Where art meets meaning, and your space meets you
I was thinking 🧐 of contrasts and reducing my colour palette recently. Below are a couple of images where I played with new forms and hues. This week I was struck by the work of Mexican artist Sandra del Pilar and British artist Sahara Longe. Both seem to assert figures of humanity in subtle ways. I like how their figures seem to give way to the paint and colour form.
My art class this week got us to practise our portrait painting with a live model. It was the first time I painted a portrait. I had always been nervous about painting humans. I somehow felt incompetent.
But I realised I had been here before when I got into it. Flashback: I trained to become a beauty therapist when I left school. And no, I was not a beauty school dropout. Instead, I did well. But what people don’t know about beauty training is the amount of anatomy and physiology you must learn. I had exams in the skeletal and muscular systems and cross-sections of the skin. When I told the art teacher about this, I found myself recounting the Latin names of the muscles of the face. Surprisingly I even told her about each muscle’s insertions and origins. Didnt realise I still remembered those pesky exam type answers.
It was illuminating how my prior experience of understanding what is happening behind faces and below the skin surface was really useful for my drawing. I also remembered the story of Leonardo Da Vinci studying anatomy. It seems he used to study cadavers. But my study of faces was not of dead people. They were the heads of 1000 facials I had done in my 20s in salons and spas in London and around the world.
It was nice to get encouragement to continue still-life drawings. I shall.
I went back to basics and relearned drawing, and the strategies used to perfect the representation of the figure.
I learned the intricacies of negative space and what it is used for. I also learned the aligning with a kebab stick. And top tip note to self remember to imagine there is a plate of glass in front of you.
I also learned to insert scaffolding in the drawing to ensure you get the proportion right. All the things they didn’t teach me when I worked towards my A’level art all those decades ago. At least I cannot remember them teaching me. Perhaps when I was aged 15,16,17, I wasn’t listening to what I was taught. But the pictures below show.
I am listening now.
I am listening now to instructions about getting the proportions and balance of my lines right.
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