L'écorché by Jean-Antoine Houdon

This was the second to last drawing of my class. The figure was done with graphite and the background with charcoal. It looks pretty scary or perhaps like something that should belong in a medical school. Well, let me tell you that in order to understand and be able to depict the human body successfully, one needs to understand its structure. Artists have been studying anatomy for hundreds of years, some of them even dissected corpses (including Da Vinci, Gericault among many others!).
This particular piece was done by Houdon as a study for his John the Baptist sculpture and eventually became more famous than the final product.

Unfortunately, much of this knowledge is no longer taught in art schools these days, but I am fortunate to have one of the few professors in America who has the information and is willing to share it with his students (a highly unusual combination). Once again, I am referring to the one and only David Y. Chang.

Professor Chang gave us a lecture on morphology and taught us all the bones and muscles of the head. It was freaking amazing!!! I now know things like the zygomatic arch, squama, the great wing of sphenoid, condyle, levator labii superioris, orbicularis oris, buccinator, depressor septi, etc. I really hope he decides to teach that figure drawing class.

Classical Drawing Report

 

 

 

 

I feel incredibly happy and at the same time very nostalgic from having finished my classical drawing class. It was a lot of work, but I also miss the camaraderie and the environment that develops when you put several artists together. My professor David Y. Chang was able to top himself (NOT an easy task) by giving us a morphology lesson as well as bringing old books to exemplify some of this teachings. One of them was Luca Pacioli's "De Divina Proportione" where Leonardo Da Vinci illustrated complex geometric shapes with silverpoint, a medium that cannot be erased. This demonstrated to the world how confident he was about his skills.

Here are some of the drawings I produced during the class. Please note they are not necessarily finished, since we had limited time to work on them in the classroom. From top to bottom:

Sphere Study (from imagination)
The Silver Cup after Chardin
Geometric Shapes study
Fruit, metal and glass still life
La Jeune Femme study

These were all done either with graphite or charcoal. I will post some more of my drawings soon...

Classical Drawing & Wisdom from my Parents...

Like my parents always insist, if one sets out to do something, one should work to become the best at it. Art, like most other things in life, is like math, if you don't know the basics you can't really get better at it. That is why I decided to take a classical drawing class again. I took classical drawing more or less six years ago, but since then, my professor restructured it to cover topics I never learned. It was the hardest art course of my degree and I had always dreaded the thought of doing it again.

Guess what? It turns out it is one of the best decisions I have ever taken. I am soooo happy with the new found knowledge about composition, veiling, the golden mean, among lots of other cool stuff. I am confident that I will become a much better painting because of this course. I can't wait to start trying out my new skills with paint!

Above is one of the master studies I worked on for "home studio."  The original is by Da Vinci, and although I am not there yet, I am definitely closer than I was six years ago when I tried it last. This time I actually enjoyed the exercise!!! Who would have thought??? (Back then it was mere torture).

I leave you with another bit of wisdom from my dad... "You can't learn how to swim by reading a book, you just have to throw yourself in the water" and that is exactly what I'm trying to do, figuratively, of course.

P.S. The study is not done, I mostly worked on working the value right on the shadows. I still have to work on the transition from light to dark and the lights :)