today

we are meeting today at 3:30 at 109 River. please bring drawing materials that will enable you to draw outside.

rain delay

it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so unfortunately we're going to meet at studio arts, like usual. see you tomorrow!

homework for tomorrow

as discussed, please take a small section of one of your series drawings and blow it up to the size of your newsprint and draw it using a different material. so, if you used something like tin foil in your series, then render the texture of the tin foil using something like pencil or charcoal. when selecting the section you will draw, please consider composition. also, please bring your series back in so we can compare your new drawing to the older one.

also, do NOT forget your three ink wash tones, paper, and brush.

Things for Tomorrow

For tomorrow, you will need:

1. A bamboo brush (size 8 or 10)

2. Drawing pad (not newsprint, the thicker stuff)

3. 3 containers with different shades of ink. Mix water and ink to create three distinct shades. Please test your mixtures before class to make sure there is a discernible difference between all three. 

please please please please please bring all these things. if you forget them, it will break my heart.

grid instructions

here's a recap of the instructions of the grid you're making for tomorrow:

1. cut a 6 x 8 inch window into a piece of cardboard
2. with strings, create a grid that makes 1 inch squares inside the window (ie cut lengths of string that are as wide as the window and then tape them to each side, one inch apart. do this horizontally and vertically)
3. draw a 3 inch grid on two sheets of your newsprint (ie each line is three inches apart)
4. label the columns on both your cardboard grid and your newsprint with letters (a,b,c...) and the rows with numbers (1,2,3...)

the more carefully and accurately you make both your grids, the more accurate your drawing will be.

look at this!

below is a link to tom phillips's book "a humument". it's a victorian novel he altered with drawings while letting certain words remain legible. i was talking to eva about this, and it occured to me it might be useful for all of you to look at it.

http://humument.com/gallery/slideshow.html

this is a really great example of turning a found object into an interesting series of drawings.

along those lines, zak smith did an illustration for every page of thomas pynchon's "gravity's rainbow" (which is like 700 pages long).

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm

i would consider something like this series of drawings to be in many ways a take on a found object. all of the drawings are directly inspired by a pre-existing work. the website is not ideal, but you can check out some of the drawings.

individual meetings!

here's the schedule:

thursday:
11:00 Eva
11:20 Alex
11:40 Spencer
1:00 Yun

friday:
10:20 Benji
10:40 Anna
11:00 Matt
11:20 Patrick
11:40 Erika
12:00 Andrew
12:20 Elise
1:00 Greg
1:20 Adam
1:40 Scott

meet me at java house on e. washington st (between dubuque and linn downtown). i'll be camped out at one of the tables towards the back.

New Assignment!

welcome back to the blog! yay!

for your next assignment i'd like you guys to work in a series. the way i like to think about a series is that each individual piece can theoretically stand alone, but in the context of the other pieces, a new, or emphasized meaning, is achieved. for this assignment i'd like you to think about material and presentation.

to inspire you, here are some images of drawing series ("series", according to dictionary.com, is both the singular and plural...). the top one is joseph grigely. he's a deaf artist who collects the bits of written notes that people use to communicate with him. the next image is marlene dumas's "blindfolded" series (20 inkwash sketches). the next two are part of sandra cinto's "nights of hope" series. and the last is anna barriball's "36 breaths", which are all ink on found photographs.

in particular i'd like you to think about the grigely and barriball images and consider the materials they've used. this assignment is a good opportunity to incorporate found materials as well as altered images from things like magazines, books, and other mediated sources.

your series will be due next wednesday (april 1st).

Figure Drawing Powerpoint Greatest Hits

instead of posting a bunch of images, i'm just going to give you the names of most of the artists shown in the powerpoint. it takes an inexplicably large amount of time to upload images on here, so you'll have to do a little research on your own. but i think you can handle it.

Pre Renaissance
Duccio
Cimabue
Giotto

Renaissance
Jan Van Eyck
Donatello
Botticelli
Leonardo Da Vinci
Michelangelo
Pontormo
Bronzino
Vasari
Fiorentino

Late Renaissance/Baroque
Titian
Caravaggio
Rembrandt

Impressionists
Manet
Degas
Renoir
Rodin
John Singer Sargent (not really an impressionist, but in that time period)

20th Century
Lucian Freud
Picasso
Chuck Close

Contemporary
Jenny Saville
Elizabeth Peyton
Zak Smith
Lisa Yuskavage

so, you guys should take some time on your own and check a few of these guys out in depth. it will really help you when handling the figure yourself.

check it out yall

stay in the know

new york fashion week!

new stuff at white cube

(old) new stuff at gagosian

kentridge at sfmoma

artists' books at moca

the last still life!

Above are Wayne Thiebaud's "Rosebud Cakes" and Edouard Manet's "The Lemon"

From Adam Gopnik's "An American Painter" (an article about Wayne Thiebaud):

"Across the room [from Thiebaud's still life of two cakes] a Manet watercolor - not the real thing... but an aquatint copy... pictures another simply shaped food, a green apple. It has the same spareness, the same intensity of observation, the same love of a plain thing seen plain. Yet to look at it is to feel in touch with a classical contemplative tradition. The apple has a dapper dapple, a comfortable shimmer that suggests looking as a completely satisfying way of living. Gazing at transient things in the French tradition, the Manet apple seems to say, is in itself a way of making them last. Looking at transient things in the American tradition, the cakes seem to imply, creates a melancholy little comedy of longing and exclusion. You feel lured in and then you feel left out.

The emotional truth, or anyway the local feeling, hits. The French apple, though it points no moral, is in every sense composed. The two American cakes, though all dressed up as if for their own birthday party, seem by contrast plaintive, longing. The apple is calm; the cakes are sad. Not just sad, but nationally sad, familiarly sad. They radiate a peculiar emotion that we have sensed before in such lovely areas of American paint as those fruit bowls in Hopper's restaurant or the childrens building blocks in Eakins - a note of yearnig, a melancholy undercurrent of aspiration implanted even in things of pleasure that we recognize more easily than understand."

For homework I would like you to consider how artists use objects to create mood. Why does Adam Gopnik find Thiebaud's cakes sad, yet Manet's apple (or lemon) composed and stately? Are these qualities inherent to the objects themselves or are they communicated through the artists' use of materials and stylistic choices?

For next Monday (the 22nd), please compose one still life with the goal of creating a specific mood. You may use any objects you want and any media in your drawing. For this Wednesday (the 18th), I would like you to have considered your mood and to have determined some strategies for conveying this tone. Please write some ideas in your sketchbook, and maybe even sketch out some of them. I will discuss those ideas with you individually on Wednesday.

Below are images of paintings by Giorgio Morandi, one of the great masters of the still life. Think about how he has used color, material, and style to impart the few objects he paints with distinct emotion.

homework!

for monday, the 16th:

make two drawings, the first of a space (interior or exterior), the second of that same space with a person in it. for example, you could draw your living room with your couch, and then your roommate sitting on the couch. find a friend who will sit still for a couple hours (do NOT work from photos), and be sensitive to how the space changes when there is someone in it. how does the weight and mass of a person affect the couch cushions? the light? the sense of depth?

check this out

hey guys,

since you're working with charcoal i thought i'd send along some links to some super awesome charcoal stuff:

here's a video by the south african artist william kentridge. he makes charcoal drawings, photographs them, alters them, photographs them again and makes videos from the stills.

here's a link to vija celmin's drawings retrospective at ucla a couple years ago. some of these are graphite, some are charcoal. they will knock your socks off.

and this is the drawing center's website. it's a museum and work space in new york that shows mostly works on paper. it's pretty sick.

and, as per request, here's a drawing of mine i did last week.

see you tomorrow!

New Blog!

Hey guys,

Welcome to the Basic Drawing class blog! Remember to check in periodically for updates, assignments, links, pictures, and other things I think you should know about.

In the meantime, here's the facial proportion study I told you about. You'll notice the head is broken down into quarters and then also broken down into smaller squares, which are the dimensions of the width of the eye.



And here are a few sketches (which I did not do), that might help you if you decide to do a view other than straight-on.