Monday, 11.11.24
Here is a drawing from yesterday’s Open Studio at Gage Academy Of Art. For the uninitiated*, an “Open Studio” is a chance to draw, sculpt, paint the figure from life, without instruction, a model in a room, posed for several hours. For this Sunday session, there was one long single pose for the whole time, broken up into 20’ segments with breaks. The Gage Open Studios have been a welcome change from the work I’ve been focused on for the last six months during Art Tour 2024, which was mostly large-scale, plein air (outside from life) watercolor work, with no drawing, just straight into painting.
*(“but we are initiated, aren’t we Bruce”)
Drawings made in this way owe their process to one of my favorite artists (and, coincidentally, one of my favorite artist’s favorite artists) Tony Ryder. I first took figure drawing workshops with Tony in high school, forever changing how I could see and draw from life. Since returning to Seattle a week and a half ago, I have been loving the chance to keep up my daily (M-F) practice of some kind of art, travel and sickness the only exceptions (I’m currently a year+ without a single day missed), switching over to the patience, accuracy, and refinement of long-format graphite drawing, coming off of the often-frantic cacophony of optical full-chroma plein air watercolor paintings completed in single sessions. Thank you, Gage, for keeping up your Open Studio offerings. This week I’ll be going Weds, Thurs, Fri, and Sun.
Knowing how much I look forward to this part of my day, I was disappointed to realize I’d forgotten my whole pencil case (still had my paper and board), no fancy Mono Tombow pencils, no kneaded eraser, no xacto blade to sharpen them, just a few promo pencils from last May’s ArtX Festival in Flagstaff, with their pink eraser.
Thank you, Director Julie, for the free pencils! They’re my gym workout notebook pencils, extremely durable, always in my backpack. The purple casing changes to pink with increased temperature. I found some dull scissors to sharpen them. Thank you to the other artist who offered me his blade to sharpen with - but I told him, I’ve made my bed, time to sleep in it.
The harder lead (lighter lines) made for a different drawing than I would have otherwise made, and I feel richer for the experience.
Yes, of course in art-making it is nice to have nice supplies, the right tools for the job, but from time to time it can be fruitful to approach your work under constraints, not having what you believe you need, making work anyways.
The lighting on the model was soft and diffuse, not pointed. Her outline in profile was sharp, and I think overall the ArtX pencil allowed me to handle this perhaps better than the usual 4B or 2B pencils I work with.
