Creative Path Studio

It’s been five weeks since my life-drawing class began. Though this evening class makes for a long day, especially after a full day of working, I look forward to it every week. My initial goal for this class was to learn to really see – to observe, and truthfully record that observation. While that goal hasn’t changed, I’ve discovered that the process of recording that observation needs refinement.

In my previous post, I wrote about falling in love with drawing with charcoal and how working with this tool affected my later drawings and etchings. I need to build new experiences, discover and play with new tools, and learn to use them properly. I can’t just rely on past habits and experiences since that is limiting.

In the past couple of classes, I’ve made a concerted effort to draw with a pencil. The results of weeks 4 and 5 are below:

I find that using a pencil for gesture drawings is challenging. Actually, I find any kind of drawing with a pencil challenging. Why? Here’s my list of reasons and challenges:

• Using line expressively is not necessarily difficult. It takes practice, and currently I haven’t had much of it.
• I have a habit of wanting to smudge the drawing, creating messy cross-hatchings that in effect negates line quality.
• Holding the pencil in a way that allows me to have a sensitive touch to the drawing surface is a technique I haven’t quite figured out.
• I have yet to learn to use a pencil properly. That is, keep the point sharp at all times, use the proper hardness value for the right task, and not smudge!

This short list of challenges is really not that difficult to overcome. As I’ve written before, all it really takes is practice.

Though I don’t feel I’m getting enough practice, these past five weeks of drawing have been more than what I’ve done in the last six years.

Knowing When and How to Use the Right Tools

I’m beginning to understand the importance of using the right tools for the job at hand. This is one of those lessons based on common sense, yet, I am the first to admit that I am sometimes lacking in this (common sense, not lessons).

Reviewing my history in art-making may help me to understand my own bias with the tools that I use and how this may hinder my current progress. This is not judgement on my part, but a genuine desire to interpret truthfully on paper what I observe.

Experience and practice should inform decisions to pick up a tool over another, but sometimes, mere habit creates this decision, resulting in a mis-interpretation of the observed.

College and the Charcoal and Conte Crayon Years

When I took my first drawing class in college many years ago, I fell in love with charcoal and conte pencils. I loved being able to smudge and move values around with an eraser, my fingers, the palm of my hand, and whatever happened to be available in my artbin. The whole process was quite messy, and often, I ended up with dark drawings.

I loved drawing in this manner, and quite enjoyed playing with dark and light values. I once sat in a bathroom stall which had black marble walls just so I could draw my reflection against a dark surface. An example of the kind of fun I had with charcoal, dark & light values, and black paper is a self-portrait I created in 1993 called “Mask”.

Journals & the Ball-point Pen Years

As I began to draw more, I became more pragmatic about my tools. It was difficult to trek around the subways of New York City with big pads of charcoal paper and my conte pencils. So, I carried my journal and my handy ball-point pen and drew whoever I could as quickly as I could. This still resulted in messy drawings, with the quality of my lines behaving more like heavy charcoal marks. I’ve included some examples from drawings of NYC’s homeless (above).

The Santa Fe Etching Club Years & Printmaking

I also created etchings as though I were using charcoal. Any experienced etcher/printmaker can appreciate the quality of line and tonal value in printmaking. My prints did not have much of that line quality and rarely exhibited the crosshatching marks of a master printmaker/etcher — I did not create Rembrandt-like etchings (though Rembrandt is one of my all-time favorite printmakers. Seeing his original prints in his studio in Amsterdam was one of my highlights this past summer.) Here’s yet another example to illustrate what I’m writing about. Pictured is an etching called “Flight” ca. 1995 (right).

The Road Map From Here

My drawings and etchings remained consistent in look, feel, and style throughout the 90s. The examples above are good illustrations of what I am referring to.

I stopped consistently drawing in 2000, when I arrived in California. This post won’t discuss the reasons why. Suffice it to say that I am ready to pick up where I left off, though technically, that is not what really occurs.

I did not pick up where I left off. I am many steps back, but I am making the steps nonetheless. Taking the class at the community college was one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. The next challenge is to make more time to draw on a daily basis.

My next post will examine what I am currently trying to achieve in my life-drawing class. This involves using tools properly and knowing when to use them.