Sunday, December 28, 2014

No Exit




Peonies in  Large Snifter, Oil on Canvas, 25 by 24 in.

Happy Moo Year, Oil on Canvas, 12 by 14 in.

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint
Birth of a Model, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Well, it was another rough year for this old traditional realist painter and obligatory starving artist, who at this particularly dreary time of the year is really bored painting mediocre still lifes under the lousy natural light entering the two adjacent but insufficient windows in his home studio in his fashionable neighborhood on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York in the state of New York in the northeast quadrant of the country still known as The United States of America, unless I didn’t get the memo.  

I’m bored with this blog as well.  Anything I write about the visual arts and its practitioners has already been written by someone else – and much better, too, especially when it comes to musing about the process of oil painting, something I’m particularly obtuse about, although it has occupied much of my time in the past 30 or so years.  I dream of moving to the High Desert to get some sunlight into my canvases, but that’s a move that seems way too decisive at this late stage in the game of life. 

I tell myself and anybody who is willing to listen that the main reason I remain in New York is because my social club, The Art Students League of New York, provides a free figure drawing sketch class for members from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday during the regular school year, and an inexpensive sketch class for members during the summer months.  I paint most mornings by that abysmal natural light in my home studio I’m always complaining about, eat a slice of pizza and drink a can of soda for lunch, take a nap and then head a short 18 city blocks to the League for the sketch class and a smidgeon of camaraderie.  That’s a pretty full accounting of my day-to-day existence, and this seemingly irrelevant information might be useful if you are considering following in my footsteps on the path to an exciting and lucrative art career.  

You have to go real slow if you want to succeed.  I believe that the Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini (1370-1440), a follower of Giotto, got it right when he advised young artists in his Book of the Art to take it easy, live moderately and drink only  "thin wines."  Thanks to his advice, I don’t get worn out “heaving stones, crowbars, and many other things which are bad for your hand” before I begin a painting.   He offered another sage bit of advice that all you young men with designs on an art career should pay special attention to:  “There is another cause which, if you indulge it, can make your hand so unsteady that it will waver more, and flutter far more, than leaves do in the wind, and this is indulging too much in the company of women.”  I’m only guessing, you understand, but I think he’s right on that score, as well!

To get back on track, something that’s never been easy for me, I was drawing the figure better 20 years ago, but this passionate visual exercise to train the hand and eye remains the only consistently enjoyable activity I have ever participated in throughout my rather long and, without exaggeration, comically wretched existence.

I’ve posted a couple of collages above with images of a few of my recent drawings in charcoal pencil on newsprint.  I’ve never had much interest in drawing with other media.   Why should I?  I’ve been drawing with these pencils on smooth newsprint for 30 years and I still get so much pleasure out of this practice that I’m loathe to experiment with any other medium.  I go through maybe 30 or more 100-sheet, 14 by17 inch newsprint pads in the course of a year and throw away thousands of sheets of drawings.  And so do the hundreds of other artists who draw at the League in various media on a regular basis.  But fear not, Rain Forest preservationists, the League does recycle.  I keep a few of my sketches, but I don’t have a very critical eye, so I probably throw away far better drawings than I save, if truth be told, at least I hope so! 

I’m not much interested in marketing these drawings.    Some years ago, a distant cousin from Norway professed to liking them and bought a few, but that seemed like such a fluke that I never tried to sell any drawings to anybody else.  Besides, they are on newsprint, which is an anathema to many artists because it is not “archival.”  Promoting drawing papers as “archival” seems like such phony nonsense to me.  It’s really nothing more than an annoying advertising pitch to get artists to buy expensive, chemically treated papers that aren’t sympathetic surfaces for charcoal.  Papers with 100 percent rag content are great for drawing, but just too expensive for all these quick sketches I do.

Part of my fascination for this time-honored figure drawing exercise is, most assuredly, the nonjudgmental intimacy permitted in a communal gathering of artists raptly engaged in drawing the nude model.  In this nurturing environment, I can make believe that I am in the company of Van Dyke, Rubens, Sargent and other great masters of the art of figure drawing.  I can always tell when I’m going to have a pretty good drawing session when I start thinking, after a couple of poses, about what I’m going to eat for dinner after the class is over.

I like to start a figure drawing with the head, when the pose presents that opportunity, because I’m drawing a live human being, not a manikin, and I want to capture the spirit of the individual model first and foremost.  The quality of an open pose for me is wedded to the carriage of the head and the expression on the model’s face.  In addition, the model’s pose is usually more graceful and balanced at the beginning, before the position of the head changes, as it invariably does, sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically.  The body is usually held in the same attitude throughout the pose, so work on the torso and limbs can wait a bit. 

But sometimes it’s so difficult to get a satisfactory likeness that I don’t have time to do justice to the rest of the figure.  And that is one of my better rationalizations for why my figure drawings aren’t so great.  Lots of artists who love drawing the figure are as good as or better than I am, so why should I consider my own work worthy of exploitation.  Why,  just the other day I sharpened a black pastel pencil for a 13-year old kid attending the sketch class, and in return for this favor, at the end of the class she gave me a notebook-size sheet of paper with a drawing of the model and a profile sketch of me that was pretty darn good!  How demoralizing is that for an aging artist headed out to pasture! 

This entire blog post seems like déjà vu all over again, but it doesn’t much matter to my phantom audience, so I’ll go through the routine again, even if I may have done so before.  The League sets aside three studios for drawing during this open sketch class, giving artists a choice of three models to draw from.  Non-members can draw for a very reasonable $7 per session.  Two of the studios are dedicated to quick poses -- traditionally 10 one-minute poses and three five-minute poses, then a five-minute break, then a 10 and a 15, another break and then a 20 or 25 minute pose at the end.  Some models at the League will only work in 20-minute segments nowadays, so the timing of the poses is less consistent.  One studio is reserved for a long pose for the duration of the class, but most of the regulars prefer drawing short poses.

There are more female artists’ models in this world than male models, and, in general, the artists, men and women, prefer drawing the female figure for a variety of reasons, including one I used to hear often from Sal, one of the sketch class regulars from years past.  “I never sold a drawing of a male model,” Sal would say, as he dashed from a studio with a male model to one with a female model.  If by some unfortunate coincidence there were three male models for the day, Sal just went home.

It bears repeating that there are no schools for artists’ models, so the training is all on the job.  And it’s gratifying to witness a novice model develop skill and confidence as the weeks and months go by.  I’ve posted five drawings of a League model in one of the collages above that are a case in point.  When this model began posing at the school two years ago, we all found her natural figure a delight to draw.  But she seemed very shy and never fully revealed her face to the artists, typified in the first two drawings of her.  But as time went on, she grew in confidence and is now very relaxed and comfortable on the posing stand.  And she is no longer reluctant to show her expressive face.

So as the new year approaches, I remain in this great city of assisted living because of the figure drawing opportunities, the rent-stabilized apartment and all the public amenities that make going from place to place and acquiring the necessities of life so convenient.  Heck, I’ve got a Starbucks and a Duane Reade/Walgreens drugstore right around the corner.  You can’t beat that in Grover’s Corners, I reckon.  No exit for me, it appears.  But it could be worse.  Out west where the sun always shines I’d need a car again and would have to learn how to deal with black bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions and two-legged evildoers armed with hunting rifles who wouldn’t mind taking dead aim on a city slicker from a mile away.  Or so I’m told.