New term

New Term Dates

8 Weekly Sessions
HALF TERM: 26th May 2015


Easels and Drawing Boards Provided.
Please Bring Paper and Own Materials


These Self-Directed Sessions will help you to develop and practice your own style with the emphasis of spontaneity and freedom of expression through a variety of timed poses.


It is an opportunity to share creative journeys with one another and revisit fundamental principles.


We look forward to meeting you, please let me know if you have any questions.


Weekly Briefs
(To influence your creative juices, I am suggesting a weekly task so that you prepare in advance before the session. I'm hoping this may aid some of you that may have 'creative blips' and appreciate a little nudge of inspiration.
Have a look at the artist in the way they work, for example, palette choice, composition and use of marks.)


28/4 WEEK 1 Artist Michael Lentz search 'drawings'
5/5 WEEK 2 Artist Derek Overfield
12/5 WEEK 3 If you're interested in colour, have a look at Designer Ptolemy Mann: significant colour.wordpress.com Life drawing in glorious Technicolor are the key words for web searches
19/5 WEEK 4 Artist Will Kim soft pastels and oil pastels
2/6 WEEK 5 Artist Angel Kubo charcoals
9/6 WEEK 6 Collage: Stewart Clough
16/6 WEEK 7 Artist Gretchen Kelly
23/6 WEEK 8 Joanne Beaule Ruggles' figure drawings with dowel pen and India ink

Marianne Seabright Tutoring Painting the Figure in Monmouth

HALF TERM DATES:
Monmouth Boys School - 5th May Bank Holiday and 26th May Half Term




Exciting News, Marianne Seabright will be tutoring with paint, the following sessions in Monmouth -
19th May, 2nd June, 9th June and 30th June.
Suggested Materials: Brushes, canvas board, suggested colours: orange-red, blue-green, yellow ochre, burnt umber and white.




We have designed a brand new course that connects our practice of mark making within drawing and the spirit of the figure through short poses with painterly methods and processes.




Marianne will be guiding members through learning how to mix colour, lightening and darkening paint including useful tips taken from colour theory, exploring flesh tone.




Sessions will also include working quickly with paint, relatively small compositions using thinned paint and time limited poses. This will focus on capturing the essence of the human form, exploring  mark making and developing colour theory and considering texture.




Drawing with paint. The use of long brush marks, long lines verses small shorter marks, brush strokes that describe the human form; sculpting and describing shape. Hard lines and soft edges will also enhance energy and atmosphere and will expand your journey of drawing and painting with expression.


Life Drawing with Sarah Shilton:
12 May Kinetic Energy - Capturing Movement. Bring paper, charcoal and a rubber.
16 June Mixed Media Wet and Dry: Bring paper, ink, charcoal, pens, pastels, anything
23 June Exaggeration of Form: Bring paper and drawing materials

New Term Checklist

Week One 13/01/14 & 14/01/14
Experimental Drawing Practice
Lots of short poses to get us back into the groove!
Bring paper, charcoal and other favourite materials

Week Two 20/01 & 21/01
Negative Space
Bring paper and own choice of materials

Week Three 27/01 & 28/01
Black and White and Grey
Bring paper, black paint and white paint

Week Four 03/02 & 04/02
Painting the Figure with Marianne Seabright
Bring brushes, canvas board and any paints you have (some will be provided)

Week Five 10/02 & 11/02
Foreshortening
Bring paper, own choice of materials

HALF TERM 17/02 & 18/02

Week Six 24/02 & 25/02
Composition
Bring paper, own choice of materials

Week Seven 03/03 & 04/03
An Artist's Influence
Finding a piece of Figurative work that inspires you.
Bring paper and own choice of materials

Week Eight 10/03 & 11/03
Long Pose
Bring paper, own choice of materials

New Term Checklist - Autumn

Please use this as a guide for those that would like to follow a weekly brief. Otherwise, you are welcome to use the Life Room for your own personal development.

16/17 Sept Week One: 101 uses of a pen
Bring paper, your pens, any pens.

23/24 Week Two: Paper, Charcoal and a Rubber

30 Sept 1 Oct Week Three: Collage
Bring a mixture of papers/materials

7/8 Oct Week Four: Pen & Ink Plus Colour
Bring paper, black ink, pens and two colours in any medium.

14/15 Week Five: See Blog Post 2011 April Harriet Barber
Use of quick techniques with colour
Bring paper and colour!

21/22 Oct: Half Term

28/29 Oct: Half Term

4/5 Nov Week Six: Researched artist of choice

11/12 Week Seven: Foreshortening
Bring paper and preferred medium

18/19 Week Eight: Long Pose
Bring paper and preferred medium
End of term drink after session!

New Term Check List

Week One 16/04/13: Measuring
Materials needed: paper, pencils, charcoal

Week Two 23/04/13: Negative Space
Materials needed: paper, drawing materials, rubber

Week Three 07/05/13: Free-style and Expression
Materials needed: paper and anything you enjoy using

Week Four 14/05/13: Tone
Materials needed: paper, charcoal, rubber and anything else

Week Five 21/05/13: Drawing with Paint - Visiting tutor Marianne Seabright
Materials needed: paper, canvas board, brushes, palette

Week Six 28/05/13: Inks
Materials needed: water soluable inks, pens

Week Seven 04/06/13: Composition
Materials needed: anything you enjoy using

Week Eight 11/06/13: Long Pose
Materials needed: anything you enjoy using

Full Day Life Drawing Workshop

 Double Tuition is offered at Hereford Courtyard Centre on Wednesday 27th March 2013 during a full day workshop with Sarah Shilton and Marianne Seabright.
Two professional artists and tutors will be available to guide you through various techniques and approaches to drawing and painting the figure.

Experimental drawing exercises, demonstrations with paint and a long pose of the female form will aim to guide the beginner, or if it is simply the access of the Life Room - the more advanced artist will be able to spend the whole day with the Nude as their subject. We believe all abilities will be inspired during this session.

For further information and bookings, please contact drawingfromnude@gmail.com
Workshop runs from 10am-4pm and costs £40.

NEW WORKSHOP - 'SELF'

Saturday 24th November, Monmouth Boys School 10am-2pm £30
Wednesday 23rd January, Hereford Courtyard 10am-2pm £30

Join Sarah Shilton and Marianne Seabright for a double tutored session on the 'Self' - portraiture and its observation.

The day will begin with quick studies to exercise the idea of using mark making skills as an expressive aid to capturing a likeness in human form.
You will be tutored on the 'rules' and technical approaches of the head and proprtions which will give you guidance towards drawing accurately.
Concepts of portraiture and 'Self' will be discussed and will be put into practice within a final piece.

You will need to bring:
A mirror and a photograph of yourself
An example of an Artist's self portrait
Symbolic personal objects (optional)

To book, please email Sarah drawingfromnude@gmail.com

Claudia Peake - New Ways of Seeing

As a regular attendee of Sarah's life drawing sessions, I am always up for a new challenge.

Robert Joyner

Our task on certain weeks was to explore a given artist, in my case Ursula O'Farrell and Robert Joyner -and attempt to work in a similar style or take aspects of the artists work that appeal.


Ursula O'Farrell, Seated Figure

Claudia Peake working in the style of Ursula O'Farrell

Ursual O'Farrell is a California based artist, with a wonderful dense rich palatte of colour which I attempted to emulate...



Claudia Peake, working in the style of Robert Joyner

With Robert's work, I was drawn to the speed of the marks, rich colours against stark white and the use of inks with pastel.

We all have an individual style whether we're starting out as an artist or have been drawing for some time - we're not always aware of out uniqueness. Looking at other artists, for me, is a wonderful way to confirm my interests, preferred ways of working and to question what I do. I really enjoy a new and exploratory journey!

Thanks, Sarah - a lot of fun!

The Straight and The Curve

Go back to the most simple use of drawing - the line. There are contrasts between long and short, the broad and narrow, but the greatest contrast in line is the difference between the straight and the curve.
A line has no character by itself. Draw one line on a piece of paper. Is it short? Or long? You cannot say until you put another line of a different length beside it. Similarily, a line can seem curved in comparison with one line and straight in comparison with another.

As a matter of pure exercise, draw a straight line to represent some contour on one side of the model. Then, attached to that, make a curved line. Continue up or down that side of the figure, alternating straight and curved lines and attaching each line to the one before it and the one after it. Proceed in the same way all the way around the figure but wherever there is a straight line opposite, try and put a curve on the other side. These should be done in five minute studies. They will probably look like charts.

As a natural result of practicing this exercise, you will begin to search the model in order to discover which contours may be best expressed by straight lines and which by curved lines. Now, you do not have to follow the straight with the curve, you will use each when it seems most suitable.

Reach in your drawing for movements that are biggest, simplest and most connected, thinking of them as either straight or curved; that goes through the entire figure.

The use of straight and curved lines does not follow contour as it exists - but heightens the meaning of the contour in relation to gesture and design; it seeks to heighten the meaning of the form.

An Interview with Sophia Wagstaff

A Goldsmiths graduate in Visual Arts, born in Marlborough 1979 and now working in Ross on Wye, Sophia tells me about her new found love in drawing, particularly in the Nude.
I understand from your time studying at Goldsmiths that life drawing classes where not a compulsory subject or even an option. Why do you think this was the case?
I think a lot of what Goldsmiths was trying to put across at the time, it was a lot more of the critical theory. It had conceptual ideas which were more apparent and pushed forward a lot more than the actual practice of art itself. It was a place where the student became more questioning and challenging rather than just sitting in a space painting or drawing. In some ways I learnt a lot of what interests me at Goldsmiths from going through the 'bullshit' to come out with more clarity the other side!
Your most important tool within the Life sessions is the pencil. What is it about this medium that you are most comfortable with?
I love pencil. For me it is the most versatile tool in the box. When I draw I look for tone and shadow predominantly to create mood and atmosphere. Whether I am applying harder lines and marks, or softer smudgy areas, the pencil feels very natural to my approach.

Is scale important in your work?Yes. I like to change the scale of my work quite a bit, I do tend to use a similar size for a while, and then have to up it usually for more simple smooth marks, and downsize for directing me back into focusing on smaller detail.

Do you see yourself converting to paint at all?

I am still very much experimenting with paint. I don't find paint to be as soft or as malleable to what I want to put down... I have used paint as a back ground to add to the general mood of a drawing, and I have used paint to 'draw' some colour into some drapery. I have also used paint and colour to emphasise a certain light in a drawing.

What is it about the nude that inspires you and encourages you to draw?

The nude has become a very important subject for me. It conjures up so many feelings of the human vulnerability and sensuality, that I think has an appeal for every 'body.' A lot of my drawings are self portraits, a kind of self discovery quite literally. When I sit in your classes and have that great intimate yet powerful opportunity to draw form life, there is something different to see every time. I love the fact that whoever (he or she is not just a figure) I am drawing from, is portraying something of who they are just in a gesture.

Is self portraiture more important as a Life study to you rather than the Nude of figure in general?

Quite honestly it depends on how I want to approach my practice at the time! I think both self portraiture and the nude in general hold equal interest for me... Somehow drawing the nude in general ends up depicting something quite different in that it seems a looser approach. When I am doing a self study it seems more intense...

Your training is predominantly textile based, do you see your work developing with this field?

Although a lot of what I have studied at college has been textile based I have never lost the urge to draw. I believe that whether you are a designer, maker or fine artist the discipline of drawing is the origin of creating. Textiles is just another 'making process' that uses other materials other than paper....As far as merging any of the textile work I have done previously, I would definitely like to merge some printing techniques with some of the drawing. I feel many printing processes have really lovely qualities to bring to my work.

Where do you see yourself progressing from here?

Hopefully into more inspired ways of capturing the nude! Progressing onto and into some new ideas with some new techniques... Printmaking will be one of them. I would also really like to incorporate photography in the near future. I think there are many exciting ways of creating moods and atmosphere with a camera. I am also very much looking forward to being involved in a the running of an art workshop.

An Interview with Marianne Seabright

Marianne Seabright, a successful and gifted artist, is invited to talk about her artistic influences, her practice as a painter and as a member of Sarah’s Monmouth Life Drawing Class.

Born in Hertford in 1977, how did your Art related education begin?
My education started as a child- much to my mother's dismay I drew on the walls in our home, in family books, on my skin and on my clothes, particularly dresses.
My Grandfather Henry Seabright was an Artist and Illustrator, although I never had the chance to meet him, I grew up with many of his unfinished paintings.
My Dad, Robert Seabright is an Artist/Graphic Designer and he taught me to draw and encouraged me to paint. He took me to the London galleries and surrounded me with the Masters. He told me I had a talent and I should keep a portfolio and go to art school. I actually qualified to do nursing instead.
However, after nursing for 3 years I found it hard to ignore the urge to do creative practice and enrolled on a part time foundation in Bristol; this led to a degree in drawing and applied art at UWE. I believe I made more of art school as a mature student. I went there when I was 30 and I was awarded a First.

Has your approach as an artist changed since you were involved in the ‘Institutional’ environment of learning?

Institutional learning trains you to become an independent, self reliant artist. You learn to harness your creativity and focus your strengths. At Art school you are encouraged to push boundaries and explore everything, there are no limitations, sometimes it can be confusing and you wonder if you are wasting your money. But when you finish, you reflect upon it for years after. However, in the commercial world it is not the same as being at University - it is harder to survive. Just because something is pushing boundaries doesn't mean it is good.

Yes, my approach has changed. I can do what I want now. I don't have to worry about grades or assessments. I still reflect critically about my work. I think about what the tutors said or might say but now I do it for me and no one else.

How would you describe your style in a maximum of five words?

Textural, Tonal, Tangential, Empathic, Atmospheric- Marianneish.

You believe you are instinctively born with a 'stick' to a 'brush'. With this in mind, explain why your current work leans towards paint ie a brush.

I was born with a stick but I am determined to adopt a brush. I lean towards paint because I am trying to push myself. Paint has a wider vocabulary and the possibilities are endless. It is exciting and difficult. I don't like easy paths, struggle is good.

You are able to turn your hand to any medium, which one do you struggle with the most? Which one do you find more natural?

Drawing is more natural.

With regards to paint- generally oil is easier than watercolour because you can wipe it away. But it depends on my mood and the subject matter. Sometime I see something and immediately think 'Watercolour'- and I do it- like magic. Then I think, how did you do that Marianne?

Are you a self taught painter?

I learn by looking, I read books, look at other artists and ask my Dad about things.

Why is colour important to you?

Colour relationships are fascinating and the possibilities are infinite. Sometimes you can put two or three colours next to each other, the viewer will know you are describing skin or water. There are common recipes and formulas that work well. There is so much to learn. I think that colour is a combination of science and psychology.

What does the figure provide for you as an artist, which for example animal life excludes for you?

I love both but animal pictures are dangerous territory. My landscapes look dead.

I take figures more seriously for some reason. I like how humans hold themselves, their weight and curves. How they behave, how they age, what happens to their bodies when they graft hard, or sit in the sun too long or when they get too fat. Human psychology is more obvious than animals, their bodies are an extension of their psychology and it is interesting to study that.

It is important that you know your sitter or figure in the composition? What changes for you if you do not know them?
No, that is not important. Sometime it is harder to draw someone you know. But I always feel I know someone better when I have drawn them. Attachment is a theme that runs through my work. So I think about the person I am drawing or who I am drawing the picture for. If I don't know the person I am drawing I may be less attached to the finished painting.
Should the sitter talk to you whilst you are drawing them or painting them?
Yes. It is interesting to hear their stories. Their history is part of their portrait. I am listening and absorbing it and it is going it and coming out in the marks I make.
As I learn more about the sitter it helps me build a picture of their life, thus building a stronger attachment to them, which consequently will make a better subject matter. I want to paint all my friends and family- but not everyone will sit for me though.
Within the subject of figurative art or portraiture, what does a Life Room add for you?
Creative energy and atmosphere of the life room, helps me focus and work hard. It seems so natural to me, there is nothing like it, it is better than chocolate cake.

Is nudity or the Nude important to explore?
Not really, I think the nude is about studying and understanding the anatomy- but I don't draw the nude to study anatomy.
I go because of the opportunity to draw someone in real life who stays still. I feel really privileged to be able to do it and find it has really helped my figure work. It has helped me improve the use of form in figure-work .
How do you choose your colour in the Nude? Your palette choice on flesh tones?
I look at the tone of the skin and match it with colour. However, I know that our bodies are made up of a large % of water, and water reflects light and colour. Skin is transparent and colours from our insides must be coming through the skin. I think about skin damage too. I also use artistic license and portray good colour relationships. I try not to worry too much about the right skin tone. Form is more important to me.
One thing at a time.
You are sitting in a Life Room and the session will be beginning in a few minutes; do you have a goal of results to complete for the session? How much mental preparation do you give yourself or you feel you need to give to yourself?
Not really. I enjoy the process as much as anything else. I tend to not enjoy it much if I am too worried about the end result. If I get a good end result its magical.
As soon as we start the warm up I begin to focus on the connection between my eyes, brain and hand, once this is achieved I am in the Zone. This has taken YEARS to control and is only truly been achieved recently. It takes between 15 - 20 minutes to get oiled. There are two are methods I use to warn my brain that I am going to get into the Zone, getting my materials together and visualizing class up to a day before. Once I am in the Zone, it is a bit dream-like and I feel a bit out of it. Talking is an antidote to the Zone, but I like to listen, in fact I listen better when I am drawing.
What is the quickest drawing/painting you have completed? How long did it take?
Not sure- I think you might have been there. 2 minutes? Maybe less.
Would you like to work on a figurative piece over several hours, days? If so, why is this important to you?
Yes, but I am beginning to think that I might be better at time-limited drawing and painting. Some of the best things I have done are quick and care free. Thanks to you.
I want to start working bigger again.

Harriet Barber - Breast Cancer Life

Harriet Barber is a Dorset-based artist who paints and draws from life. Her subjects include landscapes, riverscapes, seascapes – and the human figure. She undertook her three-year postgraduate study in the rigorous 'F' Studio at the Slade School of Art, working solely from the figure during that time.

Breast Cancer LIFE is a project which grew out of her collaboration with Art@Plush organiser Dot Browning, and a number of other women who had undergone treatment for breast cancer, following Harriet's own diagnosis in 2008.

Breast Cancer LIFE explores beauty, femininity and self-image – which are often deeply affected by the treatment women receive for breast cancer.

The women who participated have all given their time freely for the project. For most it was their first experience of sitting for an artist.



Would You Pose Nude to Boost your Self-Esteem?

It sounds like a mortifying ordeal most of us would shy away from, but more and more women are posing for nude portraits as presents for their partners or morale-boosting treats for themselves.
By Rachel Halliwell, Daily Mail 10th February 2011

'I WANT TO LEARN TO LOVE MY CURVES'

Businesswoman Rachael Ritchie, 41, lives in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, with her husband, James, a 41-year-old mechanic, and their daughter, Charlie, 17, and son, Sam, 12. Rachael says:
I've spent 20 years bemoaning the way I look and enduring endless diets in an attempt to change my body shape. Since I married James in 1991, I’ve been every size, from a 12 to a 20, but at no point have I felt completely happy with my appearance. Yet through all those years of yo-yo dieting my ¬husband has always told me I am the most beautiful woman he knows.



He buys me pretty underwear and tells me I’m sexy, but still I beat up myself over my curves. In our home we have several pieces of art that feature naked women of all shapes and sizes. I see beauty in them all, yet struggle to do the same with myself. The older I get, the more tragic that seems to me.

That is why, when I saw an advert for a studio that specialises in nude portraits, I decided to go along. Yes, it was nerve-racking undressing in front of strangers, but I knew they were just trying to make me look beautiful. I felt so self-conscious about my tummy and kept telling the ­photographer to get rid of my rolls of fat, but when I saw the pictures, that wasn’t what I noticed. I just thought I looked fabulous. I saw for the first time what my ­husband sees: a sexy, curvy woman.

Claire McLauchlin-WHhitehead, 28, is a PR executive. She lives in Manchester with her businessman husband, Anthony, 27. Claire says:
No one knows what I’m doing today — my husband thinks I’m working late. It’s not that I’m embarrassed; I just don’t feel the need to tell people about it.




I want to be able to look at them in years to come and remember what it felt like to be a young woman, in the same way I look at my wedding ¬pictures and instantly recall the day I got married. I’ve always hated my legs — I’m convinced they are bigger and chunkier than they actually are — but seeing the shots made me ¬realise it’s all in my head. I know my body is far from perfect, but having these ¬photographs taken is a way of teaching me not to ¬agonise over my looks. I think the pictures will sit in a drawer somewhere, rather than be put on show. I don’t think Anthony would feel ¬comfortable having them on display in our home when his friends come round.

All women should have a set of nude photographs done, whatever they decide to do with them, so they can be reminded there are more aspects to them than most people know.

David Hockney: Why I Paint Instead of Just Picking Up a Camera

Interview by Martin Gayford - September 18, 2006

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- David Hockney was struck by a remark of Jeremy Deller, the Turner Prize Winner in 2004: ``Artists don't paint these days, in the way that people don't go to work on a horse.''

``I pinned that up on my studio wall,'' Hockney said in an interview. ``I thought, he obviously thinks photography has supplanted painting. A lot of people think that. But I thought that remark was naive. I take a very different view of art history.'' He certainly does: in fact he has been busy for the last few years trying to turn the history of art upside down.

This autumn, there are three major events involving Hockney, who is seldom out of the limelight. There are two exhibitions: new landscapes at the Annely Juda Gallery, and a retrospective of his portraits next month at the National Portrait Gallery. And Hockney is publishing an enlarged edition of his controversial book ``Secret Knowledge,'' which argues that European painters used optical devices such as lenses and mirrors as far back as the 15th century.

All three of these apparently separate endeavors are linked. Each is connected with this David's struggle against the giant of photography. His complaint is straightforward, yet profound: He thinks the camera has dulled our image of the world. He feels that the dominance of the camera-eye view of the world in all the media -- and increasingly in art too -- is ``doing us damage.''

It isn't that Hockney despises photography. On the contrary, he admires masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he once encountered by chance on the street in Paris.

``He was looking through his viewfinder and moving his camera slightly up and down, and side to side. I thought: That man knows what he's doing, I'll follow him a bit.'' The next day, they were formally introduced. ``He wanted to talk about drawings and I wanted to talk about photography,'' he said.

`Matisse Picasso'

Hockney still wants to talk about that subject, but not to praise it. He told me this anecdote about a visit to the great ``Matisse Picasso'' show at Tate Modern in 2002.

``I went with Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and John Golding (co-curator of the exhibition) at 8 o'clock one morning, just us. And it was stunning, a terrific show. When we came out, I noticed there were four big photographs hanging on the wall, recent acquisitions by the Tate. Lucian and Frank just walked past them. I looked at them and I thought, 'F*** me, Picasso and Matisse made the world look incredibly exciting, photography makes it look very, very dull. Yet now we're moving back to all the stuff that modernism moved away from.''

This dichotomy can be traced in Hockney's own work, and therefore in the ``Hockney Portraits'' exhibition. His first mature style, with which he made his name in the early 60s, employed a cheeky figurative drawing together with near-abstract passages. Then his work got steadily tightly focused and -- for want of a better word -- photographic until the mid-70s.

I Am Not a Camera

At that point, Hockney was famous, successful -- and very dissatisfied with his own work. ``There was something wrong with what I was doing. I've called it `obsessive naturalism,' but then I didn't know what it was.'' He abruptly changed course. ``I worked in the theater solidly for three years, which was a liberation, a new kind of space for me, and the moment I stopped working in the theater, I started playing about with a camera, when I made the pictures with Polaroids.''

It was with these works -- paradoxically using a camera -- that he began to explore the question, ``What can't photography do?'' One answer was that it can't represent the 360-degree wraparound space in which we really exist. But Hockney found he could map this using a mosaic of small, close-up Polaroid images.

History of Art

From there he was led to examine Cubism -- a non- photographic idiom if ever there was one -- and eventually to a completely new reading of the history of art. According to this, the Hockney thesis, there are two ways of representing reality. One, which he calls eyeballing, is done solely by looking, and depicting what you see. The second makes use of the ability of lens and mirrors to project images, creating images that appear photographic.

Hockney has pushed the photographic approach back far further in time than ever before, as far as Van Eyck and Brunelleschi. He is irritated by the oft-repeated statement that the camera was invented in 1839. ``It wasn't invented at all actually. You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th- century invention was chemical: the fixative.'' Types of camera had existed long before.

All of this stirred up a hornet's nest of enraged academic rebuttal when ``Secret Knowledge'' was first published in 2001. The controversy persists in scholarly articles and on Web sites. Hockney is sticking to his guns. On the claim, for example, that Caravaggio worked a little like a Hollywood director, he is unapologetic, and also dismissive of the suggestion that, if so, the great master was ``cheating.''

Approach to Life

``I never got why the art historians got so het up. Actually, it makes Caravaggio more important and more original. He's really drawing with optics in a fascinating way. But I don't think there's any other explanation of how those pictures were made.''

The more you talk to Hockney, the more you realize this isn't just an art-historical question. It's about an approach to life. A drawn or painted portrait, he said, incorporates much more time.

``I pointed out that Sam Taylor-Wood's video portrait of David Beckham for the NPG was an hour long. Whereas Lucian Freud's portrait (of Hockney) took 120 hours of sitting -- layered into it -- which makes it infinitely more interesting.'' Hockney himself often works much more quickly than that, but his portrait models, almost all family and friends, are people he has been observing for years, if not a lifetime.

Yorkshire Countryside

Everything Hockney does is about seeing what's around us, and seeing it better. Recently, he went out in the Yorkshire countryside, where he has been painting for the past two years, and stopped his car beside the road. ``I took one of those Japanese sketchbooks and I'd draw different grasses in the hedgerow. After 2 1/2 hours I'd filled the sketchbook, and after that I saw that hedgerow a great deal more clearly.''

``If you'd just photographed it, you wouldn't be looking in that way. Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory -- where it stays -- and it's transmitted by your hands.'' That way of working, in Hockney's view, is well worth preserving.

Art Forum Debate - The Naked

http://photo.net/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00I30e?start=0

Life Drawing by John Berger

FOR THE ARTIST DRAWING IS DISCOVERY. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual art of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you.


THE EXPERIENCE OF DRAWING: as I looked down at the clean page in my sketch-book I was more conscious of its height than its breadth. The top and bottom edge were the critical ones, for between them I had to reconstruct the way he rose up from the floor, or, thinking in the opposite direction, the way that he was held down to the floor. The energy of the pose was primarily vertical. All the small, lateral movements of the arms, the twisted neck, the leg which was not supporting his weight, were related to that vertical force, as the trailing and overhanging branches of a tree are related to the vertical shaft of the trunk. My first lines has to express that: had to make him stand like a skittle, but at the same time had to imply that, unlike a skittle, he was capable of movement, capable of readjusting his balance if the floor tilted, capable for a few seconds of leaping up into the air against the vertical forces of gravity. This capability of movement, this irregular and temporary rather than uniform and permanent tension of his body, would have to be expressed in relation to the side edges of the paper, to the variations on either side of the straight line between the pit of his neck and the heel of his weight-bearing leg.
I looked for the variations. His left leg supported his weight and therefore the left, far side of his body was tense, either straight or angular; the near, right side was comparatively relaxed and flowing. Arbitrary lateral lines taken across his body ran from curves to sharp points – as streams flow from hills to sharp, compressed gulleys in the cliff-face. But of course it was not as simple as that. On his near, relaxed side his fist was clenched and the hardness of his knuckles recalled the hard line of his ribs on the other side – like a cairn on the hills recalling the cliffs.
I now began to see the white surface of the paper, on which I was going to draw, in a different way. From being a clean flat page it became an empty space. Its whiteness became an area of limitless, opaque light, possible to move through but not to see through. I knew that when I drew a line on it – or through it – I should have to control the line, not like the driver of a car, on one plane: but like a pilot in the air, movement in all three dimensions being possible.
Yet, when I made a mark, somewhere beneath the near ribs, the nature of the page changed again. The area of opaque light suddenly ceased to be limitless. The whole page was changed by what I had drawn just as the water in a glass-tank is changed immediately you put a fish in it. It is then only the fish that you look at. The water merely becomes the conditions of its life and the area in which it can swim.
Then, when I crossed the body to mark the outline of the far shoulder, yet another change occurred. It was not simply like putting another fish into the tank. The second line altered the nature of the first. Whereas before the first line had been aimless, now its meaning was fixed and made certain by the second line. Together they held down the edges of the area between them, and the area, straining under the force which had once given the whole page to potentiality of depth, heaved itself up into a suggestion of solid form. The drawing had begun.
The third dimension, the solidity of the chair, the body, the tree, is, at least as far as our senses are concerned, the very proof of our existence. It constitutes the difference between the word and the world. As I looked at the model I marvelled at the simple fact that he was solid, that he occupied space, that he was more than the sum total of ten thousand visions of him from ten thousand different viewpoints. In my drawing, which was inevitably a vision from just one point of view, I hoped eventually to imply this limitless number of other facets. But now it was simply a question of building and refining forms until their tension began to be like those I could see in the model. It would of course be easy by some mistaken over-emphasis to burst the whole thing like a balloon; or it might collapse like too thin clay on a potter’s wheel; or it might become irrevocably misshapen and lose its centre of gravity. Nevertheless, the thing was there. The infinite, opaque possibilities of the blank page had been made particular and lucid. My task now was to co-ordinate and measure: not to measure by inches as one might measure an ounce of sultanas by counting them, but to measure by rhythm, mass and displacement: to gauge distances and angles as a bird flying through a trellis of branches; to visualise the ground plan like an architect; to feel the pressure of my lines and scribbles towards the uttermost surface of the paper, as a sailor feels the slackness or tautness of his sail in order to tack close or far from the surface of the wind.
I judged the height of the ear in relation to the eyes, the angles of the crooked triangle of the two nipples and the navel, the lateral lines of the shoulders and hips – sloping towards each other so that they would eventually meet, the relative position of the knuckles of the far hand directly above the toes of the far foot. I looked, however, not only for those linear proportions, the angles and lengths of these imaginary pieces of string stretched from one point to another, but also for the relationships of planes, of receding and advancing surfaces.
Just as looking over the haphazard roofs of an unplanned city you find identical angles of recession in the gables and dormer-windows of quite different houses – so that if you extended any particular plane through all the intermediary ones, it would eventually coincide perfectly with another; in exactly the same way you find extensions of identical planes in different parts of the body. The plane, falling away from the summit of the stomach to the groin, coincided with that which led backwards from the near knee to the sharp, outside edge of the calf. One of the gentle, inside planes, high up the thigh of the same leg, coincided with a small plane leading away and around the outline of the far pectoral muscle.
And so, as some sort of unity was shaped and the lines accumulated on the paper, I again became aware of the real tensions of the pose. But this time more subtly. It was no longer a question of just realising the main, vertical stance. I had become more involved more intimately with the figure. Even the smaller facts had acquired an urgency and I had to resist the temptation to make every line over-emphatic. I entered into the receding spaces and yielded to the oncoming forms. Also, I was correcting: drawing over and across the earlier lines to re-establish proportions or to find a way of expressing less obvious discoveries. I saw that the line down the centre of the torso, from the pit of the neck, between the nipples, over the navel and between the legs, was like the keel of a boat, that the ribs formed a hull and that the near, relaxed leg dragged on its forward movement like a trailing oar. I saw that the arms hanging either side were like the shafts of a cart, and that the outside curve of the weight-bearing thigh was like the ironed rim of a wheel. I saw that the collar-bones were like the arms of a figure on a crucifix. Yet such images, although I have chosen them carefully, distort what I am trying to describe. I saw and recognized quite ordinary anatomical facts; but I also felt them physically – as if, in a sense, my nervous system inhabited his body.
A few of the things I recognized I can describe more directly. I noticed how at the foot of the hard, clenched, weight-bearing leg, there was clear space beneath the arch of the instep. I noticed how subtly the straight under-wall of the stomach elided into the attenuated, joining planes of thigh and hip. I noticed the contrast between the hardness of the elbow and the vulnerable tenderness of the inside of the arm at the same level.
Then, quite soon, the drawing reached its point of crisis. Which is to say that what I had drawn began to interest me as much as what I could still discover. There is a stage in every drawing where this happens. And I call it a point of crisis because at that moment the success or failure of the drawing has really been decided. One now begins to draw according to the demands, the needs, of the drawing. If the drawing is already in some small way true, then these demands will probably correspond to what one might still discover by actual searching. If the drawing is basically false, they will accentuate its wrongness.
I looked at my drawing trying to see what had been distorted; which lines or scribbles of tones had lost their original and necessary emphasis, as others had surrounded them; which spontaneous gestures had evaded a problem, and which had been instinctively right. Yet even this process was only partly conscious. In some places I could clearly see that a passage was clumsy and needed checking; in others, I allowed my pencil to hover around – rather like the stock of a water-diviner. One form would pull, forcing the pencil to make a scribble of tone which could re-emphasize its recession; another would jab the pencil into re-stressing a line which could bring it further forward.
Now when I looked at the model to check a form, I looked in a different way. I looked, as it were, with more connivance: to find only what I wanted to find.
Then the end. Simultaneously ambition and disillusion. Even as in my mind’s eye I saw my drawing and the actual man coincide – so that, for a moment, he was no longer a man posing but an inhabitant of my half-created world, a unique expression of my experience, even as I saw this in my mind’s eye, I saw in fact how inadequate, fragmentary, clumsy my small drawing was.
I turned over the page and began another drawing, starting from where the last one had left off. A man standing, his weight rather more on one leg than the other ….

Framing the Pose

Robert Mapplethorpe

Gretchen Kelly

Kelly paints from a model in short poses ranging from one to forty five minutes, usually. "It is the process of short poses that brings to life what I am after – simply the beauty of the human gesture and the color of that moment".

Swift strokes and decisions define her figurative work. "I walk away from the figure painting and come back to it later to add into the background. With refreshed vision I see what the painting is calling for – a vivid color, stenciled pattern, maybe an architectural shape or a horizon line". 

Kelly's work is about focusing on what is in front of her at the moment – the present moment, "where I find perfection and beauty".

Spencer Tunick

"A body is a living entity. It represents life, freedom, sensuality, and it is a mechanism to carry out our thoughts. A body is always beautiful to me. It depends on the individual work and what I do with it and what kind of idea lies behind it — if age matters or not. But in my group works, the only difference is how far people can go if it rains, snows etc.” –Spencer Tunick

In 1992, Tunick began documenting live nudes in public locations in New York through video and photographs. His early works from this period focus more on a single nude individual or on small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he is now known. By 1994 Tunick had organized and photographed over 65 temporary site related installations in the United States and abroad.