3rd Entry for Dec. 20, 2011

( The Toronto School of Art's Winter term starts next week.  I teach a portrait drawing class on Wednesday mornings. I also teach life drawing classes Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. There is still room in them, and you can get full registration info here.)


These are 20-minute studies of S-   . All are done with hard compressed Nobel charcoal.  The top and bottom ones are on 22 x 30" sheets of Maidstone 90 lb paper. The middle one is on a 21 x 29" sheet of german 'copperplate' rag paper that was on special at Woolfitt's.  That paper is good, but had a surface texture that was a little more coarse than I like. It is okay for rendering up a dramatic pose with strong contrast,  like S-   `thinker' pose here, but not so hot for fine details. I'm still preferring the finer-grained potential of the Maidstone paper.

I am happy with how the top drawing was evolving. For a little while there were some spare and gentle old-English carol-type instrumental pieces on the radio, and I was finding I was connecting to what I thought of as a 'Holbein' headspace, where the drawing strokes were simultaneously contour line and shading together, and the edges of shaded passages were doing a line's job, and articulating facial planes and light better than usual.
The music shifted into something more classically `challenging', and that dissipated some of that spell & focus. But it was a good night, all the same. 

Not that I don't like and respect challenging music. But for maximum drawing contemplation and focus, give me ambient music, madrigals and the like. Where speed and drama are the goal, the Sketchy's sessions disco soundtracks are fine. Plus dance music, for all the speed of the BPM rate, tends to a steady tempo and stays away from really discordant sounds. I find musical monotony and familiarity suits drawing for me as it can be tuned out when desired. I think of it as a bit like processing space on the computer; really focused drawing demands nearly all of my processing capacity, so having to acknowledge or react to outside sounds demands RAM I can't spare, and if I can't tune it out, then the drawing slows down.
But everyone is different, and what I speak of here is most relevant to the `time trial' situation of people posing for short intervals, where every minute counts and every slowdown can mean a limb not set down. Long poses are more like painting- music can enhance and sustain a mood for them, I believe.