Alright it is week two of the #InkCovid19 drawing challenge. Last week we started with a couple master copies. Our aim was to try and deconstruct these drawings. Our aim was to understand how an artist thinks about showing 3D space on a flat surface.

This week the training wheels come off. We are going live. I challenge you guys to work from life! I want you to set up your own still life and try drawing it.

Nothing is more challenging or rewarding than drawing from life. When we work from a photo or another artists drawing part of the job is already done. Those images have flattened space. When you work from life, you have to think about how you can use lines to recreate form and space.

Set up your still life

So to take on this drawing challenge you will need the following items:

1. Toilet Paper Role
2. Orange (or any round fruit)
3. Salt shaker
4. Thick book
5. Large book (with limited images or text on cover)

Set up these items using the above image as a reference. Spend some time trying to match the composition. Think about the relationship between the different items. Look at how the orange crops the bottom left corner of the toilet paper role. Look at the salt shaker. Most of it’s form is seen against the table top. Only the top part of the shaker is silhouetted against the purple background.

Getting your still life set up accurate is about practicing your observation skills. It’s about training your eyes to notice these kind of detailed relationships between the different objects we are drawing. All of this information will be used in the drawing process.

Block in: Big to small

Just like we did for our last drawing we are going to start with a very general black in. If you only had 4 or 5 lines how would you represent this group of objects. Think about the highest point (top of the toilet paper) and the lowest point (bottom of the book). Now mark the furthest point to the left (front edge of the book) and the furthest point to the left  (left edge of the slat shaker).

Orange our unit of measurement

Once you have a large general shape we want to start blocking in the different objects. We want to be very careful and make sure we get the right size for each object.

How can we measure that distance? We need a unit of measurement. You can make anything your unit of measurement, for this example let’s use the orange. Stick your arm out nice and straight with a pencil in hand. With one eye closed the pencil can act like a ruler. Using the top of the pencil and your thumb measure the height of the orange. Loosely block in your orange on your page. With a straight arm measure your orange again and use that measurement to get the relative size and placement of the other objects.

If I measure the orange in my picture. I can see that that orange measurement will get me from the top of my orange to the top of my toilet paper. Keep taking measurements and making marks on your paper.

Horizon line and object tops

Now that we have the general shapes of our objects and their placement we want to add some detail. Our initial goal was to show 3D space on a flat piece of paper. The way that we can best express space is to show the volume or the form of each object. This means we want to express the different sides or planes of the objects.

For now we are going to keep things simple. Our goal is to express the top and the sides of of each object.

To do this we have to think about perspective and the horizon line. Again let’s keep things simple. The horizon line represents our eye level of the artist.

Generally speaking where is the horizon line in this drawing? Look at the top side of the toilet paper. Can you see the whole made by the cardboard cylinder? Or look at the orange. Can you see the flower stalk of the orange? Because we can see all of this information that makes up the tops of these objects we know that the horizon line or the eye level is above our still life.

If these objects were placed on a high shelf above our eye level we would not see the top side of our objects.

Back to our drawing, measure the height of the top side of each object compared to it’s vertical sides. A common mistakes when you first do this kind of exercise is to make that top end too small. So measure twice. To make your drawing even more 3D ad some simple shading to the vertical side of each object.

When we get more advanced we will use a lighting set up to make shadows on the objects as a way to indicated the different sides. For now I want us to think analytically. So we are using shade to indicate for our self the difference between the top and vertical sides of each object.

If you get this far, amazing! Move your object around and try a second set up.

 

My Art School Job

I had a somewhat unorthodox art education. I worked for the art school (Syn Studio) where I studied. First as an intern and than as the office manager.

A big part of my job was helping the teachers prepare the set up for their classes. As an intern I would come 20 min before the class and help them set up the lights and the backdrops for the subjects we would draw (we always worked from life). As the manager I trained interns to help with set up.

Learning to Set Up Lighting

All of this meant I learned how to set up and light a still life subject for an academic drawing. Seems like a silly thing to brag or blog about but for me it was a big deal. Doing these set ups week after week, and than drawing them in class, I had a better understanding of what my teachers were trying to communicate with each exercise.

It comes back to this idea of active observation. As artists we are always trying to overcome the temptation to simply copy what we see. Great art should communicate a profound understanding of the subject.

In a very basic exercise like drawing geometric shapes we are trying to understand how light interacts with form. The aim of my shadow box (something I learned to build as an intern) is to block out the light so that only the lamp light is hitting the shapes.

In real life there are very few situations where a subject is only lit from one side. But the knowledge you gain from this exercise becomes a tool for understanding more complex lighting situations.

As part of my Toronto trip I had the opportunity to discuss potentially doing an art talk on the work of the Canadian Impressionist painter Laura Muntz and Motherhood. Fingers crossed that it all comes together. I would really love to share the life and work of this wonderful artist.

Artist Laura Muntz

Muntz started her career in the 1880s and was part of a group of Canadian artists who travelled to Paris to train in the world renowned Paris Atelier system. Muntz was paying her own tuition and managed to get work as a teacher’s assistant. This work allowed her to stay on and study in Paris for seven years. On her return to Canada she found success as a portrait artist painting the kids of wealthy Toronto and Montreal patrons. She also showed her narrative paintings at important world fairs including the Louisiana Purchase exhibition in 1904 – where she was awarded a silver medal.

Motherhood for Muntz

In the middle of her career tragedy struck: her sister died leaving behind 11 children. Muntz took up the responsibility of raising the children. For about seven years she all but abandoned her painting practice and embraced motherhood.

What I find so inspirational about Muntz story is that after the children got older and were more independent she went back to her art. She allowed herself a next chapter after motherhood. She made a studio space in the attic and got back to a daily painting routine. Eventually she re-established herself and confirmed her place in Canadian art history.

For me her story reminds me that it’s okay to put motherhood first. I think there is a lot of pressure on all of us to somehow ‘have it all’. The reality is that sometimes we have to make a choice between family and career. What her story also illustrates is that we can always come back. Taking a break from a creative practice is not the same as giving up. Life is long and we can always come back to our dreams. Such a feel-good story no!?!

New book on the go! Morrice: A Great Canadian Artist Rediscovered is a look at the life of the post-impressionist painter James Morrice by the Canadian art dealer Blair Laing. The book is a two for one deal. We learn about a great painter but Laing also includes tid bits from his life as a dealer.

Laing and Morrice

Laing is about a two generations younger than Morrice. Both men were of Scottish Canadian heritage. And both grew up in the Presbyterian Westmount community. It sounds pretty specific but it was the dominant culture in Canada in the late 19th c. and early 20th c.

In the books first chapter Laing focuses on the life of the painter’s father, David Morrice. He argues the father is a kind of archetype for early Canadian culture. D. Morrice immigrated to Canada ‘with only the clothes on his back’ and made his fortune in the Montreal textile industry.

Influence on Modernism

It was the success of his generation that inspired the nationalist spirit embodied later by the, predominately Anglo-Saxon, Group of Seven. And we can see pretty clearly the influence of artists like Morrice on the groups work.

Of course the prosperity of the industrial age was concentrated. In another book Laing talks about starting out his career by writing to a prosperous Toronto merchant and asking for a job, underscoring their shared Scottish heritage. It’s no surprise that the Catholic French-Canadian Automatists, like Jean-Paul Riopelle, broke with the style of modernists like Morrice and the Group of Seven to assert their own identity.

When we look at the work of these artists it’s not always obvious how culture influenced the work. But learning the history it becomes clear that cultural affiliations plays a role in determining an artists style. My point isn’t to criticize the culture of Morrice or The Group of Seven. What interests me is how this story reveals the quiet power culture has to influence our inner world.

Tarantino: Revenge and the Manson Family

I made it out to see the latest Quentin Tarantino film, ‘Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood‘. Like so much of his work the film is a cathartic revenge fantasy.

What’s interesting about the film is that the justification for the revenge violence is not something that happens in the film. Instead what makes violence feel cathartic is something we as an audience know about the events the story is based on. We go into the film knowing that the ‘hippies’ are members of the Manson Family. We know that in real life they gruesomely murdered innocent people including Sharon Tate.

In the film Tarantino builds up to the crimes but ultimately changes the story sending the hippies to the wrong house only to meet the hero played by Brad Pitt. In the film, what is presented are three very young kids who surprise Pitt in his friend’s home. They are armed, clearly stoned and we know their intention is violence. But they don’t initiate anything.

Pitt’s response is not only to un-arm the intruders but to kill them. Pitt is a stunt double and Tarantino underscores his physical ability, going as far as stating that he could beat up Bruce Lee. Given his control in a fight situation, I think we have to ask, why does he kill the intruders? Why not just disarm?

As an audience member I know what the real Manson kids did. It’s cathartic to see them pay for their crimes. But, in this fantasy world those kids never get to Sharon Tates home. The director has explicitly decided to change the story. So we can’t know if the kids would have gone through with murder in this universe.

Like everyone else in the theater, I was cheering on the hero. That should give us pause. It says something important about how much of an impact culture (or the stories we hear) has on our perception of reality.

Charlie Says : The Story of the Girls

Building on this idea of the relationship between culture and perception is Mary Harron‘s film ‘Charlie Says‘. The story is based on the lives of the women who participated in the Manson murders. The movie avoids gore and instead asks how a group of ‘good girls’ could do something so vile.

There is this wonderfully uncomfortable tension throughout the film between the girls’ crime and their hippie love personalities. The director never wavers from the narrative that these girls are good people and that they willfully participated in a gruesome murder.

Much of the blame for the crime is put on the isolationist group-think culture of the Manson cult. In the beginning we watch as the community normalizes free-love and drugs for it’s members. Isolated from the rest of the world they start to explain the ills of society through a dooms-day conspiracy – like sex and drugs these beliefs are normalized. Through the conspiracy they identify an enemy (the rich, other ethnic groups). Soon they see themselves as warriors destined to save the group (and the world) by attacking their enemies.

Ultimately the women are convicted and have to face the empty nature of their horrific acts.

Perception and Perspective

Unlike Tarantino’s films where good and evil are portrayed as fixed and binary, Harron’s movie forces the viewer to think about these concepts in more complicated terms.

Far from a nihilistic film, it concludes that certain acts do constitute evil – no matter the intention. In this way it highlights how this idea of ‘intention’ can corrupt our understanding of good and evil. Watching the lives of these girls as they build up to the murder, the director makes the case that intention and perspective are linked. We believe our intentions our good because they will benefit us and our community.

In the same way perception influences how we perceive threat. Right now we have a problem in the society where people are responding with violence to a imagined threat by ‘outsider’ groups. Like our response to Tarantino’s hippies, that fear and resentment is not always based on actual events. It’s often based on some outside information that may or may not be true or relevant to the situation.

Both ‘Charlie Says’ and ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ make a case for the importance of challenging our perspectives.