One of the best pieces of advice regarding drawing I've gotten since getting out of school I found in a drawing manual written in the thirties by an instructor from the New York Art Students' League. The manual itself outlines what today is your standard issue figure drawing course: A course of study based on gesture and contour drawing, with the longer studies taking one to three hours. The piece of advice is this: That drawing should be approached "incessantly, painstakingly, [and] furiously". Taken at face value, this advice isn't so great, because it resembles the worn-out advice given in art schools everywhere, "more!!! bigger!!!"; Having such advice thrown out at me in a critique is a little disconcerting, because the central purpose of critique is to present me with different perspectives on what I've done, and it insults my intelligence to presume that I wouldn't think to make more of the work, or enlarge the work.
So the drawing manual's advice is helpful only after unpacking the meaning a little. "Incessantly" just means that drawing should be habitual. The author associates drawing "painstakingly" with contour drawing, and "furiously" with gesture. This parallels something we've talked about quite a bit, many years ago: the dynamic between intuition and system.
The point of all of this is that in order to get any traction in art-making, one needs to work both furiously and painstakingly, not just one or the other. An operational flexibility is also nessecary; The flux between these two attitudes (painstaking:furious, precision:output, measured:loose) is likely what renews and reinvigorates our motives to make work, and determines how fluent we are with our materials.
For instance, Matisse was an artist that was very methodical in order to appear very loose. He kept a strict regimen of gesture drawings for several hours before each painting session, and made dozens of revisions and reiterations to his paintings. On the other hand, Calder was an artist that was very loose and cavalier about work that was ultimately very technical; this applies particularly to his mobiles, which enforce formal balance as physical balance.
Nicolaїdes, Kimon. The Natural Way to Draw. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969.
An unfortunate title, to be sure. What it's suggesting is that art making can only be learned experientially.
The Stars, Our Destination...
2 comments:
The best advice I've had in drawing was to draw what your eye actually sees, not what your brain tells you the eye is seeing. Too many folks look at an object and (consciously or not) think, "I know what one of those looks like. I'll just draw one."
i see an eye in your mouth.
uh, how did you manage that?
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