Thoughts to share, ideas to ponder

Study in white

Fabulous model at the last LCAD session.  I love painting white.  And her huge baby-doll eyes and gaze were compelling.

Quiet Glory

Could not resist this beautiful profusion in the horizontal format.  Painted mostly from life.

The Beauty of Line

In contemplating the how to best sequence and present information for my upcoming drawing class, I revisted the first and most important of visual elements: line.

Line is something we all know about and practice regularly. It is our signature. And our personal signature has a type of “fluidity” because we have practiced writing it thousands of times.

Robert Genn wrote recently about fluidity: He described it as “the presence of long, languorous strokes, elegance, panache, dash and curves. To the sensibilities of most, like a long fluid line in a symphony, they give a feeling of completeness, mastery and intrigue. There is, of course, a place for short staccato bursts and all kinds of other notes, but it's the long fluid line that beguiles.”

How can the fluidity of line be used to convey volume or bulk?

When I visited the Fechin House in Taos a few years ago and saw Nicholai Fechin's work up close I was struck my how much volume he conveyed in simple line drawings such as this:

Or consider how significant a few simple lines conveyed the essence and bulk of the man here or the energy of the dancer, both by John Singer Sargent:

In the first example, we gain a sense of bulk by virtue of the deliberate consideration given to the weight of the lines and, in the second case, we get a sense of energetic movement by virtue of the flourish.

Or consider another example by Rembrandt:

Lines with bulk and flourish and energy begin to live in the realm of art presented by Robert Henri, in his book The Art Spirit: “In drawing....there are lines that are heavy, dragging, lines that have pain, and lines that laugh.....You should draw not a line, but an inspired line.....Every line should be the universe to you. Every line should carry a thousand pounds. A line expresses your pride, fear and hope.”

Each of the visual elements of art--line, shape, value, color, texture, edges—is worthy of a lifetime of study, and all of these, with the exception of color, can be explored with a simple piece of paper and a pencil. Drawing instruction is a bit of a hard-sell for students because we all want to get to the rich color of a finished painting. But consider the examples of the Masters presented here (and there are hundreds of examples by so many) and the mood conveyed by such beautiful simplicity. What a feast of riches we artists can enjoy with so little investment of money or space or complication!

I love long-pose painting sessions!

Yesterday, at LCAD, there was a long-pose session which is new.  I arrived one hour late, thinking that it started at 10.  Nonetheless, I scrunched into the last corner available, set up my large pastel box, hoping that it wouldn't be annoying to those around me, and started to work!  The session ended one hour later than I thought, so I had a good three and a half hours with this painting.  Loved every minute!!

  Here is the block in.   I love the warms and cools that I saw on her skin!

  "Nude Study", 16 x 13, Pastel

American Artists Professional League

"Lost in Thought" (25 x 26, pastel) has been accepted to the American Artists Professional League, 83rd Grand National Exhibition to be held November 1-11, 2011 at the Salmugundi Club in New York!