Drawing school update: week 2

27 Jan

Pencil and charcoal

55 x 76 cm

Last week I started on a course at The Royal Drawing School. Week two was a different sort of session from the first. Instead of just drawing from life, we started with two sources of input:  a written description of a stage set from a Harold Pinter play, and a model who would take three different poses at different times throughout the day. The aim was to create a single drawing that was a combination of memory (i.e. imagination) and observation. 

This drawing forced me to take on a number of unfamiliar issues. One in particular was the issue of coherence. Every image has some mechanism of coherence that is its primary concern; something that "holds" the image together. It can be a visceral emotion, a story, a viewpoint, a technique, etc. All too often in my drawings I try to place descriptive accuracy as the primary mechanism of coherence.

For this exercise however I tried to release my rigid grip on perspective and linear description and focus instead on trying to hold the image together by weaving the marks and tones like a tapestry. My goal was to stay loose and try to disengage my conscious, thinking, judging, "problem-solving approach to drawing, and try to make way for something more direct, immediate, automatic. I wanted to allow the image to bend to a different set of criteria, so I focused on my mark making. Every mark in a drawing has a job to do and I wanted the marks to do more than just describe an edge or contour. I wanted the marks to connect the different parts of the drawing together. I wanted them to act as structural, tonal, and narrative indicators -- at the same time if possible.

Here's the result. This feels like progress. But I know I'm still dealing with issues of technique. My aim is to get into a state where the drawing is telling me what it needs and the pencil is being guided by the emotion or the narrative in the piece, rather than me instructing things consciously.  I want to find a way to take my ego out of the equation more, feel less in control, and make drawings that surprise me even more than this one. 

 Detail

 Detail

Detail

Am I destined to always draw like me?

Pencil on newsprint

20 Jan

Drawing has always played an important part of my life. As an animator and illustrator in the early part of my career, drawing was simply how I made my living. Although my work today as a change and leadership development consultant is very different, drawing remains an essential skill that I turn to frequently. Drawing is how I develop and share ideas with others in my team, translate insights into imagery that deepens levels of understanding with our clients, and create engaging pieces of communication as part of change programmes within big organisations. Drawing is still very much alive in my work even today.

But for me, drawing is more than just a practical tool. Drawing is deeply connected to how I think and how I engage with the world. It is a place to go that seems to anchor me. Because of this, I have always tried to maintain some form of a studio practice that involved drawing in one way or another. Like many people, I have found it hard to keep my studio work flourishing over the years given the challenges of balancing competing demands of work, family, and other responsibilities and interests. Because of this, my studio practice has not received a tremendous amount of my time and attention - certainly not on a sustained level - and not enough to really progress my work.

I’ve decided to try to address this by resetting the balance and reconnecting myself in a more dedicated way to this deeply fundamental activity. In order to make sure I build in time into my week for drawing, I have signed up for a one-day-a-week course at the Royal Drawing School. However I am treating this as an opportunity to do more than simply draw the way I already draw. I want to use this course as a means to focus on my drawing practice and to challenge and push myself outside of the comfortable and well-worn groove of my artistic habits. I want to use the course as a chance to experiment, make mistakes, do a lot of bad drawings, and (hopefully) create a few drawings that surprise me and don’t seem to be the usual sort of thing I would do.

Over the next 10 weeks I plan to document the journey I’m on as a way to track changes in both the internal conversation in my head as well as the external evidence of the drawings themselves. I’m not planning on anything too grand – or even coherent – but I’ll use this blog as a place to capture things to see how they change.

Here goes: 

January 20^th, week one.

It was good to get into the studio and draw from life. The process of slowing down and really looking forces me to stop the noise in my head and take in more information. The class opened with some shorter poses, becoming increasingly longer until a three-hour pose in the afternoon. The two images below are 45 mins each.

Charcoal

20 Jan

The work I produced was ok, but pretty pedestrian. The drawings from the longer poses were very dull and tight, as you can see from the images below. (The one on the right below was a 2 hour pose.) When in doubt, I have a habit of leaning quite heavily on draughtsmanship skills, but this has a tendency to kill the life of a drawing. I find that the more time I’m given to do a drawing, the more controlled the work becomes, and the duller it gets.

Graphite

20 Jan

So, my aim is to find a way to slow down even more, take more time to look and think, and focus my energy on translating the evidence of the subject into a drawing that is rich in information, but also full of energy, life, insight and intrigue. Slow, yet spontaneous at the same time. Is that possible?

Professor John Wood with pen

Ink

65 x 37.5 cm