Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

A bit quick for an update but I have a backlog left over from when I stated to contemplate putting up a blog. I wanted to follow a few strands and drawing is a particularly important one to me. I have returned to doing life drawing after far too long of being too busy to squeeze it in. Fortunately I was recommended to a local group that meets every Monday to struggle with the absurdly difficult task of capturing a living being by making paper selectively dirty. Put that way I feel it hardly seems a possible thing to do; but fortunately for all drawers the human brain is so familiar with its own kind that it fills in and elaborates on what the artist chooses to indicate.

Here is the great challenge: to choose what to add and what to leave out. Put too much in and your drawing will be dead like a Prudhon. I know many people admire this sort of drawing but I find it stiff and overworked. Detail is relatively easy for you have few decisions to make, you just put in all that you possibly can. Though I prefer them to the dead hand of detail I’m also not a fan of wild expressionist drawings, they are all well and good but tend, I feel, to say more about the scribbler than the scribbled!

Life drawing as I indicated in the title is to my mind a way of honing your seeing and drawing skills. To that end the drawing is not a finished thing but a record of looking that stops at an arbitrary moment. If a drawing turns out to be a thing of beauty then bravo, but that is not the intention for me of the activity. I was taught to draw by a lady who went under the name of Bunny she used I believe to teach at the Slade but was retired and teaching evening classes. I owe her a great debt as she taught me a great deal.

Here is a drawing from that period only 5min was allowed, so you have to get the basics in quick! Short poses are very valuable and often produce the best looking drawings of a session. I was taught and tend to agree that a drawing should look finished from the first mark to the last. To that end Bunny wouldn’t tell you how long the pose would be.  It might be 1 minute to 40 min! Which focused the mind wonderfully and made you go for the big general things first and not over work.

Accuracy is an unfashionable idea with many ex art college folk, but I think you need a good reason to put a mark elsewhere than as near as you can to the position and value you see. IE if you know where the mark ought to be and decide for expression sake it should be elsewhere, then fine and dandy, but putting it in an incorrect position due to carelessness and then convincing yourself that it’s OK and that’s how you meant it really, is more dubious to my mind.

Here’s another quick 7min drawing. I often use pastel pencils on a mid ground sometimes doing the first blocking out in white. Here tone was quite important as I wanted to catch the strong perspective, so the legs diminish in both tone and detail which pushes them back in the picture plane. I struggle to keep my line lively and use subtle changes of weight to get the pose across.

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Here my eye was taken with whole ensemble of model and sofa and ended up trying to treat them equally. The great thing with a grey paper is when you are doing a mainly tonal study as this is you are not starting from an extreme, so you can allow the paper to do much of the work. The different and complimentary “flows” of drapery and body kept me completely absorbed for the whole 20 min we had.

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Here the thrust of the body across the page and the defining highlight worked quite well. I have to remind myself sometimes to allow the body run off the page. I have a bad habit of trying to fit it to the page which is not by any means very important.

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Here’s a very quick short pose. It’s interesting how it captures a dynamism that the previous drawing misses. I am fairly agnostic as to the worthiness of either type of drawing, they each seek to emphasise a different aspect… if you can get them all into the same drawing then your name is probably  Michelangelo!

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Another 20min pose I wish I had kept the line work more fluid, but that is life drawing for you, it will always highlight any weakness or lack of confidence in observation.

Whew that’s it. time I stopped whittering on and got some painting done. Though writing stuff down is oddly useful forcing you to properly frame your thought on a subject. Some times after you have typed in an opinion you have long held, you look at it and think, hmm… maybe I need to reconsider that!