Visits to the Millennium Gallery and the Graves Gallery, Sheffield

I had an opportunity to start a session of Life Drawing classes today, held at the Millennium Gallery for contemporary art, Sheffield.  The tutor was Brian Smith, who is also a lecturer at Hallamshire University, Sheffield, and interestingly, informed me he was an Architecture Student of Huddersfield (when it was a poly-technical college), prior to its becoming a University.

I thouroughly enjoyed the Life Drawing, - Brian provided me with valuable tuition in a number of points, so much in fact, that I felt a little self concious that he spent so much time with me, compared to the other 15 or so students.

In particular, he explained the relational equilateral triangles that I should look out for on the human form, and try to make everything conform to equilateral reference points, rather than skewed or isosceles triangles, that novices tend to fall in to.   Furthermore, to work the human form with circles and tangents rather than the line on its own provides a better relationship to forms.   Very useful and valuable advice.

Vincent Van-Gogh, - Diggers

The additional advice provided was to work more on searching out shapes, not specifically human forms. Once identified in isolation, the shapes and shades and tonal values can be more easily recorded, rather than trying to complete a picture or likeness through viewing the whole.  This takes quite a mental mind shift, but it's results are far more accuracy in deliniating the gestalt. (The whole).

Vincent Van-Gogh, Digger

This is really about looking for negative spaces too.  In reference to Betty Edwards book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, (2012, Penguin Group),  it's a technique that is most apparent in many of the paintings by Vincent Van-Gogh, and to some degree, his friend Paul Gougan.  In Van-Gogh's drawing of "The Digger", (On the right here) this negative space drawing technique has particular importance as the figure on first glance seems to have extreme facial features. However, the positioning of the face and the silhouette of the mouth and nose and lips is actually appropriately and (paradoxically) proportionately placed.  Van-Goch also increased the contrast between the dark areas of the body & form and the negative space of the background pond and water rushes.


The Life Drawing lesson lasted two hours and I intend to use these again, especially as I can get student discount too!...  I've committed to do these every Friday morning, whenever I am free / available to do so.

My rather feeble results from today's session are as follows, and in no way at all could be compared to the genius of Van-Goch's examples above, - however with Brian's tuition, I seemed to be getting a little better after each of the model's poses which were timed at between 5 minutes to 15 minutes.

You can see from the two drawings on the left, - in the upper one (which is my clearly novice attempt), I have tried to copy the "form" of the model's upper torso. - The head, the arm, the shoulder, the neck, the chest and so on.  Whearas in the tutor's drawing (at left, lower), you can see that the focus of his attention was only on drawing or copying, shapes such as the shadow area under the chin, the triangular shape of shadow to the right of the arm-pit, the shape of the negative space between arm and head, the angle of the boundary line between the fore-arm and above, the shape of the negative space to the right of the head, etc.  Notice that these are referred to as just shapes, just lines or tangents and just shapes or spaces... There is no labelling of the objects for what they are, - they are just shapes.   This mental shift in normally trying to define and visualise the objects in our heads before deliniating them, rather than as a professional artist does, which is not to name but to DRAW takes us into a very different technique.  I'm sure you will agree that the result, i.e. the lower of the two drawings, carries much more weight, depth, artistic gravitas if you like, than my feeble attempt above it!
 So, Onwards and Upwards....  I clearly need to make this transformational shift in my drawings and to start to look and record in terms of;

• Tangents and lines coming from circles or elipses
• Angles - to be defined early and used as reference points
• Negative spaces and shapes which are just as, if not more important than the object forms you are trying to capture
• Shapes and random patterns, that are more easily recorded, 

(TANS)

....rather than trying to draw an object that has probably got it's original dimensions and drawing procedure locked in your brain, but hasn't changed since childhood... - See example on the right of my attempt to draw based on this -pre-programmed method, which looks very basic, amateurish and crude.  Even the best of the attempts, below right, still has this novice and un-sophisticated quality to it.
 I clearly have much to learn!