Master Class with Brian Smith

This Fall, I was in Brian Smith‘s Master Class in Life Drawing. Here are some of the highlights of the course.

In the first drawing, we added a drift to enhance the gesture in the contour drawing. In the second one, the drift was drawn first and the contour drawing was placed over top. We didn’t know what the gesture would be when drawing the drift. I was lucky that the model took a pose that went well with my orange wave. Then the model danced and we drew as she danced.

The first drawing is a memory exercise. The model, Ed, took a 10 min pose in a separate room. We had to walk to the room, study the pose, walk back to our easel and draw as much as we could remember. We could do this as many times as we wanted over the 10 min. I did pretty well! In the other two we played with ratios in composition, where we would only draw a certain percentage of the model filling a certain percentage of the background.

This was interesting for me: we had to design and simplify the figure. I had mixed results, but here are the two best.

For these drawings, we had to fragment the figure, zooming in to crop the composition in some unusual way. I played with line and value, taking advantage of these exercises to explore the skin folds and muscle contours of Murray’s form.

Master Class in Anatomy

This Summer, I took Werner Zimmerman‘s Master Class in Anatomy. I had heard so many good things about Seneca’s life drawing teacher, that I was thrilled to see the Master Class being offered and signed up right away. I wasn’t disappointed! Werner is a generous, passionate and dedicated teacher who knows the body inside and out.

Here I am with my ecorche figure in progress. We used small plastic skeleton models that are very unstable and they eventually broke under the weight of the clay. It was fun putting it together before it broke, and the tactile experience of placing muscles on a skeleton was very valuable.

Werner organized two day trips for us, the first being the most exciting: we went to the Human Anatomy lab at Guelph to handle and draw from cadavers. We could lift some of the superficial layers of muscles to examine those underneath, or push them around to see how they fit into one another. It’s hard to appreciate how compact and tight muscle bundles are and how tough tendons are when just looking at books. We also went to Guelph’s bone room, which holds a large collection of animal skeletons.

Here are a few of the drawings completed during the workshop. I have more, but I didn’t have the patience to photograph them because it would require re-aligning layers of tracing paper over original newsprint drawings of the figure.

Abstracting the Figure workshop!

This week, in an attempt to shake things up, I took a 5-day workshop entitled “Figurative Abstraction in Acrylic” taught by the accomplished Brian Smith. Brian is a very good teacher who is eager to share his extensive knowledge of art and composition. Each day began with two slide shows introducing us to new artists and to some important concepts of abstract painting.

Both abstraction and acrylics were intimidating. It wasn’t easy to let go of the control that I cherish as a realist artist working in oil. So much of the mark making and medium application is random, and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that. On the other hand, working with house painting brushes and slapping on thick layers of quick drying paint has a certain appeal. How much of this I’ll be incorporating into my work is hard to say.

Here are two of my better paintings from this week. Each is acrylic on watercolour paper — the first has some chalk pastel in there as well.

For this first one, we had to work on an active ground, which meant painting a figure on top of an abstract coloured pattern that we painted beforehand. We had to leave some of this ground show through in the final work. Here you can see the active ground in the torso of the figure (the gray-green, yellow-orange, and black), the white and purple stripes in the leg, and in some of the background.

For the second one, a dancing model served as inspiration. She danced continuously as we sketched her on newsprint. From those, we had to compose a painting. As she danced, I had this vision of clouds in a blue sky and so went with that kind of colour scheme.