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Workshops and Classes: A way to take time for yourself and improve your skills with gentle guidance from a pro.
REGULAR FIGURE DRAWING CLASSES - My Drawings
REGULAR FIGURE DRAWING CLASSES - My Drawings
Figure Drawing - Ongoing class held the first and third Mondays each month and later only on the third Mondays. We draw from a clothed model. A variety of drawing materials are provided, and model poses include both shorter warm-up or gesture poses, and longer poses up to 35 minutes. The classes are taught by various staff members and guest teachers.
Some of my drawings are show in the image carousel. I enjoy this class a lot but some models are much easier to draw than others.
GUEST INSTRUCTOR - Vincent Valdez
GUEST INSTRUCTOR - Vincent Valdez
Vincent Valdez taught our January 19th, 2015 Figure Drawing Class which was existing because I love his work. Three huge paintings from his series called "Strange Fruit" appeared in the State of the Art Show at Crystal Bridges.
Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit
In each of Vincent Valdez’s paintings from 13 painting series The Strangest Fruit, a single male figure floats on a blank background. Each perfectly rendered subject is suffused in a warm light, hovering in space without reference to the ground. The title refers to the 1937 poem “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol, and the song of the same title made famous by Billie Holiday - a poignant allusion to the lynching of African Americans in the United States. Valdez draws attention to the lost history of Mexican and Mexican-American men lynched in Texas up until the 1930s. The young men depicted wear contemporary clothes but no noose, suggesting both the invisibility of this history and its continuing impact in our own time i.e., the bonds still hobbling Mexican-American men today, including poverty, incarceration, drug wars, lack of education, and racial profiling.
We started with a series of short blind gesture drawings to warm up. These type of drawings are my least favorite. However, Vincent explained that he (as a student) had to do them for 6 months and how it benefited his ability and his career. What he said about how it increased the ability of his hand to communicate with his brain and increased his speed finally made it make sense to me. He believes the warm up process is important. It can hurt as much as doing the treadmill after a period of inactivity.
Vincent believes that drawing is "immediate, natural, instinctive, and primitive" like the marks on cave walls. He finds it fun and demanding. He said to look for geometric shapes in our subject even in the negative spaces. He draws with his wrist not his fingers. He stressed feeling how the forms of our clothed model interconnect and feeling the tension in certain areas and the strength in others. He explained the difference in "blackness" and "permanence" of many different types of charcoal we had available from vine to conté crayons.
On his initial drawing Vincent "grids" out areas of shadow and highlight and then puts charcoal in all the shades of the gray scale softening with a finger or paper towel.
My charcoal sketch completed in 45 minutes was fun but I would have liked more time. Vincent used up-lighting which explains the unusual light areas on the model.
He advised me to put in the darkest darks first which worked. He liked my shadows, the highlights and said the proportions of my drawing were good.
GUEST INSTRUCTOR - Adonna Khare
GUEST INSTRUCTOR - Adonna Khare
Adonna Khare taught our October 20, 2014 Figure Drawing Class which made it very special. She is the artiest whose huge drawing called Rhinos appeared in the State of the Art Exhibition at Crystal Bridges.
Adonna said Rhinos, which was done with carbon pencils, took her 8 months to complete.
This was before she won $100,000 prize for a drawing of elephants.
About the Rhino Drawing
About the Rhino Drawing
Adonna Khare’s large-scale drawings of animals are amazing not only in the detail she includes but how her imagination works overtime. Once you come closer, details emerge that suggest a story, conferring human attributes onto the animal figures (anthropomorphism). Consider Rhinos, a drawing depicting a rhinoceros family of three gathered around a rocky void. Ruptures in the skin of the smallest rhinoceros spew streams of water, while the older animals’ horns unpeel like bananas, ripe for consumption.
This work directly references the decimation of the wild rhinoceros population through excessive hunting—their horns command top dollar on the black market. The placement of the animals in a rapidly flooding environment conveys the imminence of their grim future.
In the class she had the model wear a variety of masks which everyone agreed, freed us up to be looser and more experimental.
Adonna's series of three thirty second sketches shows her skill in capturing the attitude and proportions of the figure wearing an elephant mask in a few bold lines.
She gave me the sketch when I asked for it. I'm not supposed to say she did that so don't tell anyone.
My thirty second Gesture Drawing of model wearing a bat mask. Adonna said my bat face was "The Best".
Detail of my twenty minute charcoal drawing of the model wearing a fox mask. This one was done on gray paper with white used only on the mask. Adonna liked the smile on the fox, the depth at the waist, the shadow under the mask, and the hands.
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