Below is a portrait of Hub Vogelmann in progress.  It is 16 x 20 inches, done in oil on canvas with marble dust and boiled linseed oil medium, using only cadmium lemon, ultramarine blue, permanent rose and zinc white.   While the first layer is mainly getting the shapes and the underlying basic color correct, subsequent layers will be put on in large sections to unify the color and get the light/dark relationship correct.

Below is the first layer of a painting that will evolve from figurative to abstract as subsequent layers are added.  It is 16 x 20 inches, oil on canvas.  All the color comes from mixtures of Thalo blue, Cadmium Lemon and Permanent Rose.

I’ve been reading Friedman’s “Close Reading,” looking at Chuck Close’s web site, and playing with grids this week. I’m using a very thick marble dust/boiled linseed oil medium which dries overnight. The first layers of two different trials are shown below, one in color using only a mixture of ultramarine blue, permanent rose and permanent yellow (and zinc white). The other is just vine black and zinc white. In order the images are the 1st layer of the color painting, a close up of the face of the subject in this image, the layout for this image, and lastly, the first layer of the black and white image. I’m enjoying seeing how the shapes fuse when viewed at different distances. Both these have many layers yet to go. I’m trying to get the figure and ground to mix into each other. More about that later. The first image has a lot of glare on it from my light source. It isn’t as washed out on top as it looks.  Both images are 16 x 20 inches on gessoed canvas on board.
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Standing in the Road

When I draw something from my imagination, something I’ve seen before and remember, it may resemble what I’ve seen. But there are many differences between my visual recollection and what a camera might record. So try this: Imagine you are standing in the middle of a road in Kansas. There are no mountains. The landscape is flat. As you look down the imagined road it stretches linearly out in front of you, with no curves, and vanishes in the distance on the flat horizon. On your left are many telephone poles along the edge of the road. The poles vanish into the distance ahead of you and behind you on the left. On your right, a very short distance along the road from where you are standing, sits a small rectangular, flat roofed house with a door (like a box with a door in the side.) Close your eyes and keep the scene in mind for half a minute – road, poles, house. Then open them, take a pencil, and sketch the imagined scene as you would see it while standing in the middle of the road looking ahead to where it vanishes in the distance. It should NOT be a detailed sketch, just a simple line drawing (no shading, telephone wires, shingles on the house, etc.). DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED YOUR DRAWING, which should take no more than 5 minutes.

I did this exercise for the first time with a a small group in Hereford, England in 2002. Though the drawings each of us did varied in detail, they had one “mistake” in common. The scene was drawn from high above, looking down on the poles, house and road. The viewer of this scene would have to be 300 feet tall, or be flying over the road in a helicopter. Some even drew themselves in the picture, looking down the road! Look at your drawing. Is the image drawn from high above the scene or from the view of someone standing in the road? Keep in mind that for any viewer, the horizon line (where the road converges in the distance) is always at eye level. I’ve had groups do this exercise every year for the past five years and almost all the drawings show this interesting “mistake”. Why does it happen, and what might it mean for how we visually recollect? We all have visual memories. In the example above, our memories of all the roads we have seen vanishing into the distance, wider close to us and less wide farther away. More generally, things appear larger to us when they are close, and smaller when they are at a distance, like the telephone poles and the diminishing width of the road. This is an important feature of our visual memory. Less important, in the example above, is where we are with respect to the horizon. The poles, house and road often appear in our memory as seen from high above. Our position with respect to the scene is quite grand. It is similar to the very common and well known experience of flying dreams, as well as “near death” experience memories recalled by those who recover from life threatening health emergencies. They remember looking down upon themselves. It is likely that such memories are part of the basic pattern of remembering we all share. Where visual memories are concerned, we are not like cameras.

Drawing a Portrait – Why Memory May Make it Difficult

Now, imagine the face of a loved one, relative or friend and draw a quick sketch from memory. Take only 3 minutes for this exercise. Look only at your paper. Don’t read further until you’ve finished your drawing. You may note that your drawing has idealized or iconic versions of the subjects eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, etc. Your memory stores these features, not as actual shapes, but as icons of generic shape. For example, eyes of this sort are almond shaped, with a circle inside for the iris and a black spot for the retinal opening.

Not imagining, but looking directly at the face of a friend or colleague, and drawing what we actually see is still very difficult. Our drawing is constantly being distorted by memory, by what we have seen in the past and have categorized into what might be called object icons (our mind’s symbolic picture of a nose or an eye or an ear.) We often draw what we “know”, not what we see. When I see a face and try to draw it, my mind interferes. I do the drawing by looking at the face for a bit, and then start to look at my paper as I draw, occasionally glancing back at the subject. I behave as if I was a camera recording an image in my head, and then looking down at my paper to recreate what I just saw. But memory interferes. I am not a camera, and my drawing is then not a good likeness. I let iconic images influence me. The eye in my drawing takes on characteristics of an almond shape with a circle and a dot inside – the generic eye. A nose takes on characteristics of an inverted triangular shape with two dark spots for nostrils – the generic nose. I draw eye lashes and strands of hair that I could not possibly see, but which are lodged in my memory of lashes and brows. The actual shape of a nose or eye depends on the angle from which you view it, the light, and many other factors. Eye lashes and strands of hair are only visible from a few inches away. When I let my mind interfere with my drawing, the resulting face is, in part, a memory cartoon. Learning to ignore these impulses from memory and look only at shapes is critically important in learning how to draw what we see.

Looking, Drawing and Shape Consciousness

To really draw well, it also helps to stop naming objects (noses, mouths, ears, etc.). This helps us attend only to the shapes of things in front of us, comparing those shapes to the shapes in our drawing. Our intention should be:

look, mark, look, mark, look, mark, look, mark, look, mark, look

and not:

look, look, look, look, look, look, mark, mark, mark, mark, mark

If we draw in the first way, rather than the second, we will constantly compare
our drawing to the subject, and see where we go astray.

Dissociating – The Grid

One way of focusing our attention on shapes and values (dark and light spots) and keeping memory at bay when we draw, is to put a grid in front of the subject. Using a sheet of glass we can draw horizontal and vertical lines. This puts transparent squares over the subject. Looking through this grid, we can focus on the shapes in each individual square. Objects, names and our memories of them diminish (arms, feet, legs, eyes, ears. etc.) and shape consciousness increases. One can also do this with a grid of black threads as Duerer did many hundreds of years ago. The paper used in these drawing exercises has a grid identical to the vertical one in front of the subject, and we can draw shapes and values, square by square. Even with this technique there are problems. The world is three dimensional. We have two eyes and the view from each is a bit different inside each square of the grid. And if we move our head from one position to another, the subject changes positions behind the grid. If we look only through one eye, and fix our head in only one position we can proceed, but this is arduous and difficult. It was commonly done by artists before cameras were invented.

An Exercise in Shape Consciousness – Working in Two Dimensions

All these problems can be solved by working in two dimensions, from a photograph. It can be a way of informing our ability to draw from life. The artist Chuck Close has taken the grid approach to its limits, producing an impressive body of intriguing and startling work, which probes the nature of memory, abstraction and three dimensional reality. To do this, a photograph is taken of the subject, and a grid of lines is drawn over the photo. Each square of the grid is located by a number and a letter (labeling the horizontal and vertical axes.) A similarly labeled grid is prepared on paper, with larger squares than the photographic grid, but with the same number of squares. The drawing is done, square by square, with attention focused at any one time on each grid square. The drawings that result are a summation of many small individual shape and value studies. Viewed from a distance, astonishing fusion occurs.

Drawing from Life

Drawing from a grid is not drawing from life, but as I noted above, it can inform our efforts to see without the disturbing influence of memory. If we can learn from grid drawing to attend to the actual shapes of things in front of us, and the actual amount of light and dark in those shapes, we can improve our ability to render what we see in the three dimensional world on a two dimensional paper or canvas.

Images to go with the above text will be posted a little later when I get more time.

Finished up another layer on these three pieces. The white flower in a pewter cup has been around a long time, but the background still needs work. I lowered the value of the background and warmed it on the right and cooled it on the left. It’s too divided at the moment, and I’m planning on carrying some warm value over to the left later. The fruit is close to where I want it – a bit fuzzy and an attempt at getting texture into it. The portrait at the bottom is Archer, and though it isn’t exactly what I wanted, it is as far as I want to go with it now. It will inform my efforts on the next one. There is a LOT of marble dust in it, which gave it a lot of texture and allowed it to dry hard a s a rock very quickly.

In order of appearance: Kelly, Nita, Emily E., Steph S., Steph F., Grace, Margo, Hanna, Rachel, Lila, Emily S., and Bri. Thanks for your creative work yesterday. The light in the museum was not sufficient (with my small camera) for getting images of your art. My apologies.

 Below are a few examples of student drawings based on exercises in Dodson’s “Keys to Drawing with Imagination”.