Looking at naked people (and moving your hand…)
First time back at figure drawing in quite a few years, so here’s a couple of observations:
1.I needed to get my gear together to go draw, which meant in part getting a pad. I’ve got a shelf full of sketchbooks of every possible size, because I will use any excuse to buy art supplies, and will just as often use two pages and abandon it until the next urge to start a project hits, and I start the cycle again. So I go up to the shelf figuring that every one of these books, has got tons of free pages, each one is a little monument to failed good intentions, but as I start pulling them down, book after book is full of drawings. Lots of them from the last time that I was attending figure sessions regularly. so here’s like four books full of sketches from four/five years ago. And not all that bad either, which was pleasant to see. I finally did pick up one that had a lot of extra space, and so was set and went off. but that brings me to point number two.
2. I was shocked that I didn’t really remember making all those drawings. In this way drawing is dancing: I know that I spent the time doing it, but it’s so easy to forget that I know how to do it. One point of drawing every day is simply to remind myself that I can. Stuff that I figured out how to do years ago, I still act like I don’t know how to do. Once the hand gets moving it starts to come back, that knowledge.
3. Figure drawing is a meditation for me. And entering the studio is like heading into church, or temple. Not that one has to be slavishly reverent towards what happens there, but the whole experience, from assembling my tools to slipping into the somewhat hidden entrance of Spring Studio to finding a table to peering over my magnifiers at the model, brings me into the mindset where I can confront whatever my internal issues are. All my judgment rises right to the surface in the way I surreptitiously check out the other participants and their skills. It’s a judgment I quickly turn on myself when I look at the utter hopelessness of my drawings. Yes everyone is doing it wrong, including me. And then, If I want to continue, I have to forgive and try again: move the pencil differently, resettle, look again, adjust proportions. I have to let the drawing be bad, before it can ever get any better. The whole environment contributes to this: the kind of seedy tables, the cliplights, the shelves full of art books, the other devotees.
4. What kind of person pays fourteen dollars to sit on a rickety stool on a weekday afternoon in a basement struggling to make a drawing that will never be seen by anyone else? Me for one, but all my fellow strivers in the session (and the places was just about fully booked today) exhibited a kind of ongoing absorption and patience that left me wondering about who they were. Not all students I think, and when the monitor came around one hour in to collect the fee, quite a few of them brandished the multi-session cards that marked them as regulars. But during the breaks there is little chitchat, it’s not like this practice is an excuse for some other socializing. And once the pose begins and the instrument is on your hand, you’re on your own. There’s no hovering coaching, no byplay; it’s each one of us singly trying to make visual sense of the complex arrangements of the figure in front of us.
5. Even though I’m not modeling, this activity exposes me. My hand leaves a trace, accurate or not, graceful or not. I see or I don’t. And perched at the periphery of the room, with something else in the center, illuminated that we have all paid to look at, I still want to make it all about me. Every dropped pencil resounds I think. and these are the wrong pencils anyway, some new ones that I got at Pearl, but the wood is shoddy and they keep snapping off in the sharpener. I’m down to just a quarter of the 4B that I started out with. Or maybe it’s the sharpeners fault. I’d love to use the crank wall mounted one, but it’s on the other side of the room and I can’t get to it until a break. People must be wondering why I keep sharpening these pencils over and over. It’s a classic bit of vamping, stalling for time, because no matter how sharp a point I get on the 4B, it won’t help me figure out what’s wrong with the foreshortening on that left calf. Or why I’ve drawn this lean model with the simpering cheeks of a kewpie doll.
6. Finally when it’s good, I let go. Just let go of the yammering of thought. Forget about posterity. Play with the page, abandon my ules , and pick whatever pencil I can lay my hands on and draw. And in that letting go is the lesson. All I have is the page in front of me, today. It’s mine to make of it what I will, but let’s be honest, it’ll get put away in a book and I’ll forget I even made it until some year down the road. There’s the point. These drawings don’t result in anything. One can never make an utterly perfect, utterly accurate figure drawing. What we see shifts from minute to minute, we move, the model moves, it’s all an approximation.
7. Figure drawing is an unyielding problem. A problem I will never solve, and that is its value. I can keep coming back to it, keep tackling it because I will never get to the end of it. It is a koan, to be met with humility and grace. In that drawing studio I need to be crafty in both senses of the word, but I can’t trick myself into thinking that I’ve got it licked. I don’t and that’s good enough reason to keep going back.
8. After making my devotions today I felt refreshed, energized, even though I tell that I didn’t have the stamina that I had built up a couple of years ago. I arrived to the session late, and by the end of it I was flagging, fatigued in eye and back and mind. But that can be built back up. I hope to get some more sessions in before the school year starts.
Tags: drawing, making art, notes on practice
Nay I was interviewing Wayne Thiebaud for my catalogue for my show about the founding faculty at UC Davis. He was very generous and sweet. He said at one point that the early days could be summarized by this: he would be in one classroom, in a coat and tie, making his students draw with the hardest available pencil (1A?), and he’d have them draw an egg. Next door students would be waiting for Bill Wiley and he would storm in, late, and write in big capital letters, “EGG” on the chalkboard, then storm out.
renny
31 Aug 09 at 9:18 pm