Slowing Down

Back in 1994, my friend Garin Baker invited me to join him for a figure painting session at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He was working from the model with a group of master figure painters that included Max Ginsburg and Steve Assael.

As I recall, they had already been painting from the same model for some weeks. This was their fourth or fifth session with the same pose. By the time I joined them, they had put in 20 or 30 hours into that one pose.

I was amazed with the quality of their work, which showed deep observation. I was so accustomed to painting from the standard 20- or 30-minute poses in most sketch groups, that even a three-hour session seemed like a huge luxury.

After two hours on the same pose, I felt like I overcooked the pasta.

So I applied the Ninety Degree Rule. Steve Assael became my subject. I felt energized. Here was a living, moving subject and only 45 minutes of time left. Even though he wasn’t holding completely still, there was a quality of life and tension that excited me.

I greatly admire what my colleagues have accomplished with extended observational poses, but I guess I’m more suited to catching life on the run.

I’m curious to learn from those of you who have more experience than I do painting from long poses. How much time is ideal for you? How do you pace yourself with longer poses? If you were running an atelier, how would you balance short and long poses?
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Related GJ post "Artists as Models," link.
"Ninety Degree Rule," link.
Websites for Steve Assael, Max Ginsburg, and Garin Baker.
Max Ginsburg has an exhibit "Visions of Reality," in NYC through Sept. 26.
Also, Garin, Steve, and Max are part of a group show called "The Old Hat Club" at the High School of Art and Design, through October 3.

Vibert’s Gulliver

Jehan-Georges Vibert (1840-1902) was an academic painter who specialized in realistically imagined scenes of court life.

Last spring, Sotheby auction house unveiled a large Vibert painting depicting a scene from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The painting had disappeared from public view for over 100 years.

Vibert visualized the army of the Kingdom of Lilliput with extraordinary attention to individual characterization and costume.

He placed the viewer at the eye level of the Lilliputians, looking upward at the foreshortened giant. The face seems miles away.
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Wikipedia Commons, 16 reproductions, link.
Gallery of Paintings by Vibert, link.

Art in Embassies Program

It is with sadness that I learned today of the loss of life of six Yemeni guards and four civilians this morning as the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, was hit by two car bombs.

I have a particular interest in that embassy because one of my paintings, “Hudson Highlands,” is on loan to that embassy, part of the “Art in Embassies Program” sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

There is no official word yet about the condition of the building or its contents, though reports indicate that further explosions and gunfire followed the initial bomb blast, and smoke was seen rising from the compound.

I also have a couple of paintings on loan to the U.S. Permanent Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the short run, artwork has no power over guns and bombs, but I believe that cultural exchanges between countries can make a small difference in the long run.
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News photo courtesy ©EPA
News story here and here
Art in Embassies Program, link.

Plaster Casts

Artists pursuing academic training in contemporary ateliers spend time making charcoal studies of plaster casts. These replica sculptures are made from classic Greek, Roman, and Renaissance originals.

This is an excellent way to refine drawing skills, especially the close observation of light and shade on form. As an added benefit, you get to feast your eyes on the timeless beauty of master sculptures.

Here’s a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s Moses from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Plaster casts can be either gigantic full figure replicas or smaller pieces. These affordable casts of individual facial features are based on Michelangelo’s David.

Most art schools once had large plaster cast collections, but many destroyed them in the wanton orgy of iconoclasm of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The cast collection belonging to Vassar College in New York State (seen intact above) was a typical sad story. The director of the Art program, Agnes Clafin, ordered the destruction of the collection in the 1940s arguing that casts were no longer useful in teaching, and that “this was a time to innovate, to bring Vassar up to speed.” Only a few casts at Vassar escaped annihilation.

But fortunately there are still several museums and schools that held onto their plaster cast collections. Many will allow artists to draw from them, but the limitation is often the lighting. Typically, museum lighting uses multiple light sources, which makes the study of form and chiaroscuro rather confusing. If you’re drawing a cast that’s lit by multiple light sources, it’s best not to bother copying tones and to study the lines and shapes instead.
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Intact collections
George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts
Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri in Columbia
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (including architectural casts)
University of Oxford, Great Britain
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Copenhagen Cast Collection
Pushkin Museum in Russia
for a full listing, check out:
Plaster Cast Collection Database

Story of the Vassar Casts, link

Retail Sources:
Note: beware that some are third or fourth generation molds, and may not resemble the original very closely.
Sculpt Shop
Fine Art Store
Giust Gallery

Wray Gunn

At the Norman Rockwell Museum on Friday I met the gentleman who posed for Mr. Rockwell’s famous painting “New Kids in the Neighborhood.”

Wray Gunn of Stockbridge was the black boy to the left of the scene. He said that many members of his family posed for Rockwell’s other paintings during this period.

He showed me a series of prints of the photos that Rockwell worked from.

I did a quick sketch of him in the same angle as the original picture, 41 years later. The Norman Rockwell Museum has several museum docents who are former models.

The Science of Rainbows

Some poets and artists of the Romantic era were not entirely happy with Isaac Newton’s scientific analysis of the rainbow. The poets Wordsworth and Keats believed that Newton “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors." “Unweaving the rainbow,” as they put it, reduced its power and meaning. (See the last post on the meaning of the rainbow).

But Newton also had admirers among artists, especially Turner, Overbeck, Runge, Palmer, and Constable, who did this plein air sketch in 1812 of what he called “this most beautiful phenomenon of light”

From ancient times, people speculated on how many strands of colored light went into the rainbow. Ancients argued for two, three, or four. Newton reasoned that there are three primaries, but seven hues, namely red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

The rainbow forms when rays of sunlight bounce around inside raindrops that hang suspended in the air after a storm. These raindrops reflect and refract light back toward the viewer at a 42 degree angle. As the light bounces inside the spherical water droplets, the component colors of light bend in varying amounts, and exit the droplet at slightly different angles, creating the colors of the bow.

The main rainbow forms at 42 degrees from the “antisolar point,” the point in the sky below the horizon) that is 180 degrees away from the sun. As the sun gets lower in the afternoon sky, the antisolar point raises up closer to the horizon, and more and more of the full circle of the rainbow is visible.

It doesn’t matter whether the droplets reflecting the sunlight are close to the viewer or far away. What matters is the angle, as anyone who has seen rainbows in a sprinker’s mist will know.

In this photo by Andy Goldsworthy, a man is creating a rainbow by slapping the water with a stick and sending up a stream of droplets into the air.

Next week we’ll look at the secondary rainbow and the mysterious dark region between the two bows.
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Diagram of raindrop from Answers.com
Rainbows in Art, link.
Constable sketch from Victoria and Albert Museum, link.

Brodner at the Rockwell

The Norman Rockwell Museum is hosting an exhibition of political satire and caricature called “Raw Nerve: The Political Art of Steve Brodner.”

Steve happened to be in the museum yesterday when Jeanette and I stopped by. We got to talking, and when it was time to exchange business cards, we both found we were all out of cards.

So we made custom cards, starting with a caricature of each other.

Here’s Steve’s drawing of me.

Later, while Steve was regaling some fans with some funny stories about drawing Sarah Palin, I did another sketch of him.

He took the sketchbook, turned it sideways, and created a new drawing of me, using the portrait of him as a starting point. It’s the first time I’ve “shared a nose” with a fellow artist.

If you can make it to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, don’t miss the exhibition. It contains over 100 pencil, pen, and watercolor originals, along with lots of videos of Steve drawing. His work is a rare combination of complete honesty, deep feeling, biting wit, and consummate skill. The exhibition will be on show through Oct 26.
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Visit Steve Brodner’s blog and website.
Norman Rockwell Museum, link.
Society of Illustrators Museum in NYC is also hosting "Politics O8", link.