NYT Op Ed Series on Drawing

[Synthetik]

The New York Times is featuring a weekly series on drawing that started today.  The author has an obvious bias against digital art, so take what he says with a grain of salt.  Certainly digital art does not need to lack risk and immediacy. For example, there's a ton of posts here on the forum that talk about different approaches to achieving that when working with Studio Artist.  But i thought the article series would be of interest to some of you, so here's a link to the first article.

[liveart]

John,

I don't read quite as much anti-digi bias in the article as you do. I tend to agree with the premise that using a photo for a trace over limits the work to the perspective of the photo, which is static and "dead". That is one of the reasons I was so psyched about the temporal im ops when you first included them, compressing moving time into a single image is magical in the way it brings life to the still frame. Your experiments in stack filtering are another example.

Clearly it is the artist not the tool which chooses to create with risk and intimacy. A pencil can create a "product of a too premeditated and too lengthy process of refinement," as McMullen states. A computer-drawing program like illustrator makes that even easier by intermediating between the hand of the artist and the product in a way that "refines" the line drawn.

SA is a tool that in some ways is all about the intermediation. But in contrast to what one might call a left brain program, SA's form of intermediation becomes part of the process not part of the refinement. I suppose then that, it is all in the way one uses the intermediation.

It will be interesting to see where McMullen takes the discussion. Thanks for posting the link

[Synthetik]

I don't think using an onion skin as an aid to constructing a drawing has to lead to a dead result. It depends on how you use it. You can certainly build a really dynamic interesting sketch while using it.

There's also a ton of things you can do to modify an original source image first in some way and then use the modified source as the onion skin. So you aren't limited to using the original perspective, you could use interactive warps for example to modify it. You then use the modified canvas as a new source and onion skin. Like you say, using temporal ip ops to process a movie into a static time encapsulated source image is another approach.

Here's another technique i've been using recently. I've recently been generating a photo mosaic image from an original source, then cropping out part of the photo mosaic and then using that as the source for painting (or even for constructing a second photo mosaic).


Anyway, i also think it will be interesting to see where he takes the discussion over the next few weeks. It's also nice that the NYT included something like this in their op ed section

[Paul Perlow]

This is the link for part 2

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-frisbee-of-art/

[Synthetik]

I have to confess that i didn't get the 'ellipses' he was referring to in the Mother and Child painting when first reading the beginning of this. I guess after you finish the entire thing he's referring to imaginary ellipses that would make up the tube or cylinder that makes up a limb in the painting?

[Paul Perlow]

That's it

[Synthetik]

It would have been nice if he had gotten into something like free-sketching with ellipsoid movement to build up 3D form for limbs or body parts. Even for the still life towering objects photo he presents for people to sketch. If he's trying to make drawing fun for people with this series i'm not sure he's succeeding with this week's installment.

[Jean Detheux]

I don't have time for this, am super busy preparing for two concerts, a lecture and a film festival.

But omigod, what a pile of garbage: "If you practice long enough my son, after many years of hard work 'mastering the ellipse,' you too will be able to draw sausages!"

Some accomplishment!!

Looking at the Picasso, one can see so much more than this feeble "rendering of 3D space," so much more (look at all the play of the echoing shapes for starters).

This is very much the type of "false knowledge" I have been fighting against during my many years of "teaching Art," this positing that "Art is to be found at the end of acquired knowledge" is a farce, a huge deception, a lie.

Imagine what would be left of Lascaux or Altamira if "those guys" had been under the same dictate!

I have know personally, and through Art history, many a painter who knew so much, but could do so little.
Scores of them, most of them "teachers" (as usual).

The digital tools are allowing many people to dabble in "Art," but even if they can acquire the tools with the special effects and all (brushes, presets, plugins, you name it), they end up with "catalogs," collections of things that sit next to each other like items on supermarket shelves.

Lots of "terms," but not a single poem...

One can acquire all the skills in the world, that won't compensate for a lack of "Being." never will.

Again, T. S. Eliot says it best in his "Four Quartets":

"Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
(East Coker, excerpt from part IV)

[Synthetik]

Could you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by the 'play of the echoing shapes' in the Picasso.

[Jean Detheux]

I'll try to put something together later tonight (my time).
But basically, all one needs to do is to look at "whatever"and notice how one sees it. Not seeing based on what one may know about the ways the brain works, or anything else, but a "simple" (costing no less than everything;-) looking, "just looking" as it has been called, and follow the ways by which our consciousness discloses/constitutes that which one sees.

For starters, look at this Picasso this way, you'll see that there is more than sausages in this image:

[Jean Detheux]

Here's a quick and dirty sketch of the major echoing shapes (done with a mouse!), there is a lot more to show, but I haven't got the time for that right now.
And there's the "sense-giving, sense-receiving" aspect of visual art, which I will show potent samples of soon, but only after I have done the work I am supposed to do right now.
Seeing is an active process, so is painting, it is like a dance, a relationship. a conversation, it is not "making sausages!"