Method to the Madness

Today I asked him if there was a process to all of this. I was feeling frustrated jumping from one thing to another, practicing one skill meticulously, only to abandon it all together. The past two days we've abandoned drawing the contours of the figures all together, and are expected to draw from the interior. Build the drawing from the inside, he said. To answer my question, he said, that there was method to the madness.

Every day we begin with these gesture drawings. This week we had a new model. Although she is thin and small, she had curvier features than the previous two models. Her poses were also more sensual and less angular. Her movements seemed womanly in that classical sense.



















This week we practiced more with lines. We did gesture drawings using the tips of our charcoal. How do I show form without drawing the contours?





































This drawing was the beginning of a series of frustrating attempts. This was a long pose and we were asked to fill out the body with lines while not focusing on the contours. It seems nearly impossible to move away from thinking about the body in that way, trying to ignore that obvious line separating the body from its background.















If the body is supposed to take shape just based on a series of lines, then what kinds of lines would give it shape? I began to imagine the muscles running underneath her skin, how they weave together to give her form.






































And today I left class with this. I'm not even sure where it came from. I was still struggling; frustrated, I told him that I was confused. He came and made a few marks on my paper. He explained that it's not just the outer lines that I should be paying attention to, but the lines going all over the surface of the body......

Hmmm....if the my index finger were the tip of a charcoal pencil, and if I were to run my finger over her body, where would it go? Where would it explore? I began at her neck, and traced my way down to the collar bone, where shadows made triangular shapes, and down the sternum and under the breast, where the curves lead the way to her areola. What an intimate process, to study the curves and bends of this person's body, to follow every inch and crevice.


I began to see the shadows creating shapes on her body. I began to see how the shadows move with the curve of her muscles and the sharpness of her bones.

Her face was the most interesting part to tackle. I grew up drawing faces, especially profiles, but none like this one. They were always generic, like the template of how a face is supposed to be drawn. From forehead to nose to lips.

This time I went from bottom to top. I followed the lines from her chin to her lips, her cheekbone, her nose, the bags under here eyes, the shape of her eye socket underneath the skin...

I found it by letting go. I didn't draw how I think it should be drawn. I didn't have an idea of how it should look. Don't draw how you want it to look; just draw how it looks.

I really felt like I made a breakthrough today. I don't know if these lines will make any sense to anyone else, but I'm starting to look at people differently now. I started to study the structure of the faces of everyone I talked to today. I looked at how the shadows and indentations gave tell-tale signs of the features underneath.

I guess I saw the method to the madness.

A Frustrating Lesson

Monday's class had left me confident and energetic. I knew what I could achieve as long as I maintained my energy and sense of adventure. But something was amiss on Wednesday. Even after the gesture drawing warm-ups, I felt slow and clumsy, like writing block when the words refused to flow from my consciousness to my fingertips. Here, the images did not translate. Maybe it was the loss of the sense of urgency, like on Monday when we had to do line drawings very quickly.

On Wednesday we had longer sessions. The model posed for 20 to 40 minutes at a time. We had to sketch the gesture with vine charcoal, using the thick end, very quickly, within 30 seconds. Then we were asked to draw the contour of her body. We imagined that we were ants crawling slowly over the outline of the model, and our hands followed in suite. An important aspect of this exercise was to not just draw, let's say, an arm. Not to consciously register that it was an arm we were drawing so that we do not use our logical side to draw what we "think" or "know" an arm looks like. Instead, we were to really look at the lines along the arm and the curves along the uneven surface of the flesh.

What made this particularly hard was that while I concentrated on the contours, I lost track of the proportions. It was difficult trying to combine all the techniques into one. Shane also mentioned that the act of measuring the model was simply a technique to get us to start internalizing the proportions.


Wednesday's drawings also led to more "realistic" images than those on Monday. The more realistic a drawing is supposed to look, the easier it is to spot the flaws, especially pertaining to proportion. This one for example, made her look too narrow, and the arm is too thin.

It's easier to like Monday's drawings because of their abstract look. They can fool you to think that they are somehow "good."

I also began to tune into other people's frustrations. I heard sighs and "hmms." People twisted their mouths, wrinkled their noses, and shifted their weight. It seemed that we had hit a communal block in our art.



I also noticed that after drawing the male model, whose body was sinuous with muscles and bones, the female model was much smoother and much rounder. These smooth lines had a harder time taking shape on my paper. She's a thin woman, but after paying so much attention to the uneven contour of her body, she began to look fat and flabby. It made me wonder if all those pale fat bodies of women painted long ago were really actually rather thin bodies.



One off day. It was bound to happen. Like writing or jogging, these things don't just happen every day of the week. Art is so interesting! It's not purely cerebral, like the act of writing. The hard part about writing is most of the time, the words are already there, floating in my subconscious, and it sounds good in my mind, but the act of transcribing these words onto paper is like a strange kind of fishing. There in my mind, I have all the words that I need, floating and bobbing in the ripples of my subconscious, but sometimes I'm too slow, and I can't catch the words before they sink below the surface. Sometimes I'm too clumsy, and the words refuse to be pieced together, like an unfinished puzzle.

Drawing on the other hand is so much more physical. The cerebral aspect only enters as judgment: Is it proportionate? Does the arm angle this way or that way? Where do the shadows fall? But more so, it is the movement of my hand that creates a drawing. So much of it seems to be stored in the muscles and joints. If my hand is not familiar with this type of movement, then I lack balance and lose control, like a wobbly yoga pose. There also seems to be an element of faith, to trust the movement of your hand. To go for it. And if it's wrong, try it again. There's a need for so much more of a balance between logical judgment and well, I suppose you can just call it intuition. It's a struggle between control and letting go.

Day 2: Exploration of Styles

A quick note on the models. Day 1 we had a female model. She was lanky and skinny. You could see the ripples of her rib cage and the tiny bumps of her spine. I suspected that she, herself, was an artist, because she was very well aware of her poses. Exaggerated and angled, it seemed that every limb and every curve of her body lined up with other parts of her body perfectly. It was almost as if she was doing it on purpose to produce perfect 90 degree, 45 degree, 30 degree angles.

On Day 2 we had a male model. He, too, was lanky and thin. You could see his tiny muscles weaving in and out of his body. He bothered me a little as a model, not because he's a man, but because he stopped to talk to us. He gave small suggestions as though he too was teaching. This was strange to me, because during the first day, I had gotten used to the model, being up there as nothing but an object. With so much attention to the body, you start to forget that it is a person up there. He also moved and sighed when the poses lasted a little too long--it was as if he was fighting against this objectification.


On day 2 I loosened up. I approached the exercises with full force, without fear. I knew at this point that there was no point in attempting "good" art. These wereull force and simply exercises, and here was my opportunity to explore. After the gesture drawings, which we do at the beginning of every class, our teacher Shane asked us to now use the pointed side of our charcoal. We were to look at the lines of the body--not just the contours, but every line weaving in and out of the body.

In the drawing above, and the one shown here, we had to draw without looking at our paper and just looking at the model. We also could not take our charcoal off the paper. The idea was really to look at the model, pay more attention to our subject than what's on our paper and just let our hands respond to what our eyes see.

After this, we were allowed to look at our paper again and draw the next pose. Still, we used the pointy end, with a focus on lines.






I'm kind of proud of these two pictures. They're not great or anything, but they're extremely different from the way I am used to drawing. It was like something went over me, and I just went nuts on the lines, inside and out, curving and criss-crossing every which way.

What's more exciting is that I saw my images evolving within a matter of 2 days. And the styles start to kind of resemble those I've seen in art books and museums.


A word on the penis: Surprisingly I was a little shy and avoided drawing the penis at first. I didn't want to be staring at it for so long! Then it clearly became unavoidable, and it became just another set of lines, another object.





On to contour drawing. Next we were asked to combine gesture drawing with line drawing, but this time, paying more attention to the contours of the body. The one of the man sitting up was easier than the laying down pose. I enjoyed drawing the back. I found the laying down pose difficult and awkward.




















Drawing is like yoga. It is an act of meditation. You act with intention, yet you free your mind of everything. You let go. Your eyes crawl along the body, and your arm responds. Your only focus is the shape, the angles, the length and width of that person before you. And sometimes you go into the unknown. It's intimidating; it's scary; it could utterly shatter your self-confidence. The unknown is drawing the fingers, the toes, the awkward curves of the body that you are not used to. These three hours every Monday and Wednesday are the best hours I've spent in a very long time.

Some Examples

Here is an example of gesture drawing. Keep in mind that the pose was held for only 30 seconds long. The idea is to get us not to concentrate so much on what makes a "good" drawing, but just trying to capture the movement in the body. With broad strokes, we had to show the most exaggerated angles. We did this for maybe an hour, to the point that my arm was soar. It was literally a warm up exercise to get our blood flowing, and to liberate our minds from the constraints of previously held beliefs of what made a good drawing. The exercise also broke down skill differentiation in the class. Everyone was pushed for time, and everyone's drawings were reduced to pretty much stick figures. Even so, everyone had a different style to their stick figures. Some were more rounded, and others were edgier. It was easy to see the beauty in every one of these abstract figures.

Following this very free and energetic practice of gesture drawing was a rather slow and controlled exercise in measuring. This is a self-portrait done at home:

This exercise required meticulous measurements. In contrast to gesture drawing the act was slow and deliberate, requiring great concentration--or a different kind of concentration.

In class, when I discovered that my drawing was still turning out disproportioned regardless of the meticulous measurements, I realized that it would never be down to an exact measurement. The idea of coupling this exercise with the rapid gesture drawing was to learn balance between the two. I had to keep in mind the proportions and be able to eventually internalize it without losing the wild and dramatic nature of creating the image.




I had much going through my mind that first day of class. I began to relate this process to the experience of life itself. There is, on the one hand, freedom and energy, the unexplainable ability to create an image simply through exploration. And then there's effort towards precision, there's me thinking that if I can break the process down into explainable terms like units of measurement, that I'd be able to create good art. But there really is no "how to" to art--I think, there are tactics and techniques, but it is learned purely through exploration. And most importantly, one must have humility and courage.