studio #23, lifedrawing

95. More recent sketches

2012-02-06T15:47:00.000-08:00

94. January 11, '12

2012-01-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

93. December 7, 2011

2011-12-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

92. Nov. 16, 2011

2011-11-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

91. Nov 10, 2011

2011-11-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

90. November 2, 2011

2011-11-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

89. Oct 13, 2011

2011-10-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

88. Oct. 6, '11

2011-10-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

87. September 28, 2011 (and one from the week before)

2011-09-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

86. August 25, 2011

2011-08-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

85. July 7, 2011

2011-07-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

84. June 30, 2011

2011-07-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

From last night's session in a private home, presided by a signed photo of Rudolf Steiner.

83. June 8, 2011

2011-07-01T10:21:00.001-07:00

For the record.

82. May 25, 2011 - time trials

2011-05-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

2.5 min, 5 min, 15 min.

81. May 11, 2011

2011-05-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

80. May 4, 2011 - on attitude (part 1)

2011-05-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

Why so many all at once? To credit the model really, whose league doesn't get near as much attention here as it should. Suffice to say, in my world right now, life drawing models are right up there with good babysitters and emergency room doctors. They are the selfless providers, the unsung heroes, the ones who make life, by which I mean living, possible.

It is with utmost respect and gratitude, then, and a few years' experience now watching them at their work, that I offer the following observation spilling toward advice to anyone who has ever toyed with the idea of doing what these people do - what the genii seem instinctively to know that the novices should perhaps consider, and to which the several sketches here (all drawn last night in colored conte) bear witness.

Somewhere along the line, some teacher or instructor may lead you to believe that your purpose in modeling is to provide nice long lines. If they haven't told you this explicitly, you may infer it from the instructions they murmur as they roam the studio, easel to easel. "Look at the nice long line. Follow the line. Let it flow." That's not bad advice for artists, but to my way of thinking, lines aren’t something that models should be thinking about. God and perspective will provide the lines. If the model starts thinking about lines, he or she is likely to start posing, and we don't want you to pose. We just want you to be.

Granted, that's easier said than done, propped nude on a stool in the midst of fifteen rumpled strangers peering at you shamelessly, squinting scratching, craning to get a better look at your foot or your butt. That's the kind of peace of mind it takes several lifetimes and a lot of yoga to achieve and I certainly can’t speak to that, but I can suggest one simple technique to help get you started in a direction where you almost certain to succeed:

Tilt your head.

The difference between Posing and Being pretty much boils down to that. Poses, in addition to deriving from a wildly false sense of what's visually interesting (throwing a discus, aiming a javelin, extending a chalice to the lips of the glowing Goddess) are usually distinguished by a ramrod, downright crucifixious relationship between the model's head and shoulders, such that a brimming glass of water, placed atop, would not spill a drop. The model may, in fact, believe that he is performing some great feat in remaining so straight and still at the same time as he extends his two arms and his left leg. And in a way he is. But in another more important respect, he is defeating the purpose of most of the people in the room, for the simple reason that he is assuming a position that appears nowhere outside the confines of a lifedrawing studio. It doesn't refer to anything, and who needs that?...
(cont'd below)

80. on attitude (cont'd)

2011-05-05T21:38:00.001-07:00

(cont'd from above)
...What the artists are looking for - or let's just say what I am looking for - is not lines. It's attitude. It's your attitude, which turns out not to be that hard to affect if you can get past the spotlit nude thing. Human, personal attitude expresses itself visually as…attitude. Angle. Counterbalance. And what's the simplest way of affecting that? Tilt your head. Just a half inch one way or the other will set off a chain reaction of small but telling compensations throughout your entire frame, the sum of which - once you have found a balance you can maintain for two-and-a-half, five, ten, or twenty minutes -- will be an apt expression of you being you, and not the mannequin with the glass of water on his or her head. And that is all we ask. Honestly. Read a book. Just remember to tilt your head when you do it, and magically the image will become one of you reading a book you like. All because of attitude.

Case in point, the model above, featured here in poses of several durations. Granted, she possesses a natural curvature and hyperextension that make her lines manna to my ilk, even if all she is doing is inspecting a gum wrapper, but that's the point. Whether she is inspecting a gum wrapper, or her toes, or merely standing, she does so with stunning attitude, both literally and figuratively (which in this context, mean the exact same thing). She was able simply and expressively to Be, and the proof was everywhere in evidence around the studio. In other words, I'm not the only one who had a good night last night. One artist after another was remarking the strange ease with which the images seemed to be coming - or the lines, if you will. And the reason for that was as clear as it was self-fulfilling: Not a single person in the room was posing.

79. April 20, 2011

2011-04-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

One black charcoal, one colored conte. Harsh overhead lighting, always a pleasure. The big blots of dark and light.

78. April 13, 2011

2011-04-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

colored conte.

77. A Couple of Colleagues

2011-04-06T14:49:00.001-07:00

from a different venue.

76. March 18, 2011

2011-03-17T12:40:00.001-07:00

Last class of semester. New (to us)and brilliant model.

75. March 2, 2011

2011-03-03T00:36:00.001-08:00

charcoal pencil, white chalk.

74. Feb. 23, 2011

2011-02-24T14:50:00.001-08:00

73. Feb. 16, 2011

2011-02-20T09:07:00.001-08:00

>

Two ten-minute sketches.

72. February 9, 2011

2011-02-10T11:07:00.001-08:00

colored conte.

71. January 26, 2011

2011-01-31T08:54:00.001-08:00

Charcoal, black and white on butcher paper.

70. January 19, 2011

2011-01-20T09:05:00.000-08:00

69. a portrait of six years

2010-12-26T09:41:00.001-08:00

in graphite.

68. Nov. 17, 2010

2010-11-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

All too graphite.
Last class of the fall semester. Emoticon...

67. Nov 10, 2010

2010-11-11T08:11:00.001-08:00

66. October 27, 2010

2010-10-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

65. October 13, 2010

2010-10-14T15:10:00.001-07:00

Conte, charcoal, graphite, ibuprofen.

64. September 22, 2010

2010-09-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

Thursdays in Room 23 have become Wednesdays in Room 22, but the fight is still alive.

63. September 14, 2010

2010-09-16T08:16:00.001-07:00

Charcoal and graphite pencil.

New semester. New room, which might have been affecting my mojo. That, and the amount of time I've been spending at the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery. I recommend it, but be warned: he edges over into being a little discouraging.

His life drawings/nudes are all consolidated under the year 1919...

62. A couple more from Aug 12, 2010

2010-08-13T12:21:00.001-07:00

61. August 12, 2010

2010-08-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

Another interim session held in a private home, where I'm less inclined to break out the messy chalk. But the first drawing I've done in over a month. Still the most swift and sane-making way I know to pass three hours.

60. July 8, 2010

2010-07-09T09:02:00.001-07:00

Topmost was in the big pad, graphite and conte. The rest in sketchbook, as class was once again in a private home where one doesn't like to make a mes.

Could be last batch for a while...

59. June 24, 2010

2010-06-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

57. June 17, 2010

2010-06-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

56. June 11, 2010

2010-06-11T09:01:00.001-07:00

Another class in a private setting, so graphite and charcoal pencils.

55. May 31st, 2010

2010-05-31T11:35:00.001-07:00

A follow-up, on those water-inspired images. Pastel - a medium from which I'd like to move on.

54. May 27, 2010

2010-05-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

The top sketch I'm a little iffy about, but I post it because I always think it's funny when a drawing so clearly recalls the work of someone else. (There was a post a while back that for some weird reason made me think of Carl Larsson.) This one here makes me feel like I'm looking at the figure drawings of Robert McCloskey, author of Blueberries for Sal and Make Way For Ducklings. The particular quality of line and drawing has something to do with it, but there's also the fact that the model has a lot of Sal's features, and -- correct me if I'm wrong -- Sal's mother's expression.

Anyway, this was the last class of the semester. Let the Jonesing begin.

53. May 20, 2010

2010-05-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

Not much web-worthy from this last lifedrawing class. Peaked early in the 45 second range.

Also, in preparation for a possible upcoming show with a "Water" theme, I went down to the beach. Here is the yield.

52. May 13, 2010

2010-05-14T12:39:00.001-07:00

51. May 6, 2010

2010-05-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

50. April 29, 2010 - erasing your darlings.

2010-04-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Tried something new - something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but a friend recently suggested it, and also there was an especially thick white paper at class last night, perfect for the technique: Instead of drawing on the brown butcher paper and providing highlights with white chalk (as I've been doing a lot of), I charcoal-smeared the white paper and found highlights with my eraser. In other words, I basically drew with my eraser. Fun.

I’ve been trying to think if there’s some writing analogue to this, drawing with the eraser. Imagine a page crammed with randomly selected words. Erase the ones you don’t want in order to reveal and combine the words you do. Close, but not quite, because even there you’re still drawing the reader’s attention to the words and not the spaces. They’re still looking at what you’ve left behind. Not what you’ve removed. How can a writer, through erasure, make the reader see what he or she has removed?

Maybe by killing the darlings?

“Kill your darlings” is a universally held precept among writers, attributed variously to Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, etc. Whoever said it first, all writers understand it to mean that if there is a sentence in your prose of which you are especially fond, you should probably get rid of it. The usual explanation boils down to vanity. Pride is a symptom of rot. The fact that you like the sentence so much is probably an indication that it calls attention to itself, and anything that calls attention to itself – anything that feels precious or to be of special value - must be purged for the good of the whole.

And that is certainly true.

But there’s another less recognized, less ascetic, reason that darlings must be killed. Darlings aren’t always darlings because they’re pretty or because they sound nice. They’re darlings because very early on in the process of composing a story, they stand out in the author's mind as being a damn-near perfect distillation of what it is that he or she means to say, or of who that character is, for instance. They are a kind of flag the writer plants in his or her page, a signifier to which the rest of the story must aspire, and in fact that’s often the way our darlings work best, by providing a kind of centerpiece around which the drama gets built, including scenes and dialogues and gestures. All of these are borne of the desire to justify and dramatize – to show, in other words - the meaning expressed in the seminal darling.

Once the writer has succeded in this, however – once all the rigging and the dialogue and choreography are all in place – he or she will very often find that the darling is now standing in the way. It is superfluous. It reads as being a little “on the nose,” as development people like to say. So the author kills it not because it is too pretty or ornate or subtle or mot juste-y, but because it has served its purpose. It has authored the scene, really, and it will always be there in spirit, but in the end it had to be erased so that the story – the flesh, that is – could be seen.

Post-scripturally be it noted that last night's class marks the last time we will, at least in the forseeable future, be drawing the pictured model, who is being lured east by the currents of her own life. She will be missed.

49. April 15, 2010

2010-04-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

48. April 1, 2010

2010-04-02T08:39:00.001-07:00

Still between official class sessions, a group of studio 23 stalwarts met at a private home and ponied up for a model, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday. The new setting, in addition to providing a closer, more intimate vew than usual, also meant I had to bring my own paper, in this case white watercolor, which meant less underlying color to work with. These are charcoal
pencil and conte.

47. March 4, 2010

2010-03-05T08:43:00.001-08:00

46. february 25, 2010

2010-02-26T08:16:00.000-08:00

Two uses of ten minutes.

45. february 11, 2010

2010-02-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

prognosis grim for the future of the class, but as pictures speak louder than words, consider my plea as submitted.

44. february 6, 2010

2010-02-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

43. January 29, 2010

2010-01-29T12:58:00.000-08:00

Kind of Carl Larsson-y in a weird way, no?

42. back in action: January 21, 2010.

2010-01-22T08:32:00.001-08:00

41. boxing day, 2009

2009-12-26T14:10:00.000-08:00

Still waiting for class to re-launch, so two gifts - in keeping with the season. Theo and Ada. Pastel on paper.

40. Nov. 19, 2009. Last Class of the Semester

2009-11-21T13:54:00.000-08:00

Previous Post: Hope Brooks Meryman (1931-1975)

39. Hope Brooks Meryman (1931-1975)

2009-11-21T13:13:00.000-08:00

( "Dove" by Hope Meryman, 1960s)

I missed class this last week because I was up in San Francisco attending the opening of an exhibit presented by a group called Lost Art Salon, which features historically significant and rediscovered artists whose work hails from 1970 or before.

My aunt Hopie died of cancer in 1975 at the age of 44 (my current age). She was a woodcut artist and a watercolorist primarily, whose prints and paintings still hang on all our walls, an enduring reminder of her talent, her eye, and her spirit, which was indelible. I was nine when she died. I’ve known a lot of people who have died since 1975. Few if any, are as present to me as she is. I can summon her voice in a second. I can picture her walking in my shed right now with every detail in tact, right down to cuff of her jeans. She has been here ever since, and maybe that’s because her paintings have remained such a constant in of our lives. Maybe that’s because she had such a strong personality. Maybe there’s no real difference between those two things.

In any case, through the efforts of her younger daughter – my cousin, Helena – a lot of those familiar prints, as well as some I hadn’t seen before, are once again on public view, providing occasion to look at Hopie’s work, and to reflect upon her life and approach, and see what can be learned from one who went before.

Hopie was my mother’s sister, the eldest of the brood that made painting the signature practice of the family. Three more of her sisters went on to become artists. She herself married the son of an extremely talented New England portraitist and landscape painter, who turned out to be a mentor to my other aunt (the one I attend class with), who in turn spawned two children of my generation who also show and sell successfully. The gene at question would seem to trace to my grandfather, Robert Brooks, several of whose letters to my grandmother from the front of the Great War contain sketches that would, had he chosen to pursue them further, have put him comfortably in the Maxfield Parrish School – but he did not. He became a rancher, and so (or so I have always assumed) we have Hopie to thank and to blame for being our creative pioneer, the first one danged fool enough to think there was room in the world for another artist with integrity.

And I use the term advisedly. I have long tried to gauge the nature of the ambition of my painting kin, to compare it to my own, basically because I think that as artists go, they are a remarkably healthy-minded bunch – almost to a fault. Some of that may have to do with the nature of the painting – a more sanguine activity than writing. Some of it may have to do with the fact that, though all approached their work with a clear professional eye and aspiration, none ever had to shoulder the burden of being the main breadwinner in their families. Still, the art game can be just as ugly as the writing game, fraught with just as many opportunities to lose focus, to forget why you’re doing this, to please the wrong masters and get caught up in destructive resentments and self-pity. And it’s true for anyone who has ever tried to climb a professional ladder, no matter how high or low you are, all you ever really see is the ass of the person just ahead of you. And that’s no fun...Unless you’re a dancer. I guess.

Among the artists and painters in my family, however, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of Rung Envy. I could be wrong, but of the lot, I’ve always suspected Hopie might have been the most at risk. She was a little more fiery than her sisters, and it can’t have been easy working in New York in the 60s when a lot of “important” careers were just beginning to explode. Also, of the sisters, she always seemed to me to the clearest, or most overt, in her determination to work and keep working. That’s not to say she was any more prolific than the others, just that they – my mother, her sister, my cousins even – are all incredibly, almost preternaturally, discreet in the way that they go about their work and their careers, finding ways to fit it in that make it seem, in addition to all the rest they do, a little like a magic trick – attending their openings to find out everything they’ve managed to get done while you weren’t looking. With Hopie, though, it always seemed a little more clear that you were renting her attention – from the work, I mean, and I mean that in the best, most laudable way. Even when I was six I understood that if you really really want to spend time with her, you should probably grab a pad and a pencil.

Whether that level of focus and determination ever spilled over into professional frustration, I have no idea. All I can say, having now returned from the exhibit up north, is that her work shows no trace of pollution. Quite the opposite, it’s about as centered as any statement can be.

In the first place, there is the medium. As I mentioned, she was a watercolorist as well, but the Lost Art show focused on woodcuts, the most mediating of mediums. All woodcuts are ultimately experiments, the success of failure of which depend upon elements over which the artist has not all that much control: the tackiness of the paper, the paint, the humidity of the air, but most of all, the wood. By the artist’s choice, the knots and the grain are the texture of the work and God’s gift to it, the source of all the happy accidents for which all artist are ever in search.

The woodcut artist has furthermore sacrificed the immediacy of her own line, since all the lines must be carveable and carved. That’s what provides the end-products their built-in tension: the blockiness and stolidity and flatness of the printed shapes versus the grace of the artist’s line, which in Hopie’s case so often chose to depict moving things – athletes, animals, children at play. All are stamps of life, with all the paradox that phrase entails.

And yet as much as she gave up, or gave over, to the wood in terms of line and texture, she took back in her choice of subject matter. Again, more so than for the sisters who followed her, subject matter is a pronounced feature of Hopie’s work. Not to say that her sisters don’t make careful and purposeful decision about what to paint, but in the grand scheme of things, they are never very spectacular decisions – nature based, light based, commonplace, closely observed, and all informed by the same basic understanding that it is the artist’s job to play the hand she is dealt, draw beauty from the subject, any subject – any flower, any tree, any hill -- through their own gifts and limitations. To put another way, what they choose to paint is not quite as important as how they paint it, and this puts them in league with the vast majority of working artists and writers.

Not so with Hopie (and in this respect I suspect I may feel an abiding kinship.) What she chose to look at WAS the point. To stand before a print by Hopie is to have one’s attention forcefully directed to what interested her, to the point that she often let her subjects float in the open space of the page (not something any of her sister would ever do, at least for the purpose of showing in a gallery). And that makes sense, of course, given the burden of woodcutting. The sheer labor intensivity of the process almost requires an extra-delight in the subject. It’s only such delight that sustains one through the labor. (If it took a sledgehammer to type every letter on a keyboard, I warrant there'd be fewer novels that take place in kitchens and living rooms.) Hopie’s choices were, as such, a little more varied, a little more idiosyncratic, a little more focused: A pigeon with its wings inverted downwards; two lacrosse players shouldering into one another; even the flow of a river around reeds and rocks has clearly been chosen for its design element – a forced collaboration of water and wood. Her decisions are all deliberately made, but fondly and personally and with the complete confidence of an interested, and interesting, observor.

Combine these basic features of her art – the generous surrender to the medium, the equally generous delight in and fascination with the subject – there’s not a lot of room left for preening or preciousness or any of the other things that, fragrant as they may seem at the moment of conception, wind up stinking in the long run (and no, the irony of the sentence is not lost). But it’s likely because of that – the presence of such a confident guide, the absence of any self-interest or self-consciousness – that Hopie’s prints and watercolors make for such pleasing company. I know to certain ears that may not sound like the nicest thing to say about a person’s Art – should Art not on some level displease, trouble, fester, etc. etc.? Maybe, but again it’s the quiet but powerful companionship her work provides that helps account for the fact that it holds up so well, witness the fact that pretty much everything hanging last weekend sold, which the more you think about it is kind of amazing. Art does age, after all, and nothing ages quite so quickly or hideously as a painting or a book or a song conceived to please the current arbiters of taste; most popular art becomes artifact in one spin of a wheel. That a forty-year-old print, attached to no great name or reputation, should find such instant appeal among of gang of strangers – and make no mistake, the buyers here were strangers to us all - speaks volumes, both about the work and its maker.

But to spare yourself any more of those volumes, the reader is invited to go see Hopie’s work for him or herself here. My final point, in context of this blog, dedicated to exploring and expanding the broader creative context in which I am trying to see my own efforts, is to express not just my renewed admiration for the work of a departed relative, but also just how comforting, how reaffirming and correcting I find it to be reminded of the legacy to which I was born and in which I was raised – as opposed, for instance, to the literary legacy I seem to having such trouble discerning. More so at this moment than ever, and at these crossroads, I do well to remember that, however high or low the writing takes me, I am in the end just another one of the Brookses, and I would have it no other way.

So thank you, Hopie, and thank you, Helena.

Next Post: Last Class of the Semester.

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38. Nov 5, 2009

2009-11-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

Another effort using turps and graphite (the quicker sketch is charcoal, as is the hair of the model in profile).

I'm told gesso will help.

Next Post: Hope Brooks Meryman (1931-1975)

Previous Post: a new medium

37. a new medium

2009-10-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

A friend suggested I try turpentine and graphite, so last night I did. The first result is above – a little messy, and there are respects in which I think it’s clear I had no idea what I was doing, but I record it here because it will be fun, if I continue with the turps, to monitor progress or regress. And sometimes art is like apartment hunting: you get luckier your first time out than you ever will again.

But what a big fan I am of changing medium, of starting out at the beginning again. It’s one of the downsides of growing older, is you get fewer and fewer opportunities to be an idiot, and to experience the slow-release joy -- and the instruction -- that comes from practicing at something and improving. No matter what you do for a living, once you’ve settled on your brushes, you’ll eventually achieve the basic level of technical mastery that the fates and the muses have allotted you, and it becomes nearly impossible to gauge progress one way or another. You are who you are.

But change your medium – try screenplays, try fairy tales, try turps and graphite -- and you quickly rediscover the electric charge that comes from feeling lost and groping, but also the feeling that tomorrow when you return, you will be better.

My mother is a woodcut artist. Over the years and decades she has developed a very personal and particular technique that give her woodcuts a quality that, to be honest, you will not find anywhere else. About twelve years ago, she took up oil painting. She slung herself back to the beginning, and I’m sure it was a good thing for all the reasons mentioned. The unexpected benefit, however, was that when she started oil painting, her woodcuts took off. It was as if all the creativity and inspiration she had to put on hold just to acquaint herself with the basics of her new medium got funneled back into her native soil, the woodcuts, which just started exploding with life and imagination.

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36.

2009-10-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Next Post: a new medium

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35. pen, and therefore John Groth

2009-10-20T09:15:00.001-07:00

These are from last week (Oct. 15, 2009). The paper had been left behind by someone in the studio. Very slick, and roughly 1' x 2'. I decided to try my hand with a pen, and therefore spent most of the evening thinking about an old family friend and artist, John Groth (1908 – 1988), who taught and mentored my aunt Hopie.

As John himself told it, the story goes that as a very young man, let’s say 20, he had managed his way into the office of the one of the editors of the city desk of some Chicago paper – I’m not sure which – in hopes of getting a job as a resident artist. This was back in the day way newspapers hired artists, not just for court proceedings, but street scenes, the crime beat, sports and the like. The editor must have been busy. He didn’t want to be bothered with this young punk with the portfolio, so just to get him out of his office, he said, “Go do a hundred drawings a day and get back to me.” John, in his innocence took the assignment seriously, went off and proceeded to draw a hundred drawings a day, every day.

Whether the story is true or not, it’s an excellent origin myth, it so well explains John’s mature style. As a younger man, there seems to have been a lot more Daumier to what he did. The figures were more solid and stolid, the lines more deliberate, the medium more often oil. But the later work is almost always in ink and watercolor, and always rendered in that distinctive style, a style which was every bit as dashing as John himself was. He was very handsome, with a jutting chin, pure white hair (when I knew him) cut to a page boy's length, a pencil thin mustache, fisherman’s cap, a vest, and a pipe. And he always had his pen in breast pocket, ready at any moment to whip out his sketch book and go. To be with him was to see him draw, and he was one of those artist who was fun to watch. His hand and wrist were a little like the ink-stem of a polygraph machine, but not at all mechanical. Maybe it was because of that editor in Chicago, maybe because that’s who he was, but drawing was itself a kind of sport for him, explosive, fast, reactive, and he chose his subject matter accordingly. An illustrator at heart (by which I mean no insult; I suspect I am too), he depicted a lot of the same things in his art as Hemingway depicted in his fiction: bullfights, war, cockfights, safari, the sporting life, all caught in motion and emotion. He was definitely a romantic. As much as he traveled for his work, he also often drew straight from the imagination. Any time he gave a gift or a note, he’d ad a sketch right there of a charging bull or an Indian on horseback, or himself, and that was fun to see - a grown-up pulling it right out of head. One didn’t see that often.

John also taught a lifedrawing course at the Arts Students League in New York. Outside of elementary school, it’s the only other drawing class I ever attended before the one I’m in now, and I probably only went to one or two sessions. I was young, and not all that comfortable in the space, but the lesson was still clear. John had long recognized me as a potential heir to the family business, but clearly expressed -- as I’d expect any good teacher of mine would likely express -- the desire to see me loosen up a little. Let it rip. Stop being so fucking precious with my lines.

Some years later, when I revealed to him that I was thinking about being a writer instead, I can remember his expression of disappointment. “Writing? Aw…” His face twisted as if someone had jammed his pen into his gut. “But writers…” He shook his head. I’m not sure he finished the sentence, but he didn’t have to. My understanding then is my understanding now:

Writers don’t really live.

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34.

2009-10-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

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33.

2009-10-20T09:03:00.001-07:00

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32.

2009-10-20T08:58:00.001-07:00

Same model, same evening, and a pleasing contrast. The first and more exultant, drawn early in the evening in about a half a minute with vine charcoal. The sleepier pose was the last of the evening and took twenty minutes, with a (faint) gaphite pencil.

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31.

2009-10-20T08:54:00.001-07:00

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30.

2009-10-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

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29.

2009-10-20T08:40:00.001-07:00

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28.

2009-10-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

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Previous Post: Fran Healy, Literary Critic.

27. Fran Healy, literary critic

2009-10-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

I turn attention to the topmost drawing of the post, the one of the young woman sitting on the stool with her arms folded. A friend and I were looking through the series of these drawings a few weeks ago. When we came to this one, she blurted out, “Oh, I don’t like that one.”

It was an instinctive response, which I accepted as such, and appreciate, if only because it functions as a reminder of the viewer’s (or reader's) privilege to like or dislike your offering solely on the basis of whether they find the subject matter appealing. In this instance, based upon my knowledge of my companion and the speed of her response, I assume her aversion was to the model’s attitude – wary, distrustful, defensive, judgmental.

In my mind, of course, these are all the things that make the drawing a pretty good one. The legs are a little off, but as far as the upper half is concerned, the clarity and the nuance of the attitude being expressed is pretty well-rendered, from the posture right down to the eye. Yet I am bound to accept that it is precisely this, the evident content of my depiction, which caused my friend to react so negatively, and that she had every right to that opinion.

I’m always reminded of an exchange that took place between New York Mets announcer Fran Healy and Ralph Kiner during an apparently slow game about fifteen or twenty years ago. Maybe it was a rain delay, but they were talking about the movie The Natural, and Fran Healy was saying what a good swing Robert Redford had, especially for an actor. Kiner said, “Yeah, and you know, The Natural wasn’t just a movie. It was based on a book.” Healy, whose charm consists in his embrace of the fact that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer – said, “Oh, really?” Kiner said, “Yeah, but you know in the book, the Robert Redford character doesn’t hit that home run in the end. He strikes out.” There was a long pause, at the end of which Healy finally said, “…Boy, I would hate that book.’

As a younger man, a younger writer, I think I’d have taken Fran Healy’s crit to be the purest extract of philistinism, that nothing could be more crude or brutish than basing one’s appreciation of a book on whether the hero hits a home run or strikes out in the end. As I have matured – or let’s just say aged – I’ve come round to seeing that this is completely legitimate response. Maybe not my own, but certainly not dismissable. One has to take responsibility for all of one’s choices, after all, including what happens at the end.

Be that as it may, I stand by the drawing.

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26.

2009-10-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Next Post: Fran Healy, Literary Critic.

25.

2009-10-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

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24.

2009-10-19T23:52:00.000-07:00

23.

2009-10-19T23:48:00.000-07:00

22.

2009-10-19T23:14:00.000-07:00

21.

2009-10-19T19:57:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

19.

2009-10-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

12.

2009-10-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

11.

2009-10-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

10.

2009-10-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

These were all drawn with pencil, in a sketchbook.

9.

2009-10-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

8.

2009-10-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T16:25:00.000-07:00

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2009-10-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

5.

2009-10-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

4. another of the artists, modeling

2009-10-19T16:07:00.001-07:00

3. Five more sketches of Jorgen Hansen (1922-2008)

2009-10-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

2. Three drawings of Jorgen Hansen (1922-2008)

2009-10-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

For some forty-seven, Jorgen Hansen (no relation) taught the life-drawing class that currently calls room 23 home. I was in his class for a little less than a year before he passed away, mid-semester, in the winter of 2008. There's much to be said about his philosophy, his legacy, and the inspiration that came from watching a man teach, and teach with such passion, right up to his final days. For now let it be said that he also on occasion sat-in (clothed) for his models when they failed to show, and that of all the models who have come to sit for us over the years, he was definitely one of the most enjoyable to draw.

1. Introduction: on New York and sublimation

2009-10-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

It was a little over two years ago now that my family left New York City. My wife and I had been bouncing around Manhattan, from apartment to apartment, for a dozen or so years, and I've lived there on and off since I was born. New York is home to me in a way that no other place ever will be, so much so that the idea of explaining why – ascribing it to the seasons, the wheeze of the uptown bus, or the early morning groan and belch of the garbage truck - all strike me as a writerly affectation. These are not preferences to me, or pleasures. They are sewn into me. They are my comfort food, and the way I think life should sound and smell and irritate.

Even after two and a half years away, the feeling of loss and displacement is still remarkably raw. When I see New York on television, I ache. I can’t watch Sesame Street with my children; I have to leave the room. When I leaf through the photo album of our last two years there, I feel as if I’m looking at pictures of a deceased lover. Not that she is dead. I know she isn’t. Not that we won’t be back, I’m sure we will, barring injury, but I also know what they say about stepping in the same river twice.

What makes the pain especially acute is that the year or so right before we left was an extraordinarily happy time for us, owing mainly to the fact that the prior seven years had been so sad. My wife and I had desperately wanted to have children, but couldn’t seem to find a way. We traveled the long and lonely roads of Reproductive Technologies and then adoption. We felt all the desperation that comes, and the financial and emotional devastation, and for a while there it looked like nothing would come of our efforts and that our lives were slipping away.

But all that changed. Under circumstances I’ve written about elsewhere, we were visited in relatively quick succession by two moments of grace the nature and extent of which would likewise be vain to try to capture here in words. Suffice to say that for one couple, in the space of one lifetime, to have felt so cursed and then so blessed in one and the same regard is, from a pure storytelling perspective, a little de trop. And you will say, "Well that’s they way it works, isn’t it? Deprivation breeds gratitude. Love begets grief.” And I will say, ‘Yes, but no.” Trust me, no pat psycho-dialectic comes even close to explaining whatever the hell went on, and goes on, with us. Truly, Richard Dawkins can kiss my ass.

That last couple years we were all living on West 91st St, a half block from the park and all its playgrounds, the horse path, the reservoir, the Great Lawn, the Met, the Museum of Natural History. My wife was teaching two blocks away. Our son, at 3, was attending his first year of pre-school. Our daughter was newly arrived. Her crib was in our bedroom, and we were squeezed in there but happy. I was trying to finish a book, so for mental space, I joined a private library across the park, where for a nominal fee I was given access to a small complex of working spaces up on the top level of a very handsome, old world mansion made of white stone, polished marble, burnished wood and stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

So my days proceeded: dropping one child off at school, leaving the other with our sitter whom we loved almost as much as the kids, cutting across the park from 91st to 79th, putting in as honest a day’s work as a writer can, (which isn’t too, granted), grabbing a small lunch at Don Filippo, maybe sneaking an espresso back in among the stacks, then returning in the late afternoon to an apartment brimming with the brand of joy that only two toddlers – and these two in particular – plus seven prior years of agony and loneliness, spent variously in clinics, lawyers offices, and orphanages – can bring. That kind of joy. It was a very special time in our lives, and mine, where everywhere I turned, I felt that I was home and where I should be, doing what I should be doing. Finally.

The only real fly in the ointment, and it was a pretty big fly, was money. For the reasons already alluded to, as well as my refusal to do anything other than try to finish that novel (despite the fact that for the first time in my career I had no advance and no publisher), we were accruing some pretty serious debt. My wife and I had long discussed the possibility of trying California for a few years at some point. She had family there. I had family there. Fallow dwellings and related connections tendered the prospect of slightly cheaper living, so we decided maybe the time had come to head on out, just to get our financial house in order, and to enjoy our children’s pre-school years. We weren’t closing the door on New York, by any means. We sublet the apartment on 91st, but still deep down we knew, as our cab drove us and our carseats, our strollers and diapers and overstuffed luggage out to the airport, we were leaving behind a golden moment that we would probably never recapture.

We had no great cause to complain. The ensuing flight landed us in what is surely one of the most beautiful places on earth, tucked between the foothills of the Santa Ynez Range on one side and the calm Pacific on the other, further tempered by the Channel Islands that chisel the horizon whenever the morning fog lifts. It is the land of my wife’s youth, and my mother’s youth as well, and we are surrounded by a lot of extended family with whom we get along swimmingly. So there were a slew of ways to distract and console my sense of loss. Perhaps I’d finally discover my green thumb. Or try my hand at a “New York” novel. Did Rachmaninov not write his most ‘Russian’ music wile he was traveling abroad? Did Dvorak not compose his most ‘Bohemian’ music while living in the United States? Of course he did. He was living in Manhattan, for heaven’s sake.

So I tried and I try, but still one has to be honest with oneself and recognize: Given who I am, given what I do, given the sorts of things that make my juices flow, the northern tip of Southern California (or the southern tip of the Central Coast, I’ve never really been sure), for all its Edenic beauty, is probably not a place that I would ever have chosen to live on my own. And that’s not even to say I don’t think I should be here – there’s value in being taken out of your comfort zone – but as I said to a sister-in-law not long after moving, living out here would be my personal version of Black Like Me. Those who know me will attest, the mere fact that there is a lawnmower parked in my garage right now – that’s two punch-lines right there. So yes, I admit it has been a challenge figuring out how to continue to be creative and productive and dry and constructive – how to be me as I understood me to be – without the help and guidance of countless filthy pigeons.

If joining that private library on 79th Street was the smartest thing I did before leaving New York, the smartest thing I’ve done, by far, since coming to California was to accept my aunt’s invitation to join her at the lifedrawing class she attends every Thursday evening at the Adult Ed Center in Santa Barbara.

But wait, that’s not quite as pathetic as it sounds. I come from a family of artists, mostly of the paint and easel variety. My mother is one. Three of her sister are, or were. Two of my cousins are, and I myself drew a lot as a kid, enough at least that if you’d asked me back then what I was going to be when I grew up, I probably would have sighed and said “artist.” So it’s in the blood. When my aunt invited me to join her, I said absolutely. Lifedrawing would be my bowling night, a chance to get out of the house, see other humans, draped and un-draped, either way was fine.

When I first joined, the class was being taught by Jorgen Hansen (no relation). Jorgen had been running the workshop, or something like it, for some forty years, during which time he had gathered around him a devoted following, a kind of core unit of now middle-aged to twilit artists who could be counted on to drift in and out of the doors, pending weekly availability. Coming in the escort of my aunt, an esteemed member of that unit, I felt both very much like a newbie, but also an initiate. My parents knew Jorgen as well from way back when they were all drinking and driving much too fast, and from the moment he made the connection, I think he found my presence a little disarming. Whenever he looked at me, I had the distinct feeling his life was flashing before his eyes.

Aside from that, the space was a comfortable one for me, as was the task at hand. I’ve always preferred drawing to painting, and the subject matter happens to be the one that interests me the most: humans and their attitudes. So it didn’t take long for the class to assume a fairly important role in maintenance of my psychic well-being, fragile as it was in my new surroundings. Lifedrawing was, and still is, the one thing I’ve done since moving out here that I’m quite sure is correct, to the point that I find it kind of strange that I wasn’t doing the same thing back in the city. It’s as if those three hours a week I spend in room 23 are the missing puzzle-piece of my life in New York, magically turned up here, in the Schott Center in Santa Barbara.

But my purpose here is not to tell tales or violate the sanctity of that space with much in the way of anecdote or description. That could be fun, but I think it’s best to honor the tacit compact of all who enter, that what happens in room #23 should probably stay there, at least as far as the others are concerned. For myself, my hope is simply to provide a small window into the room, the one framing the models, framing the sketches, and (when properly lit) reflecting my own experience as I drew them, including the occasional rumination about the role that art, artists, and drawing has played in my life; how that process, for me, compares to writing; and how that rediscovery has helped me cope with the various frustrations that life has been meting out, including the lingering sense of disorientation I feel, separated from the place that bore me, suckled me, weaned me, taught me, deflowered me, and seems at the moment not to care for me all that much, but who knows, maybe I started it.

Let me begin , then, with this: It was the formidable tag-team of Nietzsche and then Freud who first identified the concept of sublimation. Others added their twist later on, but the basic idea is that in order to remain citizens in good standing, we all have to find ways of suppressing our most dangerous impulses – the violent, the perverse, the anti-social, and the sexual, needless to say. We do this by re-channeling them into some more creative and socially acceptable outlet; by substituting what we think we can get away with for what we really want. This process is called sublimation. All art is sublimation. Without it, we’d all just go ahead and murder our parents.

I don’t mean to predispose the viewer. The drawings here are many things. They are what they are. They’re a father’s chance to get out of the house one night a week; a writer’s opportunity to reacquaint himself with an old neglected friend. They are, in certain select cases, the live sublimation of the clear desire for that which they portray; but even more – and here my justification for the lengths of this preamble – they are also obviously an expression of longing. And maybe it all goes back to the fact that I really didn’t draw that much during the prior two or three decades, but I can’t help feeling there’s something in the various elements that the drawings posted here combine – the grubbiness, the soot and butcher-paper tone, the nakedness, to stay nothing of the peace of mind that drawing them all has brought me – that leads me to think that they are, among other things, a cunning sublimation of the one most enduring desire I’ve felt since taking up the charcoal again – or since taking up residence in this beautiful garden by the sea - to still be fucking the streets of New York City.

Next Post: three drawings of Jorgen Hansen.