Hands, feet and faces.

Following my early years of life-drawing during which the whole pose was the norm I have tended towards hands and feet, and particularly when they are the part of the pose which is nearest and in the foreground and I can pursue an exaggerated perspective. A parallel feature has been the inclusion of a face profile: the recessed eye, the pronounced cheekbone, the chin, etc. This has often entered into the central area of a composition often as a silhouette within a cave like recess formed by a grouping of hands and feet. During this current virtual program I also have been drawn towards including a portrait from the model. Why? Not at all sure. This does not come from a deliberate and conscious decision to do portraiture. In fact I have never really had an interest in portraiture. Heads, faces, parts of faces enter into a drawing almost by accident. In fact I have held the belief that when a face is included then this will become a main focus of attention and interest by the beholder and the rest of the drawing will take second place. One goes straight to the eyes. And I also have held the belief that it is very difficult to get the face right, particularly aspects of symmetry. So as you will have seen in the past when a face enters a composition then I include only part or half of it: i.e. one eye, half a nose, part of the lips, etc. So these four drawings are part of the process described above.

It is Monday evening May 17th and Andrew is modelling. The poses are: 5x1minute, 3x5minutes, 1x20minutes and 1x45minutes. I am drawing with a 2B graphite pencil in each hand and emphasising at times with a 6B. As usual I am keeping my variables constant, so apart from the graphite two handed approach, the paper is A1 and in portrait format regardless of the pose (when a full length lying pose arrives it is tempting to go landscape, but I resist this as it also encourages me to not do the whole pose but to bring parts together and overlap and superimpose which is what I really love to do).

So on to the drawings:

Only one note to add to the drawings and it is an explanation about the first one, which contains five selected parts of the first set of 5x1minute poses. In the one minute I look at the pose, select what to respond to, then outline it, and then add a few points of weightier marks of emphasis. No time for any real conscious engagement with issues of composition, does it look right, mark-making, etc. Then on to the next selection. Many of the lines are exploratory and therefore can be quite light and hardly visible when photographed. So I did something I very, very rarely do and that is to visit a drawing at a later time and do something with it. You see I have this conviction that a drawing is sacred to the moment of its creation, the moment of its making, and that everything which appears on the paper comes from my perceptual processes and from the intimate and complex two-way dialogue between artist and muse. As soon as the pose ends then the process and dialogue stops. And if one returns to a drawing what is one doing? (this is a subject for another time, but one I have often thought about). 

So here is a rare exception to the above. I have with a 4B graphite pencil gone over every line, however slight, and brought them all up to the same weight and degree of emphasis. I have done this only once before, a few weeks ago, and maybe there is a future in it. But at the moment I have it on my easel and take a look at it every so often, in the expectation I may be able to identify and articulate the value of this process.

HAIKU and my minimalist approach

Five drawings on Monday evening  May 10th.

But before we examine them want to refer to my notes from my sketch book written on the morning of the 10th. It was pouring with rain so after opening and feeding the hens I decided to sit inside and I opened The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse originally purchased in about 1965 and which I very occasionally open for a few quiet meditative thoughts. 

I have always been fascinated by the three line Haiku verses from the 17thC. There are some rules about their construction which I will not go into here, but the appeal to me is that each one has a succinctness that embraces a huge diversity of concepts, ideas and images. As an architect I have always made the analogy with the core philosophy of one of the three great masters of the Modern Movement, Mies Van Der Rohe and his 'Less is More'.

In recent times with my life-drawing I believe I have been seeking, through a minimalist approach, a kind of purity, in which I have been able to capture the essence of a pose, but at the same time I also am reaching a degree of complexity via my overlapping/superimposing/drawing selected parts of the anatomy at different scales, and all of this with my overarching 'Picabian' tool of transparency. My drawing will often take the beholder to different parts of the pose, at varying distances, one part behind and at the same time in front of another, resulting in a spatial complexity. Also as I have talked of many times before as different parts of the body are juxtaposed a morphing of forms takes place, but not always, but when it does it can result in creative surprises.

During the morning I composed ten Haiku verses of my own, and I will include this at the end of this posting. At 6.30pm just half-an-hour before the Zoom session was to start I wrote the following: "I have been seeking a personal way out of the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic for along time. This morning I felt the beginnings of such a path. I am now on Page 5 of today's sketch book notes, so lets see what the next two hours will contribute.

I believe I have gone deep into myself to find something: Is this the first time this has happened (in my life)? I believe it may be. But looking back over my eight decades there were others, maybe similar, but this one could be special"

So here are my drawings with Fra modelling. There are a variety of timed poses: 3x5minutes, 1x20minutes, 1x45minutes then to finish with 1x5minutes of movement. But I have not posted then in this sequence. 

I am holding a fine-liner pen in each hand and drawing on A1 220gsm cartridge paper (perhaps I will attempt some enhancement as the lightness of line has not always come through in the photograph).

 

My Haiku verses, and a note concerning their context:

Field gate

Lock firmly bolted

Horses stand asleep.

Sylvia keeps her horses in the top fields where the gates can be secured during the night.

Clouds now and then

Give relief

From moon-viewing.

This may well be an exact copy from the book but tells exactly my reaction to a recent night when I was out looking at the 'pink' moon.

Ailing on my travels

Yet my dream wandering

Takes me to the next destination.

Lock down and isolating: no annual visit to Italy, and India and Southern Africa now seem so far away.

With the morning glory

Today appears

And then, the rest of my life.

Climbing up into the hill fort each morning to open up the hens, the bright sunshine over the distant landscape, the birdsong, the greenery, cause my worries and concerns to disappear. and I feel good.

Summer so soon

The hum from the apple blossom

The coldness, the dryness, the wetness now relieved from the memory.

This year we have witnessed periods of extreme weather, one after the other, but each year the arrival of honey bees gathering pollen and nectar starts a buzzing symphony almost deafening as one walks beneath the apple trees. Such a welcoming experience.

The ash dies back

The sycamore becomes brittle

The oak struggles to bud.

Most trees have some desease or other, but with ash-dieback we have been taking the ashes down from the hillfort ramparts.

I look across to harrowed field patterns

Mine, I only see from above

I wish I could fly.

Looking across the landscape geometrical linear patterns appear as farmers harrow their fields. On my Kabota I harrow our fields and as I move up and down and round and round I try to imagine how it appears to the glider pilots as they rise in the thermals from our hill and the buzzards as they glide slowly across.

A yew log on the fire

After four hundred years

Another sense of warmth.

An old Yew tree probably planted with the original cottage about 1620, or so, had to be taken down. I logged it and now well seasoned we use it in our wood burners. Tales and legends, varieties of use, symbols of longevity and rebirth, and much more, the Yew holds and gives out so much.

At dawn

Not a soul in sight

Carpet of wild flowers.

Again, climbing up to open up the hens, too early for anyone to be travelling down our lane, through wood anenemies, stitchwort, yellow archangels, bluebells, dandelion, buttercup, plantain ................. .

The Summer Solstice Setting Sun

We call it

Orange down the Blorenge.

From our hill we witness a solar calendar as the sun sets at significant points on the horizon at both Solstices and at the Equinoxes. When weather conditions are just right the sun becomes an orange ball as it slides down the silhouetted north facing slope of the Blorenge over to the north west by Abergavenny.