Class Six

A Sketching 'trip'

In this final class we will take a modest 'sketching trip' out into corridoors and common areas of the College.  We can draw each other while we draw each other...and we can make an effort to draw the environs as well.  Drawing a complex room, stairwell, or corridor can be an interesting challenge; placing figures so that they integrate with the environment is all the more interesting and challenging.  Hopefully you will leapfrog this first exercise and take and use your sketch book in bars, cafes, on ferries and at other gathering places.

Sketching and drawing on location has traditionally been a valuable skill for visual artists.  Prior to the invention of the small camera, the only way a person, artist, explorer or expedition member could transport  images and impressions of views, buildings, and objects far away places (besides buying a painting or a mass produced etching in situ) was to bring a sketch book and draw or paint on location.

In Kenneth Clarke's book 'The Nude', he makes a brief note of how, during the early Rennaisance,  statuary poses and stylistic treatments of figures travelled across Europe in transportable drawings made by artists on their travels and visits to famous paintings and sculptures.  It is apparently possible to document the spread of figurative poses, styles and content geographically according to the provenance of art objects.  This style and content could be considered to be  'memes', bits of cultural information  replicated and spread virally like genetic information, with the sketchbooks and drawings of artistic hosts being one of the most significant vectors.  Of course this would have been slow process.  Today ideas, styles, content; memes; are transmitted at the speed of the internet and spread like wildfire.

(Memes were originally posited by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as a unit of culture that can be transmitted from person to person and culture to culture by 'imitation', in the same way that an origami pattern might be passed from one individual to another.  You can read more about memes here.)

Today images themselves have become incomprehensively profligate.  A mediaval or Renaissance image would have had an enormously unique value because of the relative rarity of images in general.  They would have been percieved to have almost magical powers.  They would have been iconic.  Developments such as the printing press, mass and machine operated print production, offset lithography, photography, moving film, digital photography, cel phone cameras and the internet have increased the profligation of images by orders of magnitudes in mere decades, years, months and sometimes weeks.  In a way, our world of profligate imagary has cheapened the image; in a way it has empowered it.

(For an interesting aside, click here to watch episodes of the 1970's documentary by John Berger which deals with, among other things, the effect of the camera and mass production of images on art)

(For another interesting aside that illustrates the astounding advance of portable visual machinary in the last 10 years, click here to see a short film by Rupert Howe in which Howe shadows the movements of actor Gene Hackman in the Jack Tar Hotel (now the Cathedral Hill Hotel) in the movie The Conversation.  A large part of Howe's split screen film has his own footage imitating Coppola's with surpising accuracy!)

Back to sketching! There is a distinct possibility that the modern world has made sketching, not to mention painting and drawing and other traditional art forms, completely obsolete.  If Michealangelo were alive today he would probably be working in Hollywood or the Gaming industry.  But, as archaic as sketching might be, it can still be an incredibly useful way of generating quick visual ideas and impressions.  As well, like so many possibly 'obsolete and archaic' art activities, it has a life of it's own; it exists within a realm determined by practitioners and appreciators of the process.  You can look at a sketch and enjoy/appreciate it for what it is, and not dwell on what it isn't.

Sketching, like life drawing, is also a great way to integrate the eye, mind and hand of any visually preocupied person.  It is portable and doesn't require batteries or extension cords.  A sketching trip can be thought of like a fishing trip.  You never know what you'll catch.  It can be fun to come home and lay out your scribbles and see what transpired.  Sometimes the results can be far more satisfying than a more considered visual activity.

For a student of drawing and painting, which I still consider myself, sketching is a fantastic opportunity to use every exercise in the book in part or in whole in a desperate attempt to put down as much information as possible in a limited amount of time.  If you are drawing and observing people, you have the figurative content, but you can also put your subject in context.  To do so you will have to make careful eyeballing measurements to establish convincing perspective.  Do you sketch your people first and build the envinment around them? Or do you build your environment first and then populate it with figures? 

 Integrating figures into an environment is challenge.  It's also tough to draw two figures in relation to each other on the same piece of paper.

One trick to sketching and drawing where your figurative subjects can move on a whim, is to find someone who will constantly re-assume the same position.  I have poor memory in general, and can't hold even a visual thought for long, so this is a huge help for me.  Musicians make great subjects because they hold positions for longish periods, and if they move, come back to them again. Yelling encore! helps get them back on the stage and in position...

Pool players and spectators, although constantly moving, always assume similar positions.  Often you don't actually need the same person to assume the position.  Many sketchers end up drawing composites of their subjects.  Someone who has discussed this trick on his exellent blog of life drawings and sketches from trains and buses is Donald O. Colley, and you can visit his blog by clicking here.

Social gatherings make great sketching.  Most people can draw and talk or listen to conversation, so you can practice your drawing while visiting with friends and family.

 You can draw the person drawing beside you...

Inevitably many of your public sketching subjects will be experiencing all the sadness and misery, as well as the joys, of our human condition.  It would be foolish to imagine that as an observer with a sketchbook and crayon we are detatched from our subjects.  We are among them.  Their suffering and despair, like the elderly woman below sketched in a public library, is something we will someday experience, if we haven't already.

You might find drawing in public difficult as a result of the attention you might recieve.  It's not for everyone.  Also, there are some moral delemmas attached to drawing people in public.  Are you stealing their souls or surveilling them?  Many people who don't like Closed Circuit Television Surveillance probably won't appreciate you drawing them.  It is perhaps appropriate to feel uncomfortable sketching people, but console yourself that if your subjects are in public they should expect to be observed.

Pubs and bar rooms make for great drawing.  I could draw an interesting graph to show how my drawing improves steadily after one beer, continues to improve after two, but starts deteriorating after four.

This sketching class wraps up the course in the basics of drawing.  We've covered a fair bit of ground.  During this course you have drawn for 18 hrs in class.  That is not a lot of time.  The animators and layout artists that I refered to in earlier posts would come to work and draw for 8, 10 or 12 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, year after year.  So we haven't even put in a half a work week of drawing during class.  It is impossible to internalize and master the drawing skills we've covered in such an absurdly short time.  The strength of 'formal' education is that it can introduce us to ideas and concepts, excercises and skills, ways of working and seeing;  it's weakness is that it provides very little time to internalize, develop and master skills.  If you take piano lessons, you might receive your lesson once a week, but all week long you will practice and practice and practice daily, accumulating hours to master the medium.  The well known parody of the practical vs theoretical conundrum in all occupations is the  young University graduate, highly qualified on paper and full of theory and ideas who falls flat on his or her face in front of the old craftsperson who learnt everything they know on the job by actually doing the job. 

So buy another sketchbook, newsprint pad, and keep drawing for fun and improvement.  Visit drop-in life drawing sessions when you have time.  Don't be too results oriented; accumulate a month of drawings and sketches and then look through them and edit them down to the ones you like and dislike.  Shuffle your pile of 'keepers' and duds back and forth a bit before throwing out the ones you are convinced are not good.  Looking at your own drawing in retrospect, as well as the work of others in books and galleries, can provide great insight.

You will probably have to decide how much time to invest in drawing.  If you were interested in animation today, which is almost all done in 3D computer programs, you may well be advised to spend more of your time practicing and developing a facility with a computer interface.  But some time spent drawing form would not be a waste of time; it could only inform your virtual visual work.  Likewise if you were a painter you might want to decide how to divide your working time between painting and drawing.  But, despite drawing's lack of prestige in the visual hierarchy, I submit to you that time spent drawing is not time wasted.

Further notes and links for life after drawing class HERE.