In my earlier post today, i said, ” Ugliness has a place in art. It can be a sign of truly creative boundary pushing. The challenge to the artist is take the ugly beyond ugly, to make it reveal something gorgeous that could be revealed only through those experiences that are, in themselves, initially, ugly.”
So I thought I’d critique a few things i did last night pushing a little on a boundary, getting a tad ugly.
My first art teacher told me an artist is lucky to get one good one in twenty tries. I cling to that. I do a lot of junk while working through a sequence of trials (and errors) in search of the beckoning idea of an elusive something-or-other that would be great if I could capture it. It’s the vanishing carrot on a stick, though occasionally I get a nibble at it.
Pencil Drawing
Yellow Drawing
Last night I went to our famous Thursday Night Drawing Group in Santa Rosa sort of ill prepared and scattered. I just grabbed up a little drawing pad and some bigger pieces of good paper, plus watercolors and brushes. We had a model. We began with 2 minute warm up poses. At first I drew with pencil. It’s a good way for me to find the architectural reality of the model in space. This drawing works for that and shows a figure balanced in gravity. Then something bugged me to use color. I knew if i stayed with pencil, i’d be heading for academic drawings i didn’t want. So i started sloshing around in watercolors. This yellow drawing breaks free of the lines and breaks into color (like breaking into song!). It’s pretty nicely free in its movement, though not quite in balance. It’s a start.
Colorful Drawing
When we went to 5 minutes, I felt drawn to really bright, primary colors. I’m like a child in my love of them. More time allowed me to offer more detail (“Colorful Drawing”). I liked what was happening. The figure is quite graceful. The colors create an almost convincingly 3-D figure in some portions of it, for what its worth (trunk, hip), and the colors work well with one another. They don’t do much spatially, tho: they are there like a curtain drawn around her rather than being a space that she occupies. Nothing brilliant here, but some progress in the direction i wanted to go.
The final three bigger, longer pose drawings show a definite progression in trying to push the ugly beyond ugly to reveal the gorgeous. I didn’t get there. But something good was starting to happen.
The first of the three (“Bright Colors Lady”) is a direct descendant of “Colorful Drawing.” There are two big differences between them. The
Bright Colors Lady
colors of the bigger drawing are beginning to organize a space within which the model is situated — instead of being just, like, a play of lights around the figure. Second the figure is not negatively defined by the colors, as is the case in “Colorful Drawing.” This figure establishes itself independently with line and color of ts own. The figure integrates into the space through its color, which surpasses its lines to enter the spatial field of color around it.
One detail of this drawing quite appeals to me. The head and face are nice, I think, in their shadow play, especially noting the thoughtfulness of the pose in which the model rests an index finger against her chin. The variation in line of this upper torso area — including the other arm and the belly — I find appealing. It’s mine, of course..
The next in sequence of the bigger drawings/longer poses, “Yellow Butt,” doubtless reaches an intense peak of ugliness and yet … there is something tolerable in the extreme distortions; and, in the coloration, there is definite positive progress.
Yellow Butt
In the distortions, the figure has become strangely reminiscent of a large bug — surely an unfortunate fate, and let us pray no one steps on her! Even at that, if we allow ourselves to see the figure humanly, the distortion does riff on real body types.
Coloration is the strength of the drawing. So much more is going on here than in the earlier ones. The figure is fully integrated into the space created by colors; and it is a space. I like the gradations of yellows and oranges in the drawing, haunted by a yellow-green. The blue does push the space back.
The final big piece, “Earth Woman,” is the culmination of the series. This is the one i almost didn’t make. I was pretty tired, mostly all cleaned up and ready to leave. My little inner voice urged me to stay for just one more, a 20 minute pose; and i had a feeling for a certain quality of large blocks of smeared color — though I had no idea what they would be!
The colors in this final piece draw upon the earlier primary brightness, but they are muted now and searching for more depth. “Earth Woman” is the only drawing of the night that actually fully creates a space of depth, breadth, and height and places the figure within it, pinnned by gravity to a floor … and quite solidly, too. (I think Earth Woman may be a cave dweller. Or at least her home is a thatched roof palapa.) The piece does not make it all the way to gorgeous, but I like where it did get to.
Earth Woman
I like the nuanced, rubbed look of the colors on real walls and floor, and the heft of the body at rest there, so at peace in her skin, yet fully alert and alive. I like the way the body’s flesh is called into existence in and through the lines and their spreading colors — rather than merely being outlined.
The drawing remains haunted by its recent narrow escape from ugliness. But i think it does earn its place as the culmination of an exploratory process risking ugliness by pushing boundaries in search of transcendence. Isn’t that about the sum of what we humans can do?
Look closely at this woman — her ultimate, resigned, vibrant, child-bearing and community-creating reality — and is there not a tincture of the transcendent about her?
This post has been a huge struggle, and by golly i do believe the gods have smiled upon me and allowed me to prevail! Pictures slid all the hell over the place, seldom obeying simple commands. Words weaseled their way everywhere but to their apportioned spots. There was the devil to pay throughout! So I paid him off, and finally got through it — having learned, of course, oh yes, tons.
And that’s the way it goes in art, friends.
Xxoo,
j
