Impersonator

This is my 100th blog post. I'm kind of psyched. I don't think I've committed to anything else for quite this long. Everything is usually shorter in duration. This is a delight. So for today, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. I guess faking it is similar to just showing up. Something about that rings true for drawing, painting, and blogging. Perhaps teaching and career-making as well! More to follow!

Nancy meets Marilyn

Keely

Quick Cast

Emerging from the wild of the Frame

I tend to extol the virtues of eschewing one's own mannerisms in class, but I'm fighting that problem myself right now. I think the eye line of all my drawings is a problem when working from imagination.. it starts to look too similar, too squared off, always the same shape, even in the paintings which are more worked over... but again, these wild weekend drawings tend to take the emphasis off of that frailty with the gesture running around outside.

Flourish

On my way out the door, a goofy little imaginative flourish for the day, neither exacting nor a confection.

Drunk Drawing Portrait and Gesture

Strange the way these do great things with gesture, I think I need to give myself more freedom in my work. Series tends to open that up, as does alcohol. Funny.

Drunk Drawing

Husband and I had a bit of wine last night and then I started again with the silly invented portraits.. this is the best of the bunch. Several different weights of graphite in my new Windpower Drawing sketchbook.. not so evil! I'm so in love with the little orange sketchbooks, I think they're even made in Massachusetts. Well at least for all the paper I go through in a day looking for something that might be right, I'm not using quite so much coal related product. I dunno. Silly huh? Mmmm... slightly ethical, slightly indulgent. Woot!

In Progress / Show and Tell

This new painting is something of a labor of love for me. I'm taking her really slow, working on each likeness with slow building marks. Many of the likenesses are invented, notwithstanding my portrait of Abe Lincoln at the bottom of the Tondo. It is kind of exciting to teach figure drawing and cast drawing at the same time that I am working on a kind of cartoon of these disciplines. My students have been making remarkable works with sharpened charcoal and determination! My caricature and pile habit nods to such labors, but makes a fanciful diversion from them at the outset. While I consider these oil paintings a discipline, perhaps they are more a habit of repeated mark-making and intimate portraiture (12" diameter round). Well, off to the studio and to figure drawing group!

Skull Study Redux

After sticking myself with a knife last night while cutting an avocado for dinner, I feel less inclined to think about my skeleton today. You know that woozy feeling you get right after you do some sort of injury to yourself, well I'm a big loser and I have to lie down or else I'll faint. Its funny because I'm constantly surrounded by information about what lies under all this tissue, and yet the moment I stick myself and gush blood, all that rational knowledge goes out the window with dizzy pronouncements of "but I'm bleeding!" Comical yes, appropriate for my nutsy necrophiliac work, probably not. Yet, still I feel inclined to make a study of what I'm most afraid of and seduced by daily with heaps of anatomy books and models. Mostly, it feels a cartoon to me. Thank goodness for that.

Skulls as Daily Practice or Some Such Rot

Venus Darling

My first attempt at cast drawing using several atelier methods and sighting methods that I have been reading about. I particularly like the methods suggested by a few of the books I've begun reading in the past month: Classical Drawing Atelier by Juliette Aristides, The Art of Teaching Art by Deborah Rockman and Cast Drawing using the Sight-Size Approach by Darren Rousar. I'm using a modified cast drawing method with regard to these sources. Instead of using vine charcoal (preferred) I'm using 4B lead pencil to do the sketch and then soft graphite to do the shading, the choice for graphite partially made as I am dust averse in my own home. When at the studio, all bets are off, dust will fly! Also, I decided to forgo the sight-size exercise right now as I need a proper height for my Venus cast as this process necessitates a studio set-up and it is significantly slower than the quick sketch I was looking to start with.. However, I did find the Plumb Line (a piece of string or cute pink ribbon with a bolt attached to it to weigh it down and giving a true straight line) to be universally helpful - I will be using plumb lines in addition to sighting sticks (basically a knitting needle used to measure angles and relative size of different components of your drawing) and mahl sticks in my charcoal drawings in the near future. The plumb line is used in classical cast drawing to create a center line which you can measure off of, it creates a useful position to sight heights and widths of heads, chins, eye placement etc, and also it creates a bolt straight line to sight angles (like the angle of the chin). I find this method infinitely teachable, even as my super-quick sketch suggests absolutely no mastery of this new method for me!

Anterior - Male Pelvis

Reinhold

With Rocks and Oysters