Art is an antidote

A man sat at the next table--in his seventies, surel,y with a pinky ring that looked like it was out of a Cracker Jack box. A slender gold band with a giant red stone.

He sipped coffee and took bites of pumpkin bread--opting to use a fork, when I'd have just used my fingers.

He slipped a pair of glass on his nose.

"I want to draw him," I thought, imagining the satisfaction of capturing the bags under his eyes, the broom of stubble on his chin.

At the table next to him, six senior citizens--the women clustered at one end, the men at the other hovered over the newspaper.

These were interesting faces. Faces I wouldn't think twice about before taking a drawing class, I'd favored the smooth faced beauties in fashion magazines. Pretty. Fresh. But young faces have nothing to dig into, nothing to capture with the lights and darks of charcoal and eraser.

Art is the antidote to our beauty- and, youth-obsessed culture. All those anorexic, self-loathing girls and boys out there should just take a drawing class. Learn to see to creased and flappy bodies and faces, lined and stretched, dented and bent in a different way. Captivating.

Self portrait

In this evening's class we created a bizarre self portrait, working for 20 minutes at a time on just a small section of our face. We folded the paper into quarters, and started with the left eye and bridge of the nose, then the right, then the bottom part of the nose and part of the mouth, then the other part of the mouth.

We set things up so that our features would be out of proportion intentionally.  The mouth and eyes cock-eyed. Features pulled and squished.

Drawing like this makes me wonder if I can write like this.

More drawings

We have moved from graphite to charcoal, which proves to be much more forgiving.

I've always been intimidated by charcoal, but now that I understand a bit more about how to work with it, I love it. 

This first image is a composite. The left eye is Lauren Bacall's. The nose is Quincy Jones'. And the mouth and right eye from two others--combined to create a harsh looking individual, but I was amazed at what I'd created anyway.

The second and third image are from my last class. I spent most of the class working on the old man, and all of about 10 minutes on the old woman. Nevertheless, I think I captured her essence much more accurately--perhaps because I was working so quickly and not worrying too much .

Intro to drawing

I'm taking a drawing class. I've always loved drawing, but beyond art class in school, I've never had any formal instruction.

Not that my class is "formal." It's as informal and loose as it can get. Phil Sylvester's approach is to get you to shut down that internal censor, not worry about trying to reproduce what you're trying to draw, but closely observe and let your instincts take care of the rest.

In class # 2, we looked closely at each part of our faces using a little hand-held mirror. Phil asked us just to make marks on the paper--scribbles really--where we saw something. So I wasn't even trying to make an "eye," or a "nose" or a "mouth." I was just recording lights and darks and interesting places I saw on the paper.

We used a new sheet of paper for every part--so we could make giant eyes and noses and mouths. I drew several of each. And then at the end, we cut out the ones we liked best and glued them together to make a "face." Here's mine:

If you look closely, you'll see it really is scratches and scribbles. The mouth is mostly a series of vertical lines. I love that together, it looks like a crazy face.

Images from class 3 and 4 soon!