Monthly Studio Update - May, 2006
Studio Update:
A month or two ago I received works that I had in storage since 1994. I still haven't gone through all the work but I would like to share with you some of the pieces. One of the portfolios had works from 1977-80. I was a student in Holland then. The school I went to had no formal instruction, it was called the Free Academy, but they had models everyday. One day a week for the morning, afternoon, and evening sessions they had five-minute figure poses--that is something like 85 drawings in the day. I loved it! I was 21-23 years old and my goal was to be fluent with the figure. My belief then was that if I could draw vital figures the everything else, like landscape and still-life, was child's play. My view now is slightly different. Oh, there was really no instruction so I was left to my own devices on how to learn. Some days I would focus on line, other days on shadows, some on details, some on movement--but the fun thing on those Wednesdays is that five minutes is not very long and you simply have to go for it in a big way. The next five images are all 5-minute works from 1978.
This drawing below was 2-minute pose. If you squint your eyes you will see the figure almost pop out realistically.
The next two are mixed-media, water, charcoal. These were 20-minute poses.
One of the interesting things about seeing these works after a long absence is that I am still delighted with them, I don't know if its a sixth sense but I feel like "ya, that is it!" And I know I felt something like that when I made them. The ones that I felt like "what the hell is that!", landing pretty quickly in the trash bucket, ha, I am sure I would still not like them today.
This pencil drawing was of my roommate, Claudet, which I later turned into a painting.
I was on a path from my abstract expressionist education towards a natural realism, here is a self-portrait in pastel which was a study for the painting Pursuit.
These female torsos are from the time of Denouement, 1987.
One of the biggest problems in realism is that it is unforgiving, if something is slightly off, the total looks retarded. Here is a drawing left unfinished but you can see all the stages of the drawing and the care I took to double check proportions and anatomy. This was somewhere around 1989, I was working on four or five life-sized realistic paintings then.
One of those paintings was Ascension Night. This is kind of a hybrid study: its part Xerox copy of a line drawing and I overlaid that with pencil, marking the direction and form of the body.
I thought it interesting to see these two together. The man is recent and the woman from '78, what's that? 28 years. They are so different and yet very much the same.
Ok, back to real time. This is one of the small still-lifes I have been working on. I am getting ready to teach a class on color theory and I pumped up this painting accordingly. Its too complex to go into here, but the idea was hot shadows and cool highlights.
Yes! Finished this still life of the Little Bird.
That is May's Studio Update.