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I'm leaving this morning for my own personal Spring Break, heading on a road trip North to Boulder for rivers, green trees, independent book stores, and really good tea. In the past I've always scrambled to post ahead on my blog when I went on vacation. But I reminded myself of the one New Year's resolution I made this year, No Rushing, and that my original intent with this project was to move toward a balance between work and play. I'll post again when I return in a week. The model's last pose of the night was a perfect one to hold in honor of this time of rest.
Wendy thought of my project here when she saw the new campaign by Dove called Real Beauty Sketches. This is really cool and well worth watching. I apologize for the poor photo quality of today's drawing. I drew this last night and am packing for a trip, I'll redo the photo when I get back.
This was a fascinating pose to draw because my mind got confused, I kept wanting to turn my head sideways in order to draw the head from a familiar position. Since I couldn't do that, and could only draw what was right in front of me -light, shapes, angles -there is a quality about this face that makes it one of my best yet. I've often read what Sherrie McGraw wrote, below, but with this drawing I could better understand what she meant.
Painting and drawing are simple, but there is a reason that in practice they are not easy. There is the small matter of our own minds. This is the real hurdle that is not broached often enough. Every brushstroke and line we make is filtered through our own perceptions, prejudices, and emotional resistance to change.
I'm now enjoying doing my own drawings more than the copies. It's unknown and many fail and that's frustrating, and I miss following the refined lines of the masters, but it's also risky and wild and interesting to see what happens. It's a lot harder to find life drawing sessions though than it is to draw from a book. Oh, how I long for Spring Studio, where life drawing sessions run every day, from morning to night.
I love this one. When the model took the pose I thought with no face and no drama it would make for a boring drawing. But I realized it was a great opportunity to experiment with what I'd learned from copying Watteau's lines and angles.
Well, this project is called One Hundred Heads, not One Hundred Faces. I once heard that a teacher needs students as much as a student needs teachers. I didn't understand it at the time. I thought if you knew something well enough to teach it you would be happy you'd figured it out and content to just bask in your knowingness.
But I've since discovered that what happens is you get so fascinated and excited about what you've learned that it makes you want to share it with someone else. And now I understand why a teacher needs students.
This model was drawn a week later and already looks more comfortable than the drawings from the week earlier, as though she's just hanging out on the page.
I recently was craving going to a yoga class but nothing felt like quite the right fit. Then I realized it was because the one I wanted to go to was my own. I dreaded teaching for a really long time, I thought you had to attain a certain perfect state before you could start teaching something, and I was so far from that.
But the class I was craving had tadasana at sunrise at the top of Mount Madonna, savasana over the rumble of the subway in New York City. It had rain falling on a wall made of glass bottles during a back bend in Oaxaca, a fall afternoon in Santa Fe where the study of the serratus anterior in my mind was suddenly felt in my body. It had the cold wood floors and rustle of trees in Vermont, the smell of Cuban food wafting through the windows in Chicago. It had teachers that were just beginning and ones who'd taught for thirty years.
I realized that the only common thing in the class I was craving, besides all the yoga, was me. In "Steal Like An Artist," Austin Kleon writes that we are mash up of all our influences. Isamu Noguchi wrote, "We are a landscape of all we have seen."
This is the type of pose where I definitely would've avoided drawing the face 20 years ago. The foreshortening of the body was enough of a challenge and I could just let the head fade off into the distance at the other end.
I remember thinking, back then, that leaving the face out, or making it a dramatic smear of charcoal or dark silhouette, was making some sort of a statement, like "Who are we really anyway?" But really I did it because I didn't know how to draw the face.
I almost scrapped this one. Her face was in shadow, but still there, and when I felt things get too dark I wasn't sure what to do. When I panic I start darkening with quick scratchy lines as though that will somehow stop that going-down-with-the-Titanic feeling. Then I remembered how Sherrie McGraw says "Draw less, see more" and how she points out that a drawing is an artist's nervous system on paper. It reminded me to step back, take a breath, do the best I could, and not give up despite the darkness.
I love this gesture drawing. I like the way the face and hair turned out, and how even though there are few lines it really looks like her head is resting in her hand. It's fascinating how that can happen, how you can't plan for such a thing because you're drawing quickly and it just falls out of nowhere.
I also like the way she looks solid and planted. Maybe because that's been on my mind these days as I just wrote a post on my therapy blog about falling.
I started going to a life drawing session on Wednesday nights and I'm really enjoying it. It feels like an oasis in the desert. This is one of my first gesture drawings. I like the way I didn't shy away from the face and leave it blank like I once would have. It doesn't have much detail but I made sure it was part of the gesture as a whole.
Study (after Watteau). Watteau is a master of angles and I'm learning so much from his drawings. For this one, I used less detail on the body to show that it's moving further back in space.
Study (after Sherrie McGraw). As my comfort level with drawing heads increases I can feel that it's time to bring the body back. My 20's were a time of headless torsos, my 40's a time to come face to face with faces. It's now time to bring the two together. I turned back to Sherrie McGraw's drawings for some guidance. I love the way a single line for the ear and neck separates the head from the hand.
Study (after Watteau). Tara once told me that, having moved here from California where there are so many people and everything you need is right there, living in Albuquerque makes her more appreciative of things. Like when you find someone who shares an unusual common interest, such as Japanese tea ceremony, it feels like an oasis in the desert, precious and rare. It's true, we don't have the abundance of the Japanese gardens at the Huntington or Japantown in LA, so when you sip the green tea at Kokoro, sit by a stone lantern at the BioPark, or see the pink paint smear of cherry blossoms on the Japanese Railways poster at the Deco Japan exhibit, you feel almost giddy with gratitude.
For further ideas on how to pretend you're in Japan when you're really in the parched desert begin reading here. The story runs from March 18 - April 8. It's interesting to feel a longing and look back to discover you had the very same longing at the very same time, years earlier.
Study (after Watteau). Speaking of Japanese design sensibility I just went to see a great show at the Albuquerque Museum called Deco Japan. If you find yourself in Albuquerque longing for Japan get a cup of green tea and head to the Japanese garden at the BioPark.
Arrive when it first opens, when it's cool and quiet, and before you end up surrounded by kids feeding the koi. Sit on various rocks, sip tea and notice the patterns on water, stone lanterns, and Spring blossoms. Maybe you will see the Night Heron who lives there. From there stop by the museum to see the Deco Japan exhibit and end your day with lunch at Kokoro. Gochisousama deshita.
