Thoughts to share, ideas to ponder

Below is a description of Ned's approach to drawing and painting.  Having studied with Ned, I can attest to his ability to teach important fundamentals.  I can also attest to his jovial, warm, and supportive teaching style.  His background is impressive.  Check out his website http://www.nedmueller.com

And now from Ned:

I have been asked to give a series of life drawing workshops in 2009. They are each separate from each other.  Drawing has always been one of my main strengths and it has enabled me to survive and thrive doing a variety of things in the art world.

I would like to tell you a little about my philosophy on drawing and how I see it. Joe Henninger, a great teacher at the Art Center School of Design told us, "if you learn how to draw well...you will never have trouble finding a job"..I have found that to be true in my career as it gives you the ability, and the power to do a whole lot of things. In our early drawing classes at Art Center we worked in mostly a classical approach, slow, deliberate and accurate drawings of casts, skulls and the human figure, much as the Gage Academy here in Seattle approaches their teaching. At the same time we had life drawing classes that stressed using our eye alone to judge and estimate proportions and form.  This is the approach that I will emphasize. It enables one to become much more expressive and unique in drawing the figure, as well as all things.

Over the years, I was somewhat frustrated in getting my drawings to relate more to my painting than I was achieving, and I began to stress tone, form and mass as opposed to a dominant lineal approach. I eventually was able to see my drawings in more of a picture form and to develop more of the abstract qualities and masses that I felt was needed. This enabled me to be more open, free, expressive and much faster in doing  the portrait, figure or landscape in front of me. The class will be structured to start with a lot of quick gesture drawings leading up to longer poses. The gesture poses really gets one to work fast, get the important movements and proportion and basically, like in sports to loosen up. As the gesture poses are more interesting and dynamic the longer poses tend to be quite static and often boring and people start to tighten up. The idea is to take that looser approach into the longer poses so the drawings become more expressive. I encourage people to use Bistre conte, a kneaded eraser and smooth newsprint as it works best for this approach as opposed to charcoal, which tends to get very messy. I was first asked to teach drawing at Art Center when  I was still a student and have been doing it ever since, for over 45 years and have gotten pretty good at it as my students tell me.

The workshops will be at Arts Umbrella in Bothell, Washington on January 16th, 17th and 18th. February 13th, 14th and 15th at the Lowell Art Works in Everett, Washington, and in March at the Unclad Show put on by Gail Picken in Stanwood, Washington. The Arts Umbrella workshop is $300 which also includes the model fee. The price has not been decided in the other two, but will be very close to that amount. As the economy is squeezing all of u s, it is a good time to develop and sharpen our skills, and what could be better than working on the most important of all, drawing. I will also do an extra portrait demo drawing at the end of the second day of drawing. I hope that you can participate, we will have top models, will work hard and have fun doing it! I will get out the contacts for each workshop in the next couple of days. For the Arts Umbrella workshop, please contact me by email (nedmueller06@comcast.net). I hope that you can participate in one or more of these workshops and that my explanation of its content is clear. Let me know if you have any questions. Ned