Self Portrait Drawing - 21st April 2006
This drawing was largely an attempt to get everything in the right place, to accurately observe the relationships of one shape to another. That's why it took eight hours to get so little done, there's a huge amount of corrections in this drawing.
I'm starting to realise how important the intensity of the line is in showing form. This is partly what I was hoping for by concentrating only on line, to understand how to use line to make something live a bit better than I currently do. It seems to be happening, if slowly.
I'm not talking about drawing style, that's an anathema to me at the moment. I mean that I'm trying to match the relative intensities of my line to what I'm seeing. In a copy of a Sargent drawing I did after this one, it struck me how varied the intensity of his lines were, and how light overall. He reserved his strongest marks for a few points, the main features and the ear mostly. Everything else was drawn very lightly. I'm sure he was being led by what he saw in this, not by a stylish abstraction. "I don't judge, I only chronicle," he once said. Not entirely true because apparently he elongated the bodies of some of his sitters in order to make them appear more beautiful.
Despite the odd stance and strained expression, I'm quite happy with this drawing. It was meant to be an exercise in rigorous observation, which it pretty much is, as rigorous as I currently get anyway. I can also see that I've started to vary the intensity of the line more. I need to see the relationships between the weight of contours in life better, and I should be able to translate that into better drawing eventually.
Posted 23rd April 2006
