(Starting in a week, you can be doing an anatomy for artists class with me for 11 weeks at the Avenue Road Arts School, on Friday afternoons. More details here - sign up fast for that.
If you've never done any figure drawing and want to try it out, I'm teaching an 11-week intro class there on Wednesday evenings, also starting in about a week. Details on that here. Better act right now...)
On the Tuesday I went to the AGO for some morning drawing as well. Jacqueline was working that day. Some of their sessions are held in their gallery spaces, which limits the materials allowed to graphite. The session was in the studio where there is a large Franz Kline painting on the back wall. Seeing Kline's bold black and white brushwork takes me back to school at Arts' Sake, and the gusto and energy of mark-making that many of my teachers there pointed to, using abstract expressionists as exemplars.
Working with soft graphite on small paper it is harder to achieve that kind of boldness, and my interest was in the play of light and shadow on Jacqueline's forms, and establishing a likeness. Still, having the Kline there made me dig a little deeper for marks to use.
For me, graphite is challenging that way; I can get fine--grained gradients of light/dark, but it mostly lacks the bottom end of dark values.
All of these are on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson XL Drawing paper, using soft (8B) graphite woodless pencils.
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