Discovering Art, Part 2 of 5:

Figure Drawing

This is the second of a series of emails this week, 5 in total, M-F.  You can read part one here.

1999, when I was 13, was also the year that I first drew the live nude model in charcoal.  The class was an adult figure-drawing class, and I’d been allowed to join on special exception from the art school’s co-founder, artist Gary Faigin, who was also teaching the class.  I loved every second of it.  It was more fun and more reward than I’d ever experienced drawing, and I could feel that the other adult students respected the work I was making and the seriousness or focus I gave to the process of learning to draw the figure.  I could tell, here, there is a lifetime of practice, a lifetime of nourishment in the forms and lights and shadows of the human body.

To take my interest to the next level again, to embrace a new horizon of original artwork in my life, my family and I took a vacation to Italy, Rome and Florence specifically, in 2001.  For the first time in my life the artwork I’d only seen in used art books (by now the collection had grown substantially, and I’d been copying works like mad) was in front of my eyes, in the flesh, on ceilings in the sistine chapel, on a pedestal in Florence, almost at my fingertips.  This trip changed my life, and I drew the whole time I was there, everything of interest from pedestrians on the Spanish steps, a sketch of Michelangelo’s David, a guard at the Pantheon, the head of Nicodemus from Michelangelo’s penultimate Pietà.  Inspired isn’t even the right word - my life changed.

There was another art-life-altering moment in 2001, and it took place unexpectedly at the Seattle Art Museum.  My parents brought me to a massive exhibition of the work of an American artist I’d never heard of.  I was still head-first wrapped up with Italian and French artists, impressionists like Monet, studio draftsmen like Degas, Renaissance and Baroque sculptors like Michelangelo and Bernini.

The 2001 exhibit at SAM was a huge traveling collection of the works of John Singer Sargent.  I had no awareness of this artist or his work before the show.  My jaw dropped.  I saw in Sargent’s oil portraiture the same level of humanity and pathos I’d seen in Repin’s work in Russia, and so much more - Sargent seemed to be able to take a subject - any subject - and put it into a beautiful masterpiece in oil, in graphite and chalk, at any scale, from the precious to the larger-than-life.  Especially now that I have discovered and embraced so much more of Sargent’s work since that 2001 first impression, I could write paragraph after paragraph just on this topic, but let me focus.  There was one aspect of the exhibit that not only had I never seen, but I’d not been aware that it was possible to do.  Sargent’s original landscape watercolors, made en plein air (outside, from life), were beyond belief.  I had seen Michelangelo’s Pieta, I had seen the David, and could at least conceive of how those pieces were made and refined.  Sargent’s watercolors, on the other hand, I could not actually understand how any human could make work in watercolor that accurate, that alive, that beautiful.

In 2001, I’d tried to paint in watercolor a little and had quickly been humbled by the practice.  There is no erasing, there is no editing, the marks made are more or less the marks seen.  Unlike oil painting, which can be nudged this way and that to infinity, opaquely covered up, begun again, once the paper is disturbed or pigmented, in watercolor there is no going back.  It is more akin, in my limited experience, to sculpture than to painting, just as a piece of marble, once removed, cannot be re-attached to the block.  Seeing Sargent’s watercolor work was, to me, like seeing Michelangelo carve many Davids, each more impressive than the last, all with an apparent facility that I could only dream of.  Wouldn’t it be a convenient narrative if I could write that I immediately started practicing landscape watercolor?  Nope.  If I’m honest, seeing his work that day just planted a seed, an idea, that maybe, maybe, one day, with infinite practice, I could learn how to do some of the things he was doing with the medium.  Purely a dream, at that point, and certainly not put into practice!  I was in love with drawing the human figure, and felt like I still had so far to go just on that practice alone, to say nothing of color in watercolor or oil painting.

On the recommendation of Gary Faigin, in 2002 and again in 2003 I took multi-week drawing workshops with Tony Ryder.  Tony’s drawings of the human figure and portrait are, to date, like nothing else I’ve ever seen.  I learned more from him in a few days and weeks than I had in the previous several years.  Tony’s work relies on the sensitivity and patience of someone who has drawn so much, seen so much and so accurately, yet takes the time to see their subject anew, to ask questions about what he is seeing and why, every single time he draws or paints.  The results are stunning.  Seeing him produce drawings like he does in person is another experience altogether.  On top of this, Tony is (all his students agree here) the kindest, most patient, thoughtful person I think I’ve ever met.  He is a master of his art, doubtless, but he is a rare combination - a man who can teach as well as he can perform and do.  I don’t know any of Tony’s students (and I know a few) whose lives and work haven’t been changed for the better by attending his workshops and being in his presence.  Of course, I’m sure Tony would blush to hear this - his practice is ego-less.  I don’t get any kickbacks on enrolling in his classes or school, I swear!

From Tony, I learned some of the techniques and methods used by Renaissance artists like Leonardo or Michelangelo to draw the human body as it appears, alive, whole, integral, and how to use graphite (pencil) to render light and shadow, to give the appearance of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface.  I remember exactly the first time I could actually see this process at work in a drawing I was working on, when the forearm of the model (in my drawing) started to, as Tony puts it, “the form turns”.  It was magic, but pretty hard-won.  I was 17 at the time.  It gave me hope, hope that I could learn how to improve my art, especially from people who were doing these amazing, exceptional things, if I kept at it, worked hard, observed and practiced.

I am grateful, and lucky, to have had some of these experiences when I was young, to have met artistic heroes like Gary and Tony, and to have had the privilege of experiencing masterpieces in person across the world, in fits and spurts.

Check your inbox tomorrow (Wednesday) for

Discovering Art, Part 3 of 5:

Sargent Dreams

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Cheers,

David