotion, that vitality of personality that captured my eye and intellect.
Gesture drawings are good for capturing initial emotions and impressions. The two drawings connected to this post were started each as 10-minute drawings. My goal when I made the sketches was to choose a composition that clarified the spirit of the pose and then get down as much information as I could while the models were there so that I could finish the sketches at home.
Things suffered: perspective, proportion, hands, foreshortening. But in general, I feel like I remembered the feelings—and the narratives—I had in my head when I composed the drawings. I wonder, what narratives do you see in these two paintings?
This Albert Einstein quote (if it is from him—I didn’t have time to fact check) seems to say it all:
Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.
And, I might add, in a world where beautiful men abound as well.
This is one of my favorite drawings from last week—a series of 2-minute poses—simply because I was able to control placement of the figures on the page. I was able to do it in a somewhat organized and pleasing fashion. And I was able to do get this information down fast. 2 minutes a sketch.
I could not have done this four years ago. In fact, a year ago I could not have controlled my drawing this much. Over the last year I’ve taken another leap in abilities.
I’ve been studying life drawing at the atelier for nearly four years. I’ve been focusing very hard on proportions, angles, measurements, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to exert some kind of discipline over my errant and mindless drawing arm. (Sometimes I wonder, does this left hand even belong to me? My brain tells it to do something and like a spoiled puppy, my hand widdles charcoal all over the drawing even while my brain is chasing after it with a rolled up newspaper yelling NO! NO! NO!)
In open drawing classes (not at the atelier, because there we strive for proportion) I see a lot of people who just draw as they feel. It’s an experiential gig for them; they’re drawing to feel good, because, let’s face it, drawing feels good.
I’ve noticed that some folks have the kind of brain that allows them to see the model clearly and they are able to naturally get the information down on paper in proportion. But others struggle to see and don’t know what they are doing wrong. They often quit drawing in frustration. I was like that four years ago. My drawings were floundering attempts at something I could barely visualize, let alone realize. So I found the atelier and have been working hard ever since.
Rïce Freeman-Zachary, at Notes from the Voodoo Café has an interesting but maddening post (although with Rïce it could more correctly be called a rant) on being the thing you want to be. Among other things, she says:
“If you want to be it, you do it. And if you want to do it—if you really love it, and it’s what you want to do with your one single life—then you do it the best you can. You study, and you practice.“
And, I want to add, practice with a purpose. Because here’s the thing. After four years of obsessively measuring angles, proportions, and anatomy, these days, when I do let myself go and draw as I feel, the feelings have some way to be expressed. I’ve got a vocabulary now, and my drawings can shout or whisper, laugh or cry. The errant drawing arm is beginning to behave like a well-trained appendage. My brain is happy.
I worked on the image from my St. Stephen’s day post, and made another, more solid watercolor sketch. I don’t have a real wren to draw, so I had to cobble together an imaginary wren from an identification book and several online photographs.
When I lived in Mexico, a little wren lived in the trees next to my house. Every day at about 2:30 she would come in through the always-open kitchen door, make a circuit of the living room (she loved the indoor garden), and after about 30 minutes she would exit through the living room door. She was quite unafraid of me and the dog, and after I caught her killing a scorpion by beating it to death on the metal window bar, I always graciously bade her welcome into my house.
Unfortunately I didn’t draw so much then, so I lost my chance to sketch that little bird. I shall have to figure out how to invite a wren to my home in California.
Debbi Kaspari, at Drawing the Motmot, has several blogs on drawing birds. Two of my favorite pages: 5 Steps to Better Bird Drawing and How to Sneak Up on Your Subject. Now if I can just get a little wren to move into my backyard…
Painting and drawing and playing tunes are the things that make life real, They are what makes my life matter. These, and berry pie.
