Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

May 11, 2018

Accidents.

Filed under: Drawing,Life Drawing,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Rob Adams @ 11:32 am

We love to talk about accidents. Happy ones of course. We have to “allow” them to happen give them, “space” to occur. We have to be eagle eyed for serendipity, poised to stoop and exploit it. Chance can be out dearest friend, but only if we but let go enough to allow it to work its magic. Throw the dice in the air, spin the coin, pull on the one armed bandit’s single limb, watch the symbols spin. We scorn control, dreary control, the restraining whalebone corset of control. If you don’t throw over the traces the muses won’t speak through you. Stifled by the dead hand of thinking far to much. The flow impeded, the tide dammed, the rush down the helter-skelter road to art nirvana, sapped of momentum.

You must be the child. A child sees, wants and reaches out. You are a free spirit, an ancient soul, a primeval being sadly chained by convention. Released you could fly high to the sun shrugging off the fear of wax melting and Icarus falls. Leaving others to mundane long drawn out Sisyphean struggles with the obdurate stone of skill and craft. Surely somehow we can recover the lost innocence that was cast aside in the hunger for a quick and spurious understanding.

Shrug off the bindings of history, escape the already known, seek the thin ice, the terra incognito. How can you call yourself an artist if you do not attempt at least a few of these things? It is your duty to see beyond. To melt the cold metal of convention and cast it in the air unconstrained by any mould. To make a quicksilver response without the inertia of introspection or intellect.

I dare say many of you will tend to agree or at least lean a little towards the purple prose above. I myself would like it to be true, but it isn’t and there it is, we must live and make do with the lack of hey presto type magic in our world. Do our best with the impersonal mundane clay we have been handed. All talk of “energy” “flow” or whatever is I fear just foolish babble. We must join gamblers anonymous and give up the hope of the smile of chance and luck. No Gods watch over us, no saints intercede, no Norns weave our past and future together. There are no souls chained to our bodies, no spirits allied to our minds.

That is not to say however that there are no random imponderables in painting, or that allowing intellect to be sidelined by unconscious  or subconscious routines cannot be a good strategy. Getting the “accountancy” part of the brain off line can allow ingrained learnt processes to run more fluently. You cannot control every motion, every brushstroke, its angle, pressure, direction, speed and duration. Most of this has to be pre-programmed, or as we say learnt. It is a strange thing but the iterative and unfree process of learning a skill actually brings freedom and an escape from technicalities. Without that process becoming ingrained actual freedom will only ever be a pretence. I see it so many times. Painters or drawers acting out freedom, as if mimicking how they feel the actions might be, they could somehow achieve the actuality by some sort of sympathetic magic

Watching a skilled person perform their trade can often look like magic to an onlooker. Many artists receive good money for demonstrating their prowess. For the viewers and students however it mostly looks like conjuring. I suspect some “demonstrators” play to this and build in phoney “abracadabra” audience pleasing moments. As with all conjuring what you see is just the just the tip of an iceberg made of many many hours of practice. In a way the magic is there, it is there when all those many hours of practice, failed paintings, dashed hopes all come together and amplify what you can achieve. Like Icarus for a moment you fly. Does it feel good, yes very, just don’t expect it to happen everyday, or to happen at all without constant practice. Of course you could just carry out the actions, talk the talk  and imagine you have brought into being a masterpiece, a sort of air guitar for painters.

So another life drawing post. Now don’t run away, life drawing posts are on average the least looked at posts on this blog, I’m not sure why. Life drawing is where the above seems to manifest a great deal. People put a rather large emphasis on the means of doing it, rather than what is done. They seek the magic formula that will make a winning drawing materialise on their paper. The words, loose, free, expressive etc are bandied around a great deal.

In reality a different kind of drawing is produced depending on what you are looking for. If you are seeking to express the underlying flow of a pose you might produce a drawing with sweeping confident lines. If you are interested in how the edges cross and fade or are soft or sharp you will produce a different more nuanced drawing. If you are interested in how the volumes intersect then a more blocky approach might carry the information best. You might be drawing the shapes the light makes flowing across the surfaces and not the body at all, resulting in a soft impression. Or indeed any combination of any or all of these. Each will result in a different sort of image.

Due to the perception of art history by contemporary artists a fair few folk have difficulty appreciating different sorts of drawing. A drawing with wild inaccurate marks will be praised as loose and free. A drawing that is accurate and plots the ebb and flow of the edges dismissed as tight however good. On the other hand those with little art education will only be impressed with the degree of photographic detail achieved. Academic drawers will judge in yet a different way as to whether the tones and finish are precise and the terminus lines of the shadows emphasised to get that silky classical look.

When I look at the drawings others do my best to look for what the artists were trying to nail down about the pose in front of them. There are successful and less successful drawings in each of the categories above and each should be judged on how well that agenda is executed. The only bad drawing are those that have no premiss or plan behind them or where the artist is not truly engaged, whether they are skilfully executed or not.

Life drawing

I had not done any drawings on toned paper for a while so this was quite tricky. As always a struggle not to put in more than you can actually see.

Life drawing

A more back to basics approach. I was interested in the planes of the pose and how they flowed behind each other. The difficulty is trying to get that down in single unfussy strokes.

life drawing

So often the quick 4min ones have the most charm. In some ways that is just because they chime well with the aesthetic of our times. I am not in the least immune to this, as with unposed photographic snapshots they have an immediacy that comes across well.

Life drawing

I have introduced a cool grey here. I find it a useful addition so it will stay for a while. I am really trying not to make a “picture” or “finish” in the given time. Just to add one observation after another until the time runs out. As with all “best laid” plans this tends to get watered down by the reality of having to get the marks down.

Life drawing

Here I stuck to the plan more rigorously. Just putting down observations and then restating if need. I quite like the effect of all the good and less good marks being seen as it becomes a record of looking and resolving.

life drawing

Here I got sidetracked a little by the edges and over emphasised them.

life drawing

Here I got a better balance with the lines supporting the main interest which was the flow of the gorgeous complex forms making up  the surface of the back.

life drawing

Here the line and flow is more important with the tone in a supporting role.

life drawing

When I was first taught to draw, Bunny the tutor told us that a drawing should always be finished from the first mark to the last. So when you stop you always have a finished thing. I did not really understand this for many years, but now find it to be a very useful idea. She taught this by not telling us how long the pose was going to be. This meant no planning ahead was possible and each drawing had to be started as if it was only going to be a couple of minutes.

life drawing

Steve our model was in his eighties and was amazing to draw. Age had melted away all the excess fat revealing the forms beneath.

life drawing

A difficult one to draw, again the tone is in a supporting role needing to be just enough there to glue the line work describing the edges together.

life drawing

More quickies. They really do help you winnow out the important and telling aspects of a pose.

life drawing

Another one where I went a bit to far with the line. It is so so easy to make a line over defined. Ideally it should reflect how strong the edge is and so can go from hard and certain to very soft and undecided. This should reflect what you ca make out clearly and what you cannot. Squinting helps greatly in this regard. If an edge vanishes when you squint then it should ideally be either very soft or not there at all.

life drawing

This was the second of two drawings done over an hour. In the first one I rather lost my way but the time was not wasted as all the looking helped me be more direct and concise in this one.

I think back to oils for the next session, so looking for light and tone a little more.

October 17, 2017

Talent

Filed under: Drawing,Life Drawing,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — Rob Adams @ 10:16 am

“Oooh you are soooo talented!” Anyone who reaches a certain point of competence in any creative area can expect to receive this plaudit. Before I started to write in this blog I never really thought about what it might actually mean. On the rare occasions it came my way I would just shrug it of with a sort of semi-grateful embarrassment. They might think I was granted a special ability, but I was always completely certain that I was not. The word talent was once a measure of weight like pounds or kilograms, around 25kilos although it varied between cultures. I was also a measure used in weighing silver and from there perhaps became a measure of worth. We however use it as a description of inherent aptitude.

Here the word “natural” creeps in. Natural talent… from here it is only a small step to “God given.” Which is where my hackles start to rise! In some ways the word talent is used by people to explain why others can do a thing they cannot quite imagine they themselves doing. If you believe some people are special and “gifted” then it absolves you from not having devoted any appreciable effort to achieve similar yourself. Once you start to look the same idea is deeply embedded into our world perception. We believe in gurus, priests, geniuses, high fliers, heros, astrologers, quacks and film stars. We believe in “special” people, no wonder superheroes are so popular at the box office!

In the finance world people believe in magic people who can, “Beat the market” this is despite really good evidence that this is not the case. The trackers and computer controlled investment algorithms consistently trounce them on average every year. People believe in super powered CEOs and executives who need to be paid vast sums for their magic touch. Really they were perhaps only competent and just got very lucky once or even incompetent and lucky will do. Having got lucky the mantle of specialness is laid across the shoulders of that person and they are duly expected to get lucky again. Intelligent people may know that the evidence is against this magic being true, but in practice continue to act as it it were true anyway. For the same reason gamblers who are perfectly aware of the rules of probability still hope for the magic benison of “luck”.

With talent being lucky is just one strand, but it shows we are predisposed to believe some people have a sort of extra “mojo” that makes the difference. “Special” is another word we are very fond of “Special reserve” the very peak of rareness and quality. Advertisers love the term as you can well imagine. They have though made a discovery: Specialness and quality can be separated. You can if you build up the myth make something quite ordinary “Special” and hence charge a premium rate. Fashion brands and pop stars are built by this process. This again plays to our deep feeling that we are each of us special and distinct from the herd. We even try to big it up more… “extra special” to deal with those moments when we are going down under the avalanche of supposedly special things and need to expand the category! We might even go for “unique” just one of a kind… I have seen commercial products described thus… presumably they are all uniquely the same…

I try not to swerve too far off the topic of painting, but once I started looking at where we see “magic” people I found them everywhere. Politicians, the myth of the “strong” leader, which people still cleave to even though most examples led to large piles of dead people. Healers, saints, scientists and mystics they all seem to benefit in different degrees from the invisible halo of talent. It is interesting to see who doesn’t get the plaudit… you might be a talented garden designer but farmers don’t seem to get to be magic. No one ever said, oh you are such a talented window cleaner or plumber. Artists and Architects get to be talented with wings on their heels but Builders and Bricklayers are born to live forever with feet of clay. Actors, musicians, writers and sporty types get to be special but stagehands, roadies, librarians and groundsmen do not.

I cannot help but notice you can get to be “special” by either luck or hard work. You can do something so well that people elevate you or the media can randomly focus on you and garland you with specialness like it or not! For a painter then talent is a worthless plaudit, getting good and improving at your craft is the aim and the is not done by any kind of magic. We have varying intelligence and propensity for being patient and determined. It is these factors not any semi mystical “talent” that makes an artist.

I am behind on the life drawing and painting so I will use this post to showcase my magic, God given talents in the area…

Life drawing

I always find it interesting how the eye can conjure a figure in 3 dimensions from a few blobs! Not many of these super quick ones succeed between one does it makes all the duffers worth it.

life drawing

I don’t know why it is but a square sable brush is so much better to paint the figure with than a round one. Odd really as you would think the rounded human form would be more in tune with the latter.

life drawing

I find it a great benefit to change media with life drawing, it encourages you to focus on different aspects of the figure.

life drawing

Life drawing has this built in time constraint, the model is going to pose for this long only and that is your one chance.

Life drawing

I was pleased with this one, it is sadly rare that you manage to say just enough in the right places and not too much in any area.

life drawing

I am trying to more frequently allow the figure to be cropped by the paper’s edge. This makes you concentrate on the shapes made by the areas that are not person.

Life drawing

I always seem to do better when I don’t think about the whole to much but just add observation to observation until the time runs out. Strange that the resulting drawings don’t look unfinished even though had the time been extended I would have presumably carried on adding marks.

life drawing

You can always see where you lost concentration. Here I was going well but let the whole thing down by not looking hard enough at the chest and stomach. Or maybe by making unnecessary marks that were not backed up by observation.

life drawing

One thing I strive and often fail to do is avoid seeing boundaries that I know are there but cannot quite see. It is perfectly OK if we are not sure quite where the figure ends and the room starts. That is after all often the case when we observe our world. In practice that means marks can flow past the figure’s bounds and a line can be part of both figure and background.

life drawing

It is so hard to consider all the factors at the same time and I sometimes don’t try and focus on one aspect. Here it was direction and weight of line.

life drawing

Here I really had to resist the temptation of seeing too much when due to the light I could actually see very little. People often concentrate on confidence and certainty, but uncertainty and tentative conclusions are actually a large part of our seeing experience and there is nothing wrong to my mind in expressing that aspect in a drawing.

life drawing

One where I used patches of line direction to build up the forms. It was the model’s first experience of posing and when I look at the drawing now there is a hint of the nervous tension that the new experience provoked.

life drawing

Later in the same session she has relaxed. Toned paper is wonderful for life drawing as it means large areas don’t need to be drawn at all!

life drawing

This season we have had a mix of male and female models, it shouldn’t make any difference but somehow the subtle differences of proportion and degrees of external form revealing underlying structure make the experience of drawing each fascinating in a distinctive way.

life drawing

That is it for life scribbles. I have recently taken to using oils in the life sessions for the longer poses which has caused some thrills and quite a few spills as I struggle with the process!

 

 

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