A great opportunity opened up--drawing in the galleries of the blockbuster exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. The show is called Gods and Heroes, and the collection comes from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the school that trained all of those Salon painters for a couple hundred years or more. Awesome local artist Eduardo Fernandez is expanding our drawing skills, focusing on the movement and action of the scenes depicted in these paintings.
The first image shows what he was looking for us to get at--not a drawing as much as an outline of the movement lines ("S" curves etc.)--and the most elemental of shapes. I thought I was working along those lines (no pun intended), but reverted quickly to drawing as usual. He broke it down for me again, to show how the shapes and composition support the story that is being told (these paintings are largely mythological themes, or propaganda for the monarchy).
So I moved to a different painting, studied the directional movement of the figures, and did the second drawing shown here. It's kind of a hybrid, but closer to the objective. I think I'd like to apply the drawing to gesso board, and see if I can stay in this lane with a paintbrush, now. Drawing with a paintbrush (instead of pencil or charcoal) is so challenging for me--I always want to jump right into painting. Perhaps this will help me work around my predisposition.
The other drawings I've included seem to me to look like cells from an animation storyboard. Amazing how--extracted from their historical context--they can seem to tell a 21st cent. story.
July 18, 2015
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