Coming to a Close

And so we have reached the end!  I am amazed that the fall semester has wrapped up already and as we all finish up our last finals I am happy to look back on the progress I made in life drawing this semester.  I have come so far!  I can see so much improvement since the gesture and long timed drawings of the first half of the semester . My forms are more life-like, my gestures more dynamic.  Starting this class I would have told you that, no matter what I learned, I would be content with letting my life drawing career end at Life Drawing I.  But now that I am finished, and I see what progress I have made, I am interested to see where I can go from here.

Before now the human form had always been an area of hazy recollection.  It was something you always assumed you knew, I mean, you see the human body everyday.  But when asked to sit down and lay out the body like a map, I found myself completely lost.  Similar to how you may walk up and down the steps in your house daily, for years, but when someone asks you how many steps it contains, you find yourself a stranger in your own home.  And so I found myself a stranger in my own body.

Then slowly, lecture by lecture and sketch by sketch, I was reacquainted with my own body.  Now I can see the connections of the muscles and bones.  It is all very exciting.

If you are interested in seeing more of my work this semester you are welcome to visit my online portfolio HERE!

I have seen the most improvement in my contours.  Faces and hands are the areas that still need work.  I am very thankful I took this class and I hope that I may have the opportunity to take Life Drawing II in the future.

Knuckle Head

Class this week involved drawing the head and the hands.  So sadly, unlike my earlier hopes, the hands turned out to be a lot harder than the feet.  My fingers still looked like sausages and I just could not get my shading down.  Matt and I attempted to draw each other's hands, but, no matter how many times we had to start over because one of us moved, the inner structure was still a little mystifying. I did, on the other hand, find the skull to be much more enjoyable to draw.

There are a lot of elements of the skull that are not as one would suppose.  For example, the face only takes up 1/3 of the skull.  Because we put so much importance on the face it always seems to take up a large portion of the head.  But strip away all hair, skin, muscle, and tendons, and the majority of the skull is just there to hold in the gray matter.

When I think back to those nature specials, the one about how man evolved from a monkey, I remember the progression of skull sizes they loved to show.  The ape's skull was always small and ball-like, but as the genes grew closer to the current homo sapiens the brain cavity increased and the face flattened and shorted.

So, I guess this whole brain thing is a pretty big deal.

Time to Get in GEAR!!

The semester is coming to a close and suddenly we find ourselves with a heap of work.  One of the nice things about life drawing is that, on the whole, most of the work was achievable in class with only an average hour or two on the weekends.  I am realizing the reason that is is because there is now suddenly about a hundred pages of muscles, two shell drawings and a portfolio to mash together!!  But I am being dramatic.  We do have all that to do, but it is over the course of two weeks - nothing that can't be handled if I do a little every day.

The muscles seems to be coming along better than before but that is hard to say for certain.  After "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" and "Galaxy Quest" (yes, I am, in fact, five years old) I had some muscles on the shoulder blade and half a forearm done.  That leaves about 3 movies left until I am finished!  There is something nice about putting the manikin together.  I never realized how many muscles there are in the body!  Although mine is not very accurate, it does give you an idea of the complexity of the human form and all the connections that are required to do the things that we do.  Even now while I type this you can imagine the tightening of so many muscles just to get these words on the page.

I have started taking a boxing class with a couple friends and it is nice that it correlated with Life Drawing class.  As I feel my muscles growing (and getting VERY sore) I am able to pinpoint some of them on the manikin and realize why they are the ones that are going through a growth spurt.  Hopefully some day I will be able to rattle off the latin names as well!

"AH!  I think I pulled my semimembranosous!!"

"Naked"

On Tuesday our class took a trip up to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  Now before I get into the art piece I choose to review for this week's blog entry I would like to mention how wonderful riding the bus was.  The joys of public transportation are so numerous.  I read HG Wells's 'Time Machine', napped, talked with friends and all the while the bus plugged on toward the cities.  The trip went so quickly and I didn't have to worry about where to park, directions, gas, traffic, any of it.  All I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride.  Why we are so concerned about spending our dollars on buses, trains, and trams I will never understand.  I only hope that this type of transportation will become more readily available in my lifetime.

Now on to the art!!

This image shows the feather covered animal hide looking material that surrounded Eiko and Koma's "Naked" exhibition art.  The sculpture was set against a corner of the gallery with the two exposed sides covered with this stiff, textured cloth.  Through the holes one could see into a dark room, yellow light illuminating two nude figures laying in the center on a bed of dark feathers.  On one side you could enter the room and sit along the edge of the tattered wall on a couple benches.  

From there you could watch the art slowly play out in front of you.  The floor on which the nest rested appeared to be covered in dirt.  From the ceiling, dim yellow stage lights illuminated the couple while bits of mangled black material shifted in the breeze just below the bulbs, upsetting the steady angle of the beams.  The silence in the room was broken only by the drip of water.  Scattered in the darkness, drops thudded against the packed dirt floor.  The space around the artists was so black it was hard to tell where the room ended.  With nothing else to draw your attention, your focus was ensnared by the people slowly shifting in front of you.

My goal was to sit in that room and see if I could work out the meaning of this piece.  I wrote notes and rolled over the various implications in my mind.  After I give you my thoughts I am going to read the brochure I picked up from the museum and see what the artists have to say about their piece.

I think the thing that captured me the most was the way the couple shifted in the nest.  Their movements were slow, lethargic, and restricted.  Much like how something moves when it is first born, or when it is moments from death. The actors shifted using their backs to move themselves instead of their arms, as if too weak to utilize them properly.  They were naked and the make-up made them look so pale.  Every hint of color was covered. 

I spent a long time wondering if they were meant to look really old or really young.  I finally decided that the sculpture is not addressing birth, but death.  The darkness makes them seem so alone, trapped in the feeble struggle of their final moments.  The feathers, not like the warm nest of an infant, but as if shed from the decaying body of a giant raptor, embraced the sick.  Perhaps the feathers were molted from the actors themselves.  And now, naked, dying and isolated, they wait for their final strength to leave them.  The woman stared at me while she arched her back and attempted to move toward me, but the exhaustion of such an effort only made her fall back to where she started.  Every movement was slow, so slow.  

I am not sure of the purpose of the burned wall coverings that looked like tanned hides.  Perhaps it was the disintegration of life.  Surrounding this scene was the smothering realization that all things will die and decay.  And while we can watch this happen, whether on the benches or through the holes in the wall, the couple are isolated in this moment.  When we die, we will be weak and alone, for this is one place no one can follow.

So these are my thoughts - now let's see what Eiko and Koma have to say:

Well it turns out the brochure is not super specific.  The beginning quote is "Linger, stay here with your eyes, and kinetically observe how our bodies move toward death." So death was on the right track, but I don't think the artists wished for me to get so specific.  They are more interested in the interacted played out between them and the viewer. " . . . Being seen and seeing is tender, ambiguous, and odd - it asks the viewer to observe details." Their art focuses more on the presence, physically and mentally, of the body.  So while the sculpture may have addressed the frailty of the body and its journey toward death, it was meant to bring awareness to everything the body is.  "We think the body offers radical questioning," stated the artists, " . . . not asking questions necessarily, but questioning as a state of being."

Water + Oil = Me + Ink

I have done little work with ink and on the rare occasions that we have interacted we have not been huge fans of one another . . . to put it nicely.  In all honesty, I strongly dislike this medium so you can imagine my dismay when I first learned that our final project would be done in India and colored ink.  I think it is the unpredictable nature of ink . . . that and the almost complete inability to fine tune it once it is down.  The ink is not meant to be refined or delicate in these drawings.  But sadly those are two things that I am rather fanatical about.

So basically, this just means that I am going to need to let that go.  UGH, ink just goes EVERYWHERE!! There is no controlling it.  It always bleeds into itself when you don't want it to.  And I am far too impatient for this medium.  I want it to dry instantly, but it doesn't and I know that, yet I seem surprised every time the black shadow crazes across the light blue highlight.

I need to practice for this.  Probably a lot.  I dislike practicing too.  Why am I so whiny this week?  My frustration is being released through a bitchy disposition. :)  I suppose this ink is only fair.  I have not had that much trouble drawing bodies up to this point so it is only practical that I am met with a challenge that makes me despair.  If the "Life" wasn't the difficulty than the "Drawing" will be.

You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out . . .

Eek!  I think I forgot a blog in here somewhere!  Whoopsy daisy.  But that actually works out because we talked about feet last week and I TOTALLY forgot to mention it.

I was really happy that the feet lecture finally happened because I am the typical amateur artist where every person just happens to be balancing on their ankles and all the models got their hands removed at the wrists in some freak accident!  To be honest, hands and feet terrify me. (Drawing them, that is, . . . not in general.)  They always come out looking out of proportion and like they are made of clay.  So finding out what goes on inside them was SO helpful.  Basically your little tootsies are connected to long, curved cylindrical bones called metatarsals.  And the interesting thing is that your two smallest toes metatarsals are connected to a different part of the foot than the ones for your other toes.  So thus a little space is created there and that is why that part of the foot appears to be at a different angle.  BINGO!

So after getting all the technical jargon, out model hopped up on the chair and we honed in on everything from the knee down.  I was so proud of mine!  This is leaps and bounds ahead of where I was before!  My feet look like feet and not pudding-filled latex gloves!

I am still a little scared of the hands, but this has given me a lot of confidence.  Maybe, like the feet, the hands are not as hard as they look!

Shell Contour: The Sequel

So Tuesday we had to turn in the second attempt at our shell contour drawings.  Compared to the first, this one excelled in some areas and regressed in others. It is always hard when you try something new because (although you usually learn a lot) it rarely turns out as nice as if you had just played it safe.  I tried to be more dramatic with my perspective and give the contour lines a more organic feel.  The bumps on the cone are still giving me a hard time and you can see my perspective is a little off.

I was still able to keep from drawing the outline though, but I dislike how messy it looks. The first drawing was so clean and my attempt at a more active, sketchy style slightly missed the mark.  Also, I need to work on letting go of some of the details and focus more on the general movement of the form.  I get so wrapped up in getting all the bumps that the intensity of the shells curves is lost and the resulting drawing looks flat.

Oh well, that is why we are doing four right?  Rarely does someone get things right the first time.  So this shell is in the middle somewhere.  I do not yet have a grasp on this contour business, but I hope by not playing it safe I may better achieve a drawing I can be proud of!