This week I dove deep into subtractive drawing, something I wasn't particularly comfortable with before this. The process was the same: cover the paper with mid-tone charcoal value, search for the figure in a familiar gesture drawing, slowly build up form, use eraser to show highlights and charcoal pencil to show shadows, continue to refine the values, and add negative space details. In the first couple drawings, 15 minutes is not sufficient time to get through all of these steps. In the 45 minute drawing, I had enough time to at least somewhat address each of those steps.
I am proud of the longer drawing because I think it's one of the most naturalistically accurate drawings I've done, especially including value. For whatever reason, I decided to take myself less seriously on the longer drawing than on the two shorter ones. I have had a tendency in the past to put the artmaking process "on a pedestal" - and I think that has been something that has held me back. The "Seated female" drawing shows that when I relax my standards for myself, I tend to enjoy the process of creation more and also tend to produce better work. In addition to that, other lessons from this week are to consider composition carefully, the importance of negative space to ground a subject, learning subtractive drawing as a general skill, and most importantly, not to take myself so seriously.
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I greatly enjoyed this week. Working at this scale and in this manner really frees an artist. This week was educational for me - it reminded me to focus on drawing things like mass and tension and mood and let go of things like outer contour lines. You can see the first couple gestures from October 15 were too much too quickly. I jumped right to dark lines, mostly depicting shapes instead of forms. With the later drawings you can see the transition to very light searching lines that move through, not around, the figure. I had far more success in gesture drawing by drawing lighter lines that show dimensionality instead of shape. These drawings are some of the most fun I have in art - too often, I place artmaking and the process of creation on a pedestal and I forget to let my process flow. This week reminded me of that.
This week was a transitional week. I finished up the project "Whip", hung and documented it, and am now looking forward. This week was the important but not fun part of art. First was the critique of "Whip". I do not completely hate this project but I also am not proud of it. In my opinion, it was better as a simple pen drawing instead of with the acrylic. Throughout this and other projects, I am chasing a perfect image in my mind of a knock-your-socks-off project. So I am nearly always a little disappointed in my work.
Specifically, I think I can work on craftsmanship, planning, and composition. But I also think I have a tendency to take the art too seriously. This critique taught me that I should not put the final work on a pedestal so much and instead focus on the process. With this in mind, I intend to spend the next several weeks or months simply cranking out art, emphasizing the process of creation instead of the end product. I have some ideas I would like to pursue: more fumage, more sculpture, more unconventional materials, and more productivity. Part of the reason that this week was not productive was that I spent a lot of time in the documentation process. I struggled particularly with color correction, which is a new skill for me. I eventually had to reshoot and re-edit the artwork. |