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... and haven't worn eraser holes through it

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Posts: 410 | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Before you learn to draw, you must first learn how to erase.

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Posts: 1660 | Registered: Jan 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Before you learn to draw, you must first learn how to erase.
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I can hear this statement in a Yoda-voice.

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Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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There are several mistaken ideas about art that the art establishment has succeeded in promulgating (probably not intentionally) that I think really hurt the common man's viewpoint on art. I shall try to elucidate them here:

The spontaneous style that the abstract expressionists and the New York School (these are artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning) generated, along with its companion Freudian fads, the mistaken idea that an artist had some kind of inner gift, some kind of mad, magical gift, that made his accidental and happenstance marks more significant and more moving than those of the normal human being. This generated a couple different responses in the general public: one demographic reverted into the medieval concept of an artist being somehow gifted (or posessed) and the art the created being out of human control; he channeled something external. (this even happens in people who are not religious or superstitious; the first Freudian fads were based on what was understood to be a scientific phenomenon, though it had the same medieval roots; the artist selon Freud was channeling his own subconscious) The second demographic rejected the "nonsense" that was Modernist art on the grounds that "even a child could do that." These two reactions are both somewhat mistaken, though I don't dare to say that either is right or wrong; first of all, De Kooning and Pollock were not happenstance, slipshod craftsmen, and secondly, they were not born magically producing their most well-known works. When DeKooning painted Woman, he scraped off and re-painted the canvas over fifty times. Even if you don't much care for his aesthetic, and even if you think him a bit daft, you can't argue with his methods as being lazy and half-hearted. Pollock, who we best know for his innovations in "action painting," only came to that technique after years of development of his content and message-based approached to art. Beginning with Greek and Roman myths, and adding in motifs of Native American and Alaskan art, Jackson was actively trying to reach a universal aesthetic in which he could get rid of culture-specific clutter and appeal to a universal human spirit. Before he progressed to painting huge drip paintings, a lot of his output was similar to Moon Woman, and honestly sought, whether you believe he succeeded or not, to communicate with humanity regardless of cultural background. Thus, it's unfair to accuse him of lacking the content and purpose of David or lacking the artistic skill of Rembrandt. If you study student work and early output of Pollock, Picasso, Matisse, and the other famous Modernists, you'll find that they were often very gifted renderers, not just lame hacks who made money on their lack of talent; nor were they mad brilliant geniuses who bled virtue through their paintbrushes and extinguished cigarettes. They worked hard to get to the point where they produced the things we acknowledged them for.

I think this is important in a discussion of how to draw, because our very fundamental ideas on what art is and what art isn't really affect our view of our own creativity. Some people think "I can do what Pollock did, I'm an artist," and some people think, "I can't do what Bierstadt did, I'm not an artist." Both of these people are wrong, regardless of your own personal tastes on art. You can define art as any combination of the following qualities that you prefer, and place your own priorities where you think they belong, but it is made up of those qualities none the less. Art is made up of technical skill (rendering) and it's made up of content (creativity). Depending on what your goals are, there are ways of improving both of these in your own work.

First of all, everyone can draw. Everyone can learn the technical skill of rendering, just like everyone can throw a basketball. I may have not been born very coordinated, nor was I an asset to the 7th grade team, but I still improved my own ability to get the ball nearer to the hoop with practice. Rendering abilities are the same way.

The trick with visual rendering is that you're working, fundamentally, in a two-dimensional language. (I'll call writing a one-dimensional language, but art sometimes behaves the same way.) It's a language because we are so accustomed to communicating via symbols that a bit of that never escapes. This is why the abstract expressionists kept getting drippier and smudgier - they were trying to escape the human tendency to read symbols into visual imagery. (This is also why they got frustrated with that and turned into Jasper Johns; they finally realized that symbols are inescapable so they might as well use them and just promulgate the idea that they're not supposed to mean anything. This is a postmodern rut we're still stuck in.) No matter how obvious they tried to make it that they weren't painting landscapes or naked women, there are still those who will stand in the MoMA and try to make out the landscapes and naked women in the art drips. (But that's Freud again, and I'm done with him)

When you first learn to draw, you're trying to learn to draw symbols that others will recognize. You're trying to communicate with them two-dimensionally. You can learn to do this in one of two ways (it's best to learn both): you can learn formulaic conventions for recognizability, or you can learn visual skills of accurate (photographic) rendering. People who only learn the first become cartoonists and graphic illustrators and manga nuts. People who only learn the second become pigeonholed as reproducers and tend to lose social and cultural content to their art. They make a little more money than the first group, but some will accuse them of selling their souls. That, again, is up to you. I hope to help you learn both, and you can decide from there. [Smile]

I learned to draw the first way from Mark Kistler. He was that funny curly-haired guy with a moustache on PBS who drew that floating city and added pieces to it every day. He had two shows, I believe, The Secret City and The Draw Squad. I had a book based on these shows called Mark Kistler's Draw Squad when I was 10 that I can credit with much of my current artistic inclination. He starts with the assertion that nobody can't draw. His approach is formulaic - he teaches you with simple shapes, lines, and relationships, to draw things like layer cakes and flags and giant pencils receding into the distance. Do you ever need to draw giant pencils receding into the distance? Probably not, but it's the fundamental principals of shape and relationship and basic perspective that enable you to start drawing recognizable objects. To this day, when I go to draw a flag, I use the conventions I learned in the draw squad. But then again, my style is deliberately illustrative. And that's the key - make sure you have the skills you need for several approaches so you can justly claim that you prefer a certain style. If you only ever do what you like, you're pigeonholing and limiting yourself. If you try varied approaches, it improves and enriches the approach you finally choose and gives you more credibility in that context.

The second drawing method is harder to teach, harder to master, but very important to understand. You gotta draw from life. You gotta, gotta, gotta, make yourself draw things you don't like to draw. Ironically, the things that are hardest to draw are the things for which there exist the most abundant symbolic representations in our culture. Nobody likes to draw hands; nobody likes to draw eyes. That's because we started so young learning the symbolic approach to these objects that they are very hard to un-learn. When you first sit down to draw a hand, you want to draw five fingers and a palm, because that's what you see on traffic lights and Muslim necklaces and Kindergarten Thanksgiving art. But look at your hand from any angle other than straight-on: do you see five fingers? The fingers you do see... are they really recognizable fingers, or are they weird mound shapes on top of other fingers? You can't name things; you have to draw straight from your eyeball, and that's hard. Don't draw the model's finger; draw the model's weird bumpy shape above the shadow about a third the length of the other long smooth line to the right. Look at your eye - is it a white football shape with a brown circle in the middle? No... it's got all kinds of curvy reflected light in it and your eyelid comes down and folds at the edge, and....

A good trick to representational drawing is, like Scott suggested, to turn your source upside-down (start with a photo; your model can't stand on her head that long). And, most importantly, don't laugh at how it turns out. Don't even turn it over again when you're done if you can help it, because then you start naming things again. "Oh, man! look at the neck! It's all crooked and she looks like a hunchback..." You see, though, it's not a neck! It's the shape you drew in the lower quarter of the page slanting upwards toward the dark spot that was about half as long again as the line next to it. It was never a neck.

Another good way to achieve this is with a grid - take a magazine picture and draw a square grid over the surface. On a larger (and always work as large as you can - it prevents the "postage stamp" syndrome where you start making symbols again) paper, draw a faint grid with the same number of squares. Number the rows and columns if that helps - and in square 1A draw what you see in square 1A of your source picture. Don't draw the jawline across five squares first and then go back - because, you see, it's not a jawline. Its position in 2B needs to be close to the lower left corner so it will match up with its continuation in 3C that starts about 1/5 of the way across the top and slopes down gently to the right. Your finished product may not be as recognizable as you'd like, but it's more recognizable than a caricature of the same picture, because it's based on what's actually there rather than a symbolic re-interpretation.

So do it! Just go! And don't feel like you have to show any of your drawings to anyone. Try drawing things fast and with a permanent marker - get a big pad of newsprint and go to the park and draw human shapes, allowing yourself only 10 seconds per person. It's important to train your eye; it's not important to be making things to frame at this point. I have a degree in art and I still draw some really ugly stuff sometimes; that's OK, I need to do it to keep my eyes sharp. So go get a clove of garlic or a skull or something equally frustrating and get going!

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Posts: 58 | Registered: Sep 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Art is made up of technical skill (rendering) and it's made up of content (creativity). Depending on what your goals are, there are ways of improving both of these in your own work.

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.... but then didn't adress the second quality - the creativity - at all. I'll try to do so briefly.

This is what I saw lacking in so many of my art school associates. Some people are naturally very creative; I was often praised by my peers for having novel approaches to assignments; but it, like good technical skill, is not all a gift from God. I realistically see my artistic talent in this respect as being inextricably linked with my interests in other forms of art; in literature, in music, in cooking. Fine arts students notoriously hate art history, but I think that attitude is dangerous. You have to understand the philosophy and precedents of the past before you can truly create good, meaningful art. You can sell art without it (Thomas Kinkade probably does quite well for himself), but your work is not going to last long if you don't have a purpose and an original genesis for it. You'll notice that the Kandinskys and the Rembrandts and even the Marcel Duchamps of the world were not just visual artists; they were noted art theorists and historians and produced a great deal of literature about art as well as tangible art. No one ever started a movement (Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism) who wasn't very aware and active in (and generally opposed to) their contemporary art atmosphere. Students who shrug off art history are shooting themselves in the foot; brilliance is not going to spring full-formed from your forehead, and your work will stagnate when you do.

Every single one of my prize-winning and noteworthy art works has been inspired by some outside academic pursuit. The times when I find myself the most productive artistically are the times when I'm engaged in external literary, historical, or even scientific learning.

The way you develop your creativity and improve the quality and content of your art is this: you read. You read, and you eat weird food and you travel and you hike and you learn how to tap dance and you take up macrame. The most moving and the most relevant artists are the DaVincis of the world; the ones who relate their work to the greater context of humanity. The artists we won't remember in ten years are the ones who draw the same wildlife or throw the same pot continuously and ignore the larger world around them. Some of the truly great artists are those whose technical skills were at best mediocre (but they still worked on them, mind you!) but whose content was so compelling and relevant that it continued to speak to people for years.

Posts: 285 | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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I have enough trouble with 26 letters.

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Posts: 2978 | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged |