The Norma Project

Norma.
Charcoal.
3 hours.

I haven't used charcoal in a long time, and was looking forward to using it again for the quickness of application. It takes much less time to fill an area with tone using charcoal than pencil, and I have regretted lately that I have been unable to do much more than a contour when figure drawing. Contour drawing, while nice, is not a "drawing"' but rather the skeleton of a drawing. As my teacher Tim says, the contour is "the place where you hang a drawing." Something along those lines. A drawing is an investigation of space, or , Tim again, "imaginary ?? In imaginary space." In other words, you need tone - the space that tone implies and creates - in order to have a "drawing." Of course, there are beautiful contour drawings, but I think there is something to this definition: without tone, a contour lies flat on the page - it remains design only - while the addition of tone (implied space) brings drawing into a deeper sphere or Art. The Art of painting is the illusion of 3D space that is created on a 2D surface. This is the difference between Drawing and mere design. Design is a part of Drawing; Drawing combines design with spatial thinking ("Drawing is sculpture by other means" - Tim, of course!), which only means that Drawing is a fuller (not better) Art.

So - I wanted to do a Drawing.

Isabelle, the host of this drawing group, casually mentioned that I could do a painting during these sessions if I wanted, and it got me to thinking about doing a capital-P Painting of Norma, and what that would require. I wrote some notes to myself and figured out that I would need to do the following:

• Prepare canvas


• Transfer my drawing


• Paint a poster study


• Brush in an underpainting, indicate background


• Fill in the background underpainting


• Paint a first pass (with a focus on the face and hand)


• Paint a second pass

To do all of this, I really only need four sessions with the model: one to do the poster study, one for the underpainting, one for the first pass, and one for the second pass. I can do a large portion of the work at home, and Isabelle gave me a photo of Norma's portrait, so I could use that as a reference at home. (In fact, I suppose I could take my own photo, from my own perspective, and work on the portrait in my own studio.) I emailed Isabelle to ask what she thought of this, and she sounded keen to do it. We may even be able to swing one or more four-hour sessions, which would be fantastic. (I need as much time as I can get - especially for the poster study, since I want to complete it in one session.)

Drawing in the Louvre

When I returned to Canada after six months of studying the figure in France, all I wanted to do was go back and continue my studies, since Calgary does not have much to offer in the way of figure drawing (certainly not long pose, anyway). I was already in what I considered the most serious-minded figure drawing group - which, at that particular moment in time, was foundering due to lack of members - and the prospect of an open-ended sojourn in this city felt like entering a creative coma. Calgary has wealth, and sometimes the City or the province throws some cash at the Arts, but generally, they waste arts funding on nonsense like the "Movement Movement" (a pun, get it?), or headlining crap like the Device to Root Out Evil, or else Cowboy art, like statues of horses or Indians or whatever, which is generally realist but somehow not my cup of tea. Nothing for the aspiring figure artist, and damn little for the aspiring artist in general (conceptual artists notwithstanding). For myself, the resources for study are few, and the opportunities to show, or to teach, or generally to make my mark remain for me to create.

So after two and a half months (during which I had exactly one session with a model), I was back in France - in Paris this time. Back at Studio Escalier, and totally excited by the prospect of drawing in the Louvre, and working with Tim & Michelle. I wasn't sure what to expect from the drawing course, other than an intense focus on drawing and a bit of French art history. I expected to get my mind blown, which I had come to expect from them, but of course, I didn't know which direction it would get blown in, and I had no way of predicting how many drawings I would come out with, or of what quality. (One of my first questions to Michelle was along the lines of how many drawings can I expect to finish during the course - which, naturally, she could not answer.)

Upon arriving in Paris, and before the course started, I drew this piece at the Musee Guimet:


The Musee Guimet houses artifacts from Asia. I had visited the museum at the end of my previous workshop at Studio Escalier, and had fallen in love with this Feminine Divinity from Rajasthan, so I spent a Sunday afternoon (roughly 4 hours) drawing her. It was perfect timing: not only is the museum free on the first Sunday of the month, but the Metro station closest to the Musee Guimet (Iena) was scheduled to close for repairs the day after I did the drawing and wouldn't open again until well after I had left Paris. So, on February 6, I got in, got it done, and felt incredibly satisfied!

After that, I drew some block-ins of the morceaux de reception (the pieces created by artists invited into the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and simultaneously on block-ins of the model we had. For some reason - nerves, ego, depressed mood - I never drew at my best in the studio, although, thankfully, I was able to produce a few nice pieces at the Louvre. (I spoke to Tim & Michelle about this, but they were at a loss to explain it; I now put it down to wanting to impress them instead of wanting to explore drawing and be willing to fail forward.)

Happily, I did record the moment I "got it":
[insert photo]

I was blithely drawing this statue, and not doing too terribly well at it (as you can see), then I looked at what I had done and said to myself, No! That's not what the figure is doing at all! It's more like this - then proceeded to draw the 'correct' version to the right.

And there was no stopping me after that!

(Except, as I mentioned, in the studio...)

Bolstered by my newfound progress, I produced half a dozen decent drawings, of which the following are just two:


River God

Vulcan