At the end of the last post on the planes of the head, I’d mentioned that I’d done a series of copies of Sargent portrait drawings, emphasising the planes and the form. Having worked for a little while with Loomis’ planes, and sculpted a head that emphasised the planes, I was looking for something with a little variation.
A few months of drawing bald geometric heads was quite enough.
The drawings I’m posting today were done about a year ago I think. There’s not a huge amount of them, but they were a bridge from the Loomis planes back to copies of old (and not so old) master drawings. But these drawings are certainly not copies in the usual sense. There’s been no attempt to replicate the marks or feel of the originals, or even much attempt at accuracy in the first ones. They’re perhaps more correctly described as conceptualised drawings. All I was interested in was the form, abstracted, in a sense, from the originals. By trying to visualise the form of these heads in terms of planes, I hoped to see if the structure of planes I’d derived from a combination of Loomis and theAsaro head could be applied in practice. In a way, these drawings represent a translation of the planes from the imagined, or ideal heads of Loomis to specific, real world heads.
This was the first sheet of three heads, all taken from Sargent drawings. The book these drawings came from is Sargent Portrait Drawings published by the Dover Art Library. I’ve had mixed results with Dover books, but this one is excellent I think. Cheap too.
These drawings are obviously very similar in conception to the Loomis-based drawings in the last post. There’s no tone, no light and shadow, just line. Surprisingly (at least to me at the time I did these little drawings) it’s still possible to create a feeling of form using line only – especially if the inner forms are rendered in a kind of geometry of interlocking shapes, as these are. It’s even possible to translate something of the character of the original portrait.
This brings up an interesting point about drawing and painting which has struck me many times.It has to do with how far you deviate from what you see. On the one hand, you might have work by an artist like Botticelli, say, who stylises the forms in his drawings to a great degree.
In this drawing by Botticelli, he’s used the calligraphy of the marks and the shape of the forms they describe to express a concept, an idea, rather than a visual truth.
The folds of the cloth draped around the main figure have a diaphanous, floating feeling. But that effect hasn’t been achieved by reproducing the optical effect of floating cloth. It’s been suggested by the way the folds have been treated. Her hair too, is more calligraphy than visual truth echoing the swirls of the folds of the cloth. All those swirly lines combine to reinforce the light, floating quality of the drawing. Of course, the whole thing is heavily mannered. Look at the length of her arm! Not much visual truth there.
In direct contrast to this isa kind of work which stresses the optical effect, the image that hits the eye. This kind of work is often termed ‘naturalism’ perhaps the most obvious early example being Velazquez. Certainly the sight-size technique lends itself to this kind of approach, this way of seeing and translating the subject to the canvas. Perhaps the naturalistic, or optical approach really reached it’s zenith in the 19th century naturalists. They might also be called realists, in the true sense of the term. Those painters are at the top of my mind at the moment because I’ve just read a fascinating and in-depth post about the naturalist painters today on Matthew Innes’ excellent blog. Recommended reading.
What I’m trying to get across with this lengthy digression is that drawing can communicate an idea of something without being an exact reproduction of the way it looks. In my shabby little head drawings, I’m trying to convey an impression of the form of these heads by delineating the planes. In Botticelli’s very beautiful drawing, he’s conveying the idea – if you ask me – of grace and beauty. But neither of them look much like what we see.
Whilst working on these heads, I was trying to keep upmost in my mind the shape and direction of each plane as I drew it, and how it fitted into the planes adjoining it. They’re very simplified drawings in terms of the shapes. Sargent’s portrait drawings are a great model to use for an exercise like this, since he also simplifies his form down to the essentials. Part of this may come from his sight-size training, which stresses large forms over detail. Although apparently he sat down to do these drawings with the paper on his lap, no doubt his brain had been wired by much sight size painting to work in a similar manner whatever his approach.
To clarify things a little, here’s an example from the sheet above along side the original drawing by Sargent:
Here’s another one. I think you can see how Sargent has simplified his drawing into the main planes, very clearly and explicitly stated. I’ve tried to simplify them down even further into line representations of the planes.
Here’s a couple more, also from Sargent drawings:
It seems to me that this way of approaching a drawing is a way of thinking as much as -if not more than – a way of seeing. The goal is to gain an understanding of the structure of the form rather than duplicate it’s appearance.
Whilst doing these drawings, I would try to remember the experience of sculpting a head, to imagine myself not drawing, but creating these forms in three dimensions.
So how would this help when drawing a real head? Well, I would need to do more real life head drawing with this approach in mind to reach any hard and fast conclusions, but this is how I believe it could help:
Simplification of form: I believe that in all drawing and painting, simplification of the myriad of details that catch our wandering eye into the main, general forms helps produce a more coherent image. Our usual way of seeing can be our own worst enemy since we tend to dwell on detail. Our eyes are drawn to hard edges and abrupt changes in value and we miss the big picture. Drawing and painting representationally is more about the judging of relationships than anything else: relationships of shape, proportion, value (relative lightness and darkness) and colour. By establishing the large general statements first, we can more easily judge the relationships of smaller areas to the whole and to each other, and so avoid (or at least reduce) a lot of common errors of shape and value which will work against the believability of the image.
Simplifying also leads to stronger statements. When we draw or paint a subject, I believe that we’re translating the subject into our medium, not copying it. An effective translation of a head into a drawing may be a very different thing than copying what we see. If the general,large forms are strongly and convincingly stated, a much smaller amount of the detail than we actually see can be enough to complete the piece. I think the Sargent portrait drawings are a perfect example of this in action.
Understanding value relationships: Value relationships are hard to get right. When we focus on a particular area of the subject we’re drawing or painting, our eyes naturally adjust in order to maximise the differences between the values in that area. It’s an inherited survival mechanism, very useful when you’re trying to avoid a tiger in long grass, not so useful when you’re trying to draw one.
The value of a plane is dependent first on its local value, then on its proximity and angle to the primary light source and to any secondary light sources, like reflected light. If we have a clear model in our minds of the structure of what we’re drawing, we ought to be able use that to help reduce errors in value relationships. By asking ourselves what angle this particular plane is in relation to the light, and in relation to other planes, we ought to be able to compensate to some extent for the adjustments our eyes make. Drawing is thinking as well as seeing.
There’s probably many other advantages to thinking about form in three dimensions that I haven’t considered yet, but those two are pretty important I think. I’m glad that writing this post has brought me back to these drawings, and made me reconsider why I was doing them and what I was learning from them. I might have forgotten about them otherwise. The one thing I haven’t done very much of is to translate this practice into the real word, and used it to draw some actual heads. Having looked at these drawings again, and come to the conclusion that they were useful and instructive, I’ve just decided to do a run of drawings of my own head from this perspective. I’ll report back on what I learn once I’ve done a few.
As far as my head drawing practice goes, after this point I continued with some drawings based on Sargent’s portraits, but started gradually to omit the ‘wire frame’ lines and to introduce some tone. I’ll post some of these next time, along with the further old master copies that they led me to, if there’s room. Here’s the first one of that series:
For now, I want to finish with a couple of examples of this approach used slightly differently. Frank Reilly, American illustrator and educator, used an approach perhaps not too disimilar from this one to break down a head into it’s constituent forms. Reilly was, like Loomis, a student of Frank Vincent Dumond’s. Although his approach may appear to be very different visually, I believe it’s very similar in conception:
I’ve borrowed this image from Doug Higgin’s excellent site aboutFrank Reilly’s teachings which I highly recommend browsing through. There’s some fascinating stuff there. Doug has self-published this information – and more besides – in a book called The Frank Reilly School of Art. He was nice enough to send me a copy. I will be reviewing it at some point, but haven’t found the time yet. However, it’s inexpensive and I think it’s an excellent little book for those who want to find out more about the teachings of this most influential artist.
I came acrossanother great head drawing demonstration using this approach to understanding the planes of the head and their relationship to values recently onNathan Fowkes excellent blog. He’s evidently using an approach closely related to Reilly’s. I wonder if he was taught by a Reilly student himself. It’s nice to see the approach used in a real world head drawing, and a beautiful one at that.
Related further reading:
An interesting post on planes and visualising different lighting conditionshere.
An article on myamericanartist.com byJohn deMartin of Studio Incamminati on drawingcubes in perspective, and applying that to the figure.
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Hey Paul,
Great post on a difficult subject.
George Bridgman was Reilly’s drawing teacher, his book on Life Drawing is an excellent book with some interesting examples of heads using planes, mouldings, and shapes.
I’m not sure if you have his books but I think they are a great companion to the Loomis books as they have more action and he was also Loomis’s drawing teacher.
The deMartin article is very good as well.
Hi Jeff, sorry for the late reply. It’s been a very hectic fortnight for me, more on that later!
I didn’t know Bridgman taught Reilly. I don’t have any of his books either, but a recommendation from you is certainly good enough for me. I’ll put them on my wish list for when I can afford to buy books again 🙂
Bridgman was also Norman Rockwell’s drawing teacher, (Rockwell was his TA).
The great thing about Bridgman is that it’s a perfect companion to perceptional drawing, as it is more conceptual and also based on developing skills to draw the figure out your head.
They are also very cheap, in the states they are about $9.00 a book on Amazon. They are small compact books as well.
>it’s a perfect companion to perceptional drawing, as it is more conceptual and also based on developing skills to draw the figure out your head.
That’s an excellent point Jeff. Sadie put up a really good post about different approaches to figure drawing recently on here blog here.
I like that fact that although she’s been taught in the Ted Seth Jacobs way, she’s ‘approach agnostic’ and can see the benefits of other ways of working. That’s a healthy attitude I think. This stuff is hard enough without cutting yourself off from things that might help through brand loyalty for a particular approach.
I like Sadie’s site a lot.
I’m taking a drawing class right now with an former student of Ted’s, Dennis Cheney. It’s very interesting and the best thing is we have and excellent model who poses in one pose for the whole 8 weeks of the class. I am learning a lot about Ted’s ideas and methods which is very fascinating and completly different to who I was learned when I was 20. It’s very hard at first, maybe because I’m an older, my eyes are not what they were when I was 29.
The interesting thing is that it’s about thinking in three dimensions after you do the block in, you then have to correct the tilts and gestures and proportions.
I spent weeks working on this.
It’s a very slowed down way of drawing and it’s great, I’m sold. Signing up for another class, which are about $12 per hour for three hours one day a week + instruction. Very reasonable I think.
I think keeping an open mind about this stuff is important. Being to dependent on one idea is not good.
>it’s about thinking in three dimensions after you do the block in, you then have to correct the tilts and gestures and proportions.
That makes an awful lot of sense to me. Do you think it relates to the way I’ve been thinking about these copies at all? Distant relations maybe? I sometimes wonder if these various approaches might have more in common than it might seem at first, and the differences are really in the details.
>It’s very hard at first, maybe because I’m an older, my eyes are not what they were when I was 29.
>I think keeping an open mind about this stuff is important.
I do believe it’s harder to adjust to new ideas when you’re older. I find that. It’s natural I guess, since we form our opinions based on our experience, and our opinions help to get us through the day so we like to stick to them 🙂
I wonder if that doesn’t have more bearing than physical factors, our bodies gradually breaking down over time. Hm. that’s a bit of a pessimistic way to put it isn’t it? I’m imagining Neo repeating “free my mind” to himself before making the big jump…
Well when one is doing copies it’s not the same as drawing from life. I find that mere fact of the presence of the model forces me to think in a different way. However I do think one informs the other.
One thing for me is that I now use a straight line block in all the time, or most of the time and in doing so I have noticed that it has helped getting at the essence of whatever I am drawing faster. I never used this technique very much before now. The more I start to understand Ted Seth Jacobs’ ideas, and coupled with how some of his ex students were, Jacob Collins, Tony Ryder, Timothy Stotz, Michael Grimaldi to name a few I am becoming aware that he is on to something. I only wish I studied with him when I was in my twenties, he was teaching at the ASL when I went there.
>However I do think one informs the other.
Indeed. What I’ve been trying to do with these Sargent copies is to treat it the same way as working from life – thinking about form, planes etc – rather than copying the drawing. I think that approach should be the same for both types of work.
But I agree of course that working from flat copy and working from life are very different propositions.
>One thing for me is that I now use a straight line block in all the time
The straight line block-in seems to me to be very similar to the Bargue drawing approach, the production of the initial schematic in straight lines. I do think it helps to get curves right if they’re reduced to straight lines first.
>I only wish I studied with him when I was in my twenties, he was teaching at the ASL when I went there.
Damn! I’ve often looked at the Studio Escalier site and would love to study there one day.
Hi ., your works all supper very nice.
nice drawings & i m artist ……!
Have you seen the video Ron Lemen did demonstrating the Reilly method? I found it a lot easier to understand compared to static pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWLS3fki6oM (unfortunately squished — might be worth downloading it and stretching it out to proper proportions)
Think you’ll get around to reviewing Doug Higgins’ book? I’m very interested to know what you think. I got Apollo Dorian’s book recently (so glad it was made into a digital version!), which I haven’t started on but I’m curious how they compare.
Hi Lulie,
Thanks very much for adding that video. I think it’s great. It is a pity it’s squished, as you say, and personally I don’t like time lapse because I think it gives beginners the idea that you just dash these things off!
It is a brilliant demonstration though. Here it is linked for ease of use:
Head drawing demonstration.
I also came across this one, a real time drawing demo of the Loomis method:
Loomis head drawing demonstration
>Think you’ll get around to reviewing Doug Higgins’ book?
Honestly it’s unlikely now. My own interest has moved away from these kind of schematic interpretations because I’m not interested in working from imagination – at least, not at the moment.
That said, it’s inexpensive and I think it’s worth getting. I haven’t seen the Apollo Dorain book, but I have heard very good things about it. I also didn’t know it was out in digital format now Have you got a link for it?
I’d be very interested to hear what you make of the Dorian book once you’re a bit further through it.
Hi Paul,
Great writing! It’s obvious you have done a great deal of thinking on the topic. I guess what you are doing would benefit any student of drawing or painting of any level.
As a comment aside I personally believe that as J. S. Sargent was coming out from Carolus Duran Atelier probably never had to make conception of planes or facets in 3D space, not at least too consciously or as a specific stage of his method…maybe his brain wavered between 2D (right side) and 3D tactile (left side) but Duran’s methodology seemed to be more like close to pure 2D (all is seen as flat retinal abstract tonal shapes)
Here in Australia Max Meldrum (1875-1955) developed an extreme version of the sight-size method to a point that it was fully 2D without any preliminary drawing as it is done by most ateliers today (his philosophy was radical at the time and although resembles sight-size externally, conceptually it is quite different)…He would have said that drawing per se is just symbolic because we don’t see lines in nature and drawing invites the tactile 3D sense too much therefore mental preconceptions come forth making difficult a more objective visual assessment of your subject (if there is such a thing as “more objective”).
Saying that I still believe a good grounding in constructive methods that use 3D volumes, planes, etc helps avoid unwanted asymmetry, perspective, and proportion problems, especially in portraiture. Even in an extreme methodology like Meldrum’s (which by the way here it was called Tonal Impressionism at the time and today some authors call it Australian Tonalism) a bit of 3D analysis of your subject can’t be a bad thing.
On Frank Reilly’s method (totally unheard of here in Aus)… it seems to me achieves a more idealized than life feeling because it ties things in a fluid way (conceptualizes connections) making them more idealized and simplified than nature…therefore making a stronger and simpler statement and generating a hidden flow and design.
Thanks for talking about your interesting learning process.
Regards,
Pablo T.
Hi Pablo,
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. You raise some really interesting points.
There is something very different about drawing with outline and painting (or drawing tonally) something that matches the visual impression.
Whilst it’s certainly possible to come much closer to the visual impression with painting, drawing can perhaps be considered more as thinking about your subject rather than recording its appearance.
I think the separation of drawing from the visual impression also allows freedom to interpret, and to create. More emphasis can be put on the design, and the piece of work then becomes something else. It becomes a creation, something new, with the visual impression as its starting point.
The point you make about Carlos Duran is certainly a valid one. There is a lot of emphasis on the visual impression in Sargent’s paintings. But I’ve found that in copying his drawings, I’ve found a simplification that seems to me to be based around the major planes of the head. I think it’s this that gives his drawings their strength and depth. There is certainly much left out of the drawings, and what is left in is very carefully selected I think. Some of them are really masterpieces of brevity, describing the form fully with the most concise means.
One of the reasons I always look at an artist’s drawings more than their paintings is that in their drawings you can see them thinking. Much of that evidence can be covered up in a painting, where perhaps an artist feels more ‘on show’. I love Rembrandt’s drawings for the same reason, you can almost see him working things out, line by line.
I agree with you on Reilly’s method. It does make for a more idealised version of nature. Perhaps not so very different from the ancient Greeks in a way? I see it as a continuum with many different points on which an artist can sit. I think all positions have interest and value in their own right.
I was discussing this with David Kassin some time ago, and he was saying that he wants as much as possible to remove himself from the picture, so that he gets as close as he can to what he sees. But he’s also put a huge amount of time into studying anatomy so that he can understand the forms of the bones and muscles beneath the skin.
I haven’t heard of Max Meldrum before, thanks for mentioning him. It’s interesting that he places emphasis on the objective. So did Coldstream and Uglow in the UK, but I find their work quite stylised.
I’m very interested in what you say about Meldrum’s method – how is it conceptually different sight size do you think?
Hi Paul,
Meldrum developed a whole theory/philosophy that underpins his procedure. He won a scholarship to go to Paris where he studied briefly at the academies Colarossi and Julian (where probably he learnt sight-size as it is practiced more or less today) but decided to study the works of the old masters by himself at the Louvre and other museums instead slowly developing his ideas about perception and painting.
For him painting was a science and visual phenomena come to our eyes in an “order of visual importance”. Put it simply imagine you have your eyes shut and open them just a tiny bit. You would only see a tonal difference (all dark plus something a bit lighter) but would be unable to know clearly shapes of objects or their specific colours. Then you open your eyes a little bit more and tonal differences are clearer, shapes more distinct but about colours you are still not quite sure. Finally your eyes are fully open and colour (hue and Chroma) is completely revealed.
That is the natural order of visual impressions…normally tones (values) first, shapes reveal themselves second, and finally colour. Therefore drawing the use of lines as symbols for what you know to be a tactile border, have no place in his type of painting. That is why is so different with the current practice of sight-size…he would have seen drawing as an unnecessary step that takes you around town when you just wanted to walk to the next door.
The method sets everything as in sight-size (subject next to support, etc.) but the support can be higher or lower as the procedure does not line up horizontally head and bottom of subject with the painting. Now your painting process matches this “unveiling” of the subject….so you never “direct the eye” to look for some pre-determined thing …like noses, or planes, or shadows and the lights, etc…you just accept what naturally seems to be the most obvious difference between your painting and the subject at that stage and you try to make your painting match the subject at that level of squinting.
Also there are not “things”…like noses, or the “shadow of the object”…just all is a collection of flat coloured abstract shapes…When one is in the “zone” is quite remarkable as you find yourself truly forgetting that you have some object in front and everything ends up being light…a truly retinal experience. It doesn’t happen all the time but that is what we aim at (that 3D tactile thing!).
Hope I explained this more or less clearly…it can confuse people sometimes.
Note on the side…I practice the method but I also use other procedures depending on many factors…and I don’t think strictly that all Meldrum’s ideas were flawless…at the end I see methods as tools…rather than philosophies that must be defended at any cost.
There is more to painting/drawing than just copying…and in fact I don’t think “copying”…mimesis….is really possible.
Cheers…
Pablo T.