New Series - Twenty Drawings of Eyes
Posted 4th February 2006
Well, I'm happy to say I've started two of the four series I set myself to do after that reassessment, the cafe sketches and this series, twenty drawings of eyes.
So here's the first four eyes (no pun intended,) two copies and two from life.
I'm doing some copies of old, (and not so old,) masters in all my series. I really do think its invaluable experience. It takes you out of your own style for a while and lets you see how some of the best artists of their day have solved the same problems and challenges you face when you're learning to draw and paint. And lets face it, if you're any kind of artist at all, you'll be learning throughout your entire life (isn't that part of the fun?) so I hope that I never get too big for my boots to do this kind of study.
I do think you learn the most from working from life. Its a tougher challenge all round. When you copy a drawing by somebody else, all the real challenges have already been faced and solved - how to simplify the shapes, the tones, what to leave in or take out - whereas when you're working from life you have to figure all that hard stuff out for yourself. I think this is why people sometimes say that its easier to copy than it is to draw from life, and I guess I agree with that.
Part of what I'm trying to do here, as I said on my background page when this site first went up, is to send myself to my own little art college and to learn all the stuff they glossed over or totally ignored when I did my degree fifteen or twenty years ago (the one year of it I completed anyway).
Now, if you went to a master's atelier back in the Renaissance, or right through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries come to think of it, you'd be expected to sit drawing copies of other masters' drawings for a very long time. Then when you got that right, you'd be expected to work from plaster casts for an even longer time. If you eventually got that right, you might possibly, if you were very good, be allowed somewhere near a live model.
Now I freely admit, I haven't the patience to spend the next two years exclusively copying old masters, and two more after that drawing plaster casts. I know that if I did I'd be a much better painter, at least in terms of technique, but I want to be a portrait painter again soon. I'm getting bored of what I do for a living now, it keeps me from drawing and painting all day and that frustrates the hell out of me, so it seems to me the best way to pay the mortgage and get to draw and paint all day is to learn fast! And you know, this is the twenty-first century and everyone is in a hurry these days, everyone wants it all on a plate and yesterday, please. I guess I'm no exception.
But at least I've realised that I've been trying to push ahead too quickly lately, and that because of that I've got myself into trouble.
So what this series of eye drawings, and the other series I'll be working on, represent is me realising that I need to take the time to get this right. Twenty hands, twenty eyes, twenty noses, twenty mouths, and a lot of drawings of people in cafes before I let myself near a proper attempt at a portrait.
I don't have all the answers, maybe I'm wrong even about this. I can but try.
