Black and White

Charcoal is my life. There is black dust everywhere. "Drawing and painting" program evokes thoughts of color. But, my life is all in black and white. I'm not complaining, though. The more limited the means of expression, the more opportunity for the mind to focus on different aspects of expression.
Here is a picture of my most recent Bargue drawing. Charcoal on paper.

Some Beauty to Give

This post does not recount a particular incident in my life at the Florence Academy but represents the fruit of a lot of different experiences. So, while it does not reference school, it relates.

Awhile ago, I had a particular heartache. What that thing was does not matter, but in the midst of this thing, I was sitting on a train, and I remembered a trip to Costa Rica from a few years ago, and I remembered the hills there, on the coast, green in the sun and lush like nothing in the northern lands. And as I gazed on this with the eyes of my soul, there was something inside of me that melted and mended and I was made whole again. It was all very straightforward and rather shocking to me. I was in pain. I saw a vision of beauty remembered. The beauty was balm to my wounds. "So," I said to myself, "beauty heals." 

Yes, yes it does. Since then, I had noticed this phenomenon a lot. My morning walk to school, for instance.. It is (thanks to daylight savings time) always as the sun is rising. Even the pigeons, in flocks, silhouetted against the pale, pink sky make my heart rise. And, whatever is on my mind or weighing me down, it lifts, and something inside of me rises to meet the morning. 

I need beauty. It is not just a perk. Without it, life would be a lot worse than just boring. I think this is true for everyone. Maybe everyone does not realize it, but I think this a universal need. (I won't back that up with any argument. This post would get way too long.) 

But, everyone perceives beauty differently. What moves me may not speak to you. Then again, there may be a handful of people in the world who see what I see and draw life from it. So, then, to those handful of people, I, as an artist, have a responsibility. Because, artists, as I think I have written before, help people to see. 

So, to the people who need the beauty I have to give, whoever you are, I am working on it. Sometimes I get discouraged because what inspires me is so far above anything I can make, and sometimes I wonder if I am even seeing the right thing or digging deep enough to see, but I am working on it. 

On that note, I will leave you with one of my favorite T.S. Eliot quotes. This is from the Four Quartets, Stanza V of East Coker:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which 

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid of the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the the trying. The rest is not our business.

And, here are my two landscapes from this week, searching for beauty in the city:

Water Tower over Green and Prince, Watercolor, 5"x7"

The Watchers (Quick Nighttime Sketch), Watercolor, 5"x7"

The Model Room

Students spend 3 hours in the model room every day of class. The model room is a large space with concrete floors, neutral colored walls, and natural light from north-facing windows. We work in silence with breaks every 20 minutes for the model. 

Each of the images below represent the work of one day. These drawings were preparatory drawings for a long (5 week) drawing in charcoal. 

Day 1: Day 2: Day 3:

These drawings show the development of visual understanding of the pose. The first drawing is stiffer and more general in comparison with the third which is more expressive and specific. Each day of drawing is a kind of visual exploration. 

I enjoy this kind of work because it helps me to see more, and that process of seeing more is by nature contemplative. By contemplative, I mean receptive of what is present. Period. In one sense, art is about making things - transforming existing materials into new things. It is an active activity. In another sense, art is about receiving what is present without trying to change it. It is about going deeper, going beneath the surface of things, or going beyond the first impression. 

Most people have two arms and two legs, a head, and a torso. These are ordinary, horribly ordinary things. But, I once heard a teacher refer to the "drama" of a particular intersection in the body, and when she said it, I could see it. Light and dark and tension and resolution and harmony and unity - all the things that make up drama. And this, all this, is usually hidden under our clothes. Seriously, what a metaphor! If we could see for real all the time, it would blow our minds. 

The Arm of Moses as Seen by My Little Girl

Don't tell my classmates, but I kind of like Bargues (copying exercises). Back to animal shapes: I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I've got more to say. So, one way of breaking down an image and understanding it visually is to find shapes within it - kind of like finding shapes in clouds. "This one looks like an elephant... that one looks like a baby..." This week, I was working on my new Bargue drawing, Mose's Arm from Michelango's famous Moses on Julius II's tomb. I was working my way down the arm, blocking things in using the "seeing shapes" technique. Actually, I was seeing animals. And, I had a flashback. I remembered the downstairs bathroom floor in my childhood home. When I was a little girl, I used to sit there and look and the linoleum and see shapes and creatures and animals. They all had stories. There was the guy with the club. There was Our Lady. I couldn't look at that floor without seeing all kinds of things in it. I thought that was pretty cool - connecting with young part of me and being able to bring it into this new process that I'm learning as an adult. 

Copy of a Copy of a Copy. But, why?

This past week, I finished my first Bargue. A Bargue drawing is an exercise that involves making an as-exact-as-possible pencil copy of one of a series of drawings by a guy named Charles Bargue who lived back in the 1800's. Bargue did a series of drawings of casts of parts of famous sculptures. So, right now, I am working on a Bargue of Mose's arm from Michelangelo's Moses. My recently completed Bargue is of a hand holding a whetstone, but I can't figure out what the original sculpture was.
So, what is the point of this copy of copy of a copy? (Original, cast, Bargue copy, my copy). You've heard the saying, "Its not about the destination, it's about the journey."? Well, it is. It's about the journey. There is a whole process to making the copy that is designed to help an artist learn to see. And see what? Contour lines, shapes of shadows, form turning in space, shapes of half-tones (the grey areas), overlaps, relationships between all of the above, and the list goes on. All of the things I learn while making the Bargue, I then take with me into the model room where I apply them to human figure drawing. And, human figure drawing is also a didactic exercise, the lessons from which I can then apply to future artwork.
Lots of exercises. It's all preparation. Funny thing is that it is easy to get lost in the exercise - and not in a bad way. Even if the main purpose of the copying exercise is to teach me to draw, that does not mean that the product is not also beautiful in a particular way. I have a great affection for my Bargue. I could sculpt the form in space of the 2-dimensional image I drew, and I would know every curve. I have to say that I am much more at peace now than I used to be about things being both exercise and end in themselves. I remember my mother saying that in college she thought that a person gets an education to do something and then they finish the education and then they go off and do it. End of story. But, now she knows that the learning part really goes on forever. (Something like that. Sorry, Mom, if I messed up your words.) So, one of the things that I've learned from doing my first Bargue is that I *really like* representational drawing. It's fascinating and challenging and fun. So, that tells me something about the direction I might want to go, and since fleshing out that direction is part of the point of this blog, I'd say that's a good thing.
Signing off for another week. Thanks for reading. Go out there and see Beauty today.

Hand with Whetstone, Copy of a Cast Drawing by Charles Bargue

Mucking Around with Watercolors

Week five of the first trimester at the Florence Academy of Art is done, and I'm tired. This is a lot of drawing. So, Thursday night, I cut loose a bit and took advantage of the fact that full-time students are allowed to attend part-time figure class and pretty much do whatever we want.
So, here's my recreation: watercolor sketches. It's my attempt to bring some of my own heart in to the stuff I've been learning. In this case, my "heart" is pretty much represented by the fact that I enjoy watercolor. Heck, I enjoy color, period. Down with pencils!
OK, rant done. Bring on week six.

Fantastic Paintings by Cornelia and Stephen

Today at the Florence Academy of art was our Friday lecture. It was a real treat because it consisted of a presentation by Cornelia and Stephen, two of our instructors, about their show that is opening at the academy on Sunday.

See the Facebook invitation here:

Bauman and Hernes: Selected Works

Both of them graduated from the Florence Academy at about the same time and have been making paintings ever since. It struck me how different their work is from each other as well as how their talks differed. Stephen opened with a quote from Frankie Valli that goes like this:

They ask you "what was the high point?" Hall of Fame, selling all those records, pulling Sherry out of the hat, it was all great. But four guys under a street lamp, when it was all still ahead of us, the first time we made that sound, our sound. When everything dropped away and all there was was the music. That was the best.

Stephen then went on to describe how he has followed that "sound" which is his in his painting career. And, he showed slides to illustrate that process.
Cornelia, on the other hand also showed us a number of slides, but they were grouped into genre, and she went into quite a bit of detail about the composition and process of painting each one.
Both talks were fascinating, and the work is really beautiful.
The thing that impresses me is that both Stephen and Cornelia were trained at the same school, in the same discipline, and both focus on the human figure as their subject matter. And yet, within this narrow focus, the range of emotions and ideas they communicate in their paintings are very different. Each of them has a unique artistic vision which is transmitted the classical realism of their paintings.
I think that the thing I take away from this is to not be afraid to engage in the styles of mediums that attract me simply because other people already use them and because they may have connotations which with I do not want to be associated. Even though I am being trained in a very particular method, the method is only a vehicle. It is my responsibility to make it my own.