POST#179: TO DRAW OR NOT TO DRAW, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Harlem Figures: Charcoal and Oil on Canvas 24"x 54"

My friend George recently recommended a book from the 1920s by Harold Speed called “The Practice and Science of Drawing.”  Staying in print that long, I’m sure it’s an excellent primer on the art of drawing but it begs the question of whether anyone needs or wants to draw any more. Given easy access to computer and photographic images, is it even a necessary skill? When I began to study art as a teenager, drawing from life was the basis of all our training. The entrance exam I took at the age of 14 for the High School of Music & Art in New York City was largely designed to see whether or not I could draw. My best friend and I still remember the contour drawing we were required to do for the exam; neither of us had ever done one before.  It was widely accepted among artists that before you could study painting or sculpture, you had to know how to draw. I remember telling my friend Elena, a graduate of the prestigious Moscow Art Institute, that I had met graduates from the top art schools in America who couldn’t draw a hand. She sniffed and haughtily replied that in Russia, you couldn’t get into art school if you couldn’t draw a hand.

Cut-Outs Projected onto Canvas Drawings

 

But drawing, while it might be “technically obsolete,” has certain advantages over photo derived images. It forces you to actually LOOK (stare) at something, study it. Get to know it. It is one thing to photograph a tree and its branches, but a totally different part of the brain is required to draw it, to understand how everything connects, how light and shadow create roundness and depth, the texture of the bark. In drawing from life we learn about a subject in a way no photo can ever teach us. Just think about what we get from one of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. Better than a photo any day!

"Dream" - Charcoal Drawing on Stained Canvas 60"x48"

There is also another kind of drawing that’s almost impossible to teach: pulling images from the subconscious, the so-called ‘inner eye.’ It’s something that can only be accessed after long experience in training the ‘outer eye.’ Many artists never learn how to access the millions of images they have stored in their brain, the so-called ‘imagination.’ Frankly, that’s where the really interesting stuff is found. But, before you get to the inner eye, you need to spend an awful lot of time learning how to draw what’s in front of you. 

POST #178: TURNING PHOTO-LEMONS INTO PHOTO-LEMONADE

Projected Wall Image

Projected Wall Image

I recently received an e-mail from a photographer friend (one of the best I know) asking me to give him a crash course in photo composition. While my technical skills as a photographer are “weak” (to be kind), I’m really good at composing images. Those of you who know me know I hate technology; anything that requires me to press more than two buttons sends me into a panic. But all those courses I took in Two-Dimensional Design in school plus twenty-plus years of teaching art history on the college level have sharpened my eye to the point where I can take the most mediocre, banal image and crop it into a masterpiece. For many years I was invited by local camera clubs to judge their shows, although I was careful to explain that I didn’t know an f stop from a hole in the wall. But what I could do was take the really bad photos they projected onto a screen and, using my fingers, crop them into works of art. You could hear an audible gasp from the audience when the miracle took place.

“Under the El“. Overlapping projections. 6’x8’

A few years after I graduated art school, I decided I wanted to paint a series of urban scenes (a la Ben Shahn.)  I bought a ‘point and shoot’ Brownie camera for about $3 dollars plus a couple of rolls of black and white film (all there was) and went down to the Lower East Side to photograph architectural details. I never got around to the paintings and the photographs along with their negatives went into a drawer where they inexplicably remained untouched for over twenty years. As 2”x2”snapshots, they were truly awful, but for some reason, I took them into the local camera store and had them enlarged. The level of detail was extraordinary and I discovered that each print could be composed/cropped into a half dozen reasonably successful photographs. In fact, the quality of the enlargements, given the basic point and shoot technology of my Brownie camera, was so remarkable that I was even able to make 6’ posters without loss of detail. My negatives yielded a treasure trove of urban imagery I’ve been mining ever since. A few years ago a cinematographer friend, CiCi Artist and I made a movie out of the photos and around that time I put together an illustrated book of Lower East Side memoirs provided by friends. I also created and “environment” by projecting the photos onto four large gallery walls, allowing visitors to become part of the scene. By the magic of judicious cropping, my amateurish Brownie snapshots turned into a gift that keeps giving.

Projected Wall Image