Work in Progress - Kevin

This just goes to show you how ghastly things can get in the underpainting stage. Night before last his face was green. It all gets better in the final stages. Honest!

Progress in the Portrait Project

Top to bottom: Michael Elsasser, Claudia Monaco and moi. Sea earlier posts for preliminary drawings. Obviously I like horizontal compositions for these portraits and I also like side or back-lit light sources. The shadow areas are built up in multiple glazes of alternating complimentary colors Terra verte mixed with a tiny piece of viridian in one glaze and vermilion mixed with a little alizarin crimson in the next glaze.

Tyrone at the Art Students League

Tyrone held one pose for the afternoon on Saturday, posing in sessions of 20 minutes each with five minute breaks, seated on a high stool in front of an old plaster bas-relief. James McElhinney's class is focused on drawing, the figure and anatomy. The class runs from 1 pm. until 4:30. These four drawings, each done with a 6B pencil, represent one afternoon's work.

Note: image enlarges if you click on it.

Progress report

HERE ARE TWO PAINTINGS I started some time ago, paintings on which I just resumed work. The little rowboat is was spotted catching sunlight in late May from between the planks of the dock at Islesford on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

The young lady is another imaginary beach queen wearing a paper crown. James McElhinney with whom I've worked for several years at the Art Students League in New York refers to this kind of pose as "one of the mud-flap girls."

Just Happy to be Here

The above drawing is included in the new 2009-2010 catalog for the Art Students League of NY. Those familiar with the catalog format know that the bulk of the book consists of a page devoted to each instructor. One each page is a fairly large reproduction of a piece of art by the instructor and a smaller image of a piece done by one of the instructor's students. My drawing appears on the page devoted to James Lancel McElhinney with whom I've been studying for the last two years or so. I am also his 'monitor,' a sort of teaching assistant who takes care of chores like timing the models, collecting class tickets, etc.

Overhearing two students talking about my drawing in the catalog, a third student asked me, "Is that a picture of you?" Well, no, actually it's not: I am neither bald nor thin. And at this point in my life, not likely to pose nude for a group of thirty or so artists. But thanks for the compliment. I guess.

Two-Minute Drawings

This is a great warm-up exercise for any drawing session. But you have to approach it as just an exercise. If you take any trace of an attitude that you are actually trying to create art you will probably have some degree of difficulty. It seems that only when you approach this as just a warm-up exercise (think of runner's stretches before the 10k) then, without the pretense of 'making art' one is free to fine-tune the hand-eye coordination and sometimes, mirabile dictu, you end up creating a bit of art.

One secret seems to be to just keep your drawing hand moving all the time.

Things I've noticed after doing these exercises over the years: In the first pass I tend to make the head too large and in the subsequent minute and a half, almost always end up reducing it. Sometimes it helps me to add the head last, after fixing the rest of the torso. It helps to think of these drawing as 'gestural' that is aiming to capture the gesture of the body, where the weight is borne and where the muscles are working and where they are at rest.

Sometimes our progress is measured in baby steps. In the drawings above, I was particularly pleased to have caught the position of Robin's fingers in her left hand in the drawing that is second from bottom.

After doing about ten two minute drawings, spending five or ten minutes seems like an amazing luxury!

Robin

From the model Saturday afternoon, Art Students League NYC.