Oh To Be in Boston....

Brisbane to Boston.... the attraction of walking the streets that Robert B Parker, Dennis Lehane and Jeremiah Healy inhabit has always been tempting, but of late there are other reasons for me wishing I was in Boston right now. 


The Boston Museum of Fine Art currently has (by all accounts) a wonderful exhibition of Degas Nudes on for the next few months. Edgar Degas is best known for his paintings of horse races and ballerinas in rehearsal, but from the 1870s until about 10 years before his death in 1917, Degas knocked out some of the greatest nudes in the history of Impressionism and Western art. Only the media changed - charcoal, pastel, paint, monotype, lithograph, clay - but the consistency of image remained constant. Degas stripped away centuries of idealisation and to a degree, sentimentality, revealling the female form as it was in his lifetime. From all accounts, Boston's MFA exhibition has gathered some of the best American Degas nudes and French works together and also mixes other contemporaries alongside to help offer comparisons and break the image flow. The images are at times unsettling as well with some of the images depicting brothel workers and lesbian sex alongside some of the more well-known and admired Degas work's showing women at bathtime and drying themselves in mise-en-scene paintings. Oh... to be in Boston...

Penwald Drawings

Penwald drawings are the result of mesmerizing performance drawings by artist and dancer Tony Orrico. He is a human spirograph, performing works for up to 4 hours continuously! A true testament to hard work and the physical nature of art.

Gustav Klimt: Drawing

With Klimt in vogue in Victoria at the moment, I've been posting Klimt images here over the last few days. Its a little difficult to find decent Klimt drawings on the web and the ones that are there fall into three categories :

Early works such as this piece which show Klimt the draftsman (before he became Klimt as we know him). Klimt certainly had ability as one would expect when they'd been educated through the academy tradition;

Working drawings for his paintings which are the rough sketches for the larger works where he is working out basic compositional problems for his canvasses. these show some of the basic characteristics of the paintings, but are extremely rough works similar to "mud maps".

His erotic pieces which are in many ways highly provocative(eg Danae and her Golden Shower) and I'm a little hesitant to put them up here due to the NSFW nature of them (You can find several of these easily and they are readily available at any number of sites and blogs.) Klimt himself was said to have fathered 14 illegitimate children and descriptions of his studio and sketches from the times suggest an extremely bohemian lifestyle, so we shouldn't be surprised at some of the imagery - very reminiscent of Egon Schiele erotic nudes in both style and content matter.

But as to finding Klimt drawings that look like "Klimt"...
Burn brightly, Pete.

Fingerings

Judith Ann Braun is an artist who has gone back to basics and is drawing with her fingers, producing some surprising and unique results.

Braun says: "Fingerings" are done with my fingers dipped in charcoal, sometimes using both hands simultaneously to the extent of my arm's reach. I am using the inherent symmetry of the body to make gestural inscriptions,developing a vocabulary of mark making with these simple means.'

Burn brightly, Pete.

Rounded Drawings

Students often ask me about my own personal work. Although I trained as a painter, I would consider myself more comfortable drawing than painting - not that I'm doing very much of either these days. I remain interested in the process and developments of others however and my eye was recently caught by the drawings of a American sculptor, John Paul Gardner. Like so many sculptors, his drawings have an added or heightened sense of depth and his marks making all works to help build that 3D experience into his work - as evidenced in these recent black and white drawings of his:

Burn brightly, Pete

Tremendous Tens

Recent drawing exercises from Year 10 students - 

beginning with multiple sport images showing movement and depth in pencil or fineliner pen with a simple single coloured line added to help develop the image; the second busier drawing is about energy and motion with the inclusion of colour with coloured paper collaged on randomly; the final is a drawing still using the initial figures but building on energy and movement, but using other marks. The final darker image is produced in inks with the idea of being a faster and looser drawing about drawing and mark making using what was learnt in previous exercises. 

Three different students show their approaches to the problem:

Student 1: Equestrian

Student 2 : Gymnastics

Student 3: Snowboarding

Burn brightly, Pete

Drawing New Conclusions

Artist Sol LeWitt insisted that the artist’s role lies principally in the conception rather than the execution of the work. LeWitt then went farther, arguing that the execution may be carried out by a competent assistant working to a preconceived plan without any assistance from the artist at all. 

His Lines in Four Directions,Each in a Quarter of a Square is a classic 1969 ink study, where an upright sequence is followed, clockwise, by a horizontal and two kinds of diagonal direction. It sounds simple enough, but the result looks unexpectedly complex, even mysterious. (See above) He then began producing spectacular mural-size drawings in private and public spaces, with assistants carrying out his written instructions. His first solo show in London covered five walls with thin pencil lines executed entirely by students. LeWitt did not see the work until they had finished making it.

LeWitt died in 2007 but his legacy to art survives in an amazing collection of writings, photographs, and above all the drawings that continue to delight amaze and confound. Challenging to some, delightful and beautiful to others - LeWitt pushes the boundaries and asks us all to draw our own conclusions about the process of drawing.


Burn brightly, Pete.

My Fabulous Nines

Two weeks ago I finished a unit of tonal charcoal drawings with my year 9s (thirteen year olds) and have been working through marking over 50 works today. Self portraits, they worked from photographs taken on the Mac's camera and produced these large (A2 = A4x4) charcoal works. Here's a sample - no names no pack drill - but they all look like them and I'm very pleased with the results:

Burn brightly, Pete

Medium Rare

Juan Francisco Casas is an artist who rather bravely has chosen to use biro as his preferred medium - brave because this choice is not seen as a classic method of art making. Educated in Spain, his works have gained both international popularity and notoriety over the last ten years. Not small pieces, Casas' works are developed up initially from photographs.... but be warned the site (in Spanish and English) may not be for the feint-hearted.

So don't let the classic forms or a lack of formal education in the various media and forms stop you from producing the way you want to. Get the image down and do it your way. Remember Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life time and that was because someone took pity on him and helped him pay a debt. Go for it and do it your way.

Burn brightly, Pete.

Not All Fingers and Wrist

Trying to get kids to understand that drawings don't have to be photographic or representational can be an uphill battle at times... and they don't all need to be produced by conventional methods either. Here are some wonderful drawings produced by making bubbles from ink and soapy water. By US artist Charlotte Sullivan...

Burn brightly, Pete