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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.
