Last night students made value studies of still life in charcoal. After covering a large sheet of paper with a gray midtone of soft charcoal, line sketches were done with medium vine charcoal. Using a gum eraser the highlights were pulled out (negative drawing) and darker areas were added with more stick charcoal. The results are shown below. All the drawings turned out very well, and students learned a great deal about Chiaroscuro (creating the illusion of volume and space with dark and light.) We spent about an hour talking about light, shadow and form, as well as the value scale. The biggest challenge was perception of all the value changes which occur in the subject under different lighting conditions. We turned all the room lights down and used spot lighting to accentuate the shadows. In following weeks, we will do this again using different mediums. Ink wash is on the agenda in a couple of weeks. Next week we will be studying one, two and three point perspective.

From the conference in Washington on Tuesday:
Richard Holbrooke, Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Architect of the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia:

The full title of the 1948 Genocide Convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.” We must focus on prevention. Ahmadinejad is at the UN – we can’t stop him from speaking there – but we should never invite him to speak anywhere else. He uses these forums to legitimize himself in Iran.
Gregory Gordon, Former Legal Officer, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:

The origins of the legal definition of incitement to genocide are with the case against Nazi Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stuermer. In 1946 the Nuremberg Court found his incitement to kill Jews constituted a crime against humanity. Genocide does not take place without incitement.

Dore Gold, Former Israeli Ambassador to the UN:
The international community is engaged in a struggle to understand who Ahmadinejad is and what his role is. He’s trying to become a legitimate world leader, but he should be in the box of a war criminal.
Esther Mujawayo, Survivor of the Rwanda Genocide in 1994:

At the time of the Rwanda Genocide in 1994, the official propaganda of the government prior to and during the genocide, via newspapers and radio, was to promote hatred of the Tutsis. Hearing Ahmadinejad in the UN makes me doubt that the international community has learned its lesson.

Salih Mahmoud Osman, Member of Parliament in Sudan, Human Rights Actvist-Darfur:

Why is the situation in Darfur happening after the Rwanda genocide? It is largely caused by government incitement of racial hatred, denying peoples’ identity.
Prof. Irwin Cotler, Member of Parliament, Canada, Former Attorney General and Justice Minister:

States that are parties to the Convention against Genocide ignore that they have not only a right but a responsibility to prevent incitement to genocide. The failure of state parties and the UN to act is a fatal blow to the corpus of international law and to the UN, especially to the Genocide Convention. The international community must promote preventative action.

At the beginning of class I’ll collect the Xerox copy of your journal book entry reflecting on your upcoming paper. Bring the Xerox copy to class, don’t come to class and then leave to copy it. I don’t want the original, just the copy (with a title, clear signature and date). You will be graded on this reflection. After we critique your homeowork assignment (from Dodson) up on the board, we’ll briefly go over the handouts I’ll give you, and then have a short lecture/discussion on the topic of value and Chiaroscuro drawing in charcoal, followed immediately by a quiz on these topics.

You will then begin a value drawing in charcoal by covering a large sheet of paper, taped to your drawing board, with soft charcoal. After lightly sketching your subject in vine charcoal on the midtone gray, you’ll remove charcoal with your gummed eraser to create light values and add charcoal with your soft or medium charcoal stick to create darker values. Pay very careful attention to the actual intensity of the darks and lights. If you do this correctly, you will be able to create the illusion of volume. In the example below you will see a quick drawing of some apples done this way from life. The photos below it represent, on the left, the values of the still life, and on the right, the full color version of the still life from which the drawing was made. The drawing took about 40 minutes from start to finish, which is plenty of time for you to make one or two of these.
I will bring lots of subjects which you can draw. Or if you wish, you may bring your own. If you do, bring objects which are white or clear glass. We will turn off the overhead lights (or dim them) and bring some local spot lights to create shadows which will result in interesting compositions.

Drawing as a Way of Knowing students spent about 4 hours yesterday, exploring the differences between analytical and intuitive modes of drawing – i.e. slow and careful measurement to create accurate rendering of shape and value vs. more rapid gestural drawing, to capture intention, motion and feeling of the subject. Rebecca kindly came and modeled for us in poses of 20 seconds, 2 minutes and 20 minutes. Everyone was very hospitable to her and she enjoyed seeing everyone’s work.

The focus of the day was an effort to have students keep their eyes on the subject, at least as much or more, as on their drawing. This helps in drawing what you SEE, and not what you KNOW (i.e., what you think something should look like). It’s a challenge. If you look at the pictures of students above, you’ll note that almost everyone’s eyes are on their drawings and not on Rebecca. Is this a coincidence? Probably not. Most of us draw as follows: look, look, look, look, mark, mark mark, mark. I happened to snap the image during a mark, mark period. These are generally longer than the looking period, which is often at the very beginning of each pose. We sometimes act like we are a camera, taking in the subject in an intensive look, and then creating the drawing from the image in our heads. We should try to make more of an effort to constantly compare our drawing to the subject: look, mark, look, mark, look, mark, etc. That being said, some very creative and well done work resulted by the end of the day.

We also looked at images by master artists (3rd image down from the top) to see how gestural and analytic modes are used in different drawings. We talked about how gesture can be foundational for analytic drawings in some cases, and how it can be supportive and merge into more precise regions of the drawing in others. One classic example of the latter is the drawing by Rembrandt, where the area around the subject’s face is very carefully analytic (to capture a likeness), but the body and clothes are quite loose, flowing and gestural.

The last image posted is from a student who really got the essence of gesture down well. It involves much restatement, and is loose and free, yet captures the essence of the pose and the weight and position of the model’s body.

For a short video (youtube) demonstration of a simple gesture drawing, click here. When you get to the choices, click on the gesture drawing of the fan.  It’s the best one illustrating what we tried to do in class.

An excellent class of 14 students began last week. This week we did drawing exercises which focus attention on eye-brain-hand interactions, including drawing from memory, drawing blind, drawing while looking (look, mark, look, mark, look -etc.), and in the photos above, exercises in drawing things very close to the eye (insects), a medium distance of about 10 to 15 feet (a bird or flowers in a vase or corn on a chair), and finally things far away.

We would have gone outside for the latter, but the light was gone and the temperature was in the 50′s. So instead we used a projection of a distant landscape. The problem with this of course, is that the photographer of the scene composed it. But students did their own versions, modifying, altering and creating their own compositions and styles. A lot of attention was paid to measuring, proportions, and getting shapes and values correct. Many very nice drawings resulted.

In the process of doing this work we tried to focus on thinking of the visual field as a collection of shapes of various values, rather than a collection of named things (trees, houses, cups, wings, etc.) I tried to get everyone in the photos, and if I didn’t succeed, my apologies to those I missed. As the course proceeds I’ll attempt to get everyones’s drawings and process up in this blog.

Thanks to everyone for working hard and creating great drawings. Remember this week to spend some time researching the artists you will be writing about and emulating in your papers. I’ll need to give you final approval for your choices, so email me, call or see me in class about what you have found and what you are thinking about as paper topics. I’ll be sending an email to the listserv about the content of next week’s class, so make sure you are ON the listserv. If you are having trouble, please contact the helpline or visit the computer center in the the basement of Waterman for assistance.

A final note: PLEASE use fixative on the charcoal drawings you did so that they remain on the paper and don’t wind up as a collection of dust on the bottom of your portfolios. Thanks much!!!

Have spent about a week or two doing flower still lifes in various color triads. The first image is one from yesterday – the first layer (using linseed oil/marble dust putty with small amounts of vine black, zinc white and permanent rose). The second image is a group shot of various paintings in progress. Am really beginning to get the knack for trial after trial to see what emerges without having to have that FINAL painting in my mind.

When we look at any image (take for example the one exhibited here by Rajie Cook at the Burlington, Vermont Art Hop – FlynnDog Gallery), in the instant beyond our immediate perception we interpret it. Our understanding of its meaning comes not only from the image “out there” in front of us, but from our own life experiences, knowledge and past history. So any one image will have different meanings for different viewers. Adding text is another issue. Text, like a lens, focuses meaning and can make it clearer. And if the text is a falsehood, it becomes part of an artistic effort that lies.

Art Hop has again become a venue for such lies, again sponsored by “Vermonters for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine”. Using words like peace and justice in the name of an organization like this is, in itself, a lie. What are we to make of the image above, a model of a crushed child in a high tech mouse trap, arms broken, steel across the neck. All kinds of interpretations might occur to us. But when it is accompanied by text which tells us that Jewish “soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport” we are confronted by blood libel. Here in Burlington, Vermont. The Art Hop exhibit at the Flynn Dog is an extension outwards of similar images linked in the web site of “Vermonters for Just Peace….”, images which turn history upside down and equate Jews with Nazis.

When I asked the artist (Cook) about this image and the words associated with it, all he could say was: “Have you read Hedges book?” This is the author whose words he quotes. That was essentially the end of our exchange. His talk was about the oppression of the Palestinians: road blocks, check points, walls, barriers, etc., and how these make life difficult. Of course they make life difficult. It would be better if they did not exist. But no mention was made of WHY there are road blocks, check points, walls and barriers in Israel. Suicide bombings, rocket attacks from Gaza and weekly terrorist attacks and attempts at attack are not part of such presentations.

There are better ways to advocate for peace in the middle east. Demonizing Jews and Israel only polarizes the community and creates acrimony, anger and disgust. It does not represent the place where we live.

Alla Prima in Phthalo Blue, Indian Yellow and Permanent Rose. I gotta move on from this triad. A lotta of marble dust putty too. Very little Zinc White! Had a lot of trouble with the glare on the top right because this isn’t dry yet, and the oil relfects the light source. Haven’t yet decided whether this is going to be the underlayer of many more to come, or whether I should call it a day or do another painting of this subject down the road to more reality.