3rd entry for May 3, 2015

The top-most study here was the point at which my efforts to tune out the improv music at the Jam Factory Collective session snapped*. After struggling to make connected lines of Denis' body, I started scrawling and generally attacking the page with pens and a brushpen.
Jason Kenemy's music was shifting and polyrhythmic. I could have spent an intersting hour or two drawing my response to his music with no model. Drawing Denis as I'm accustomed has a different set of slower internal rhythms and would have been fine on its own as well. Trying to do those simultaneously just wasn't working, so I gave over to the music. For the two drawings after that, I was using big sticks of graphite - often held `mitt' style in my fist, to put bold scrawly lines in keeping with the music's tempos.
After that I was able to be more loose and free about the drawing. That I feel is ultimately a good thing. The session was like an art class where an obstacle to working on autopilot is thrown in. The upside is that I started getting a lot less precious about the drawing. So all whining aside, it was worthwhile.

* and I suspect, the most interesting drawn response I've done in a while, which I'm going to think about.

If you want to get a taste of Jason's music, you can hear some excerpts online. From the 2:00 mark on the 3rd "littleBits and piano" piece is where I was getting wound up; the moody electronics were fine - it was the piano atop it that kept jarring. The other three tracks underscore his adept and interesting playing. (just more interesting than I thought I wanted .)  2 hours of solo piano improv is pretty impressive.

The top two are on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Recycled Sketch paper. The lower four are on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson XL Watercolour paper, mostly using a big hexagonal Lyra water-soluble graphite crayon the thickest, least precious drawing tool I had.

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.

2nd Entry for Dec 6, 2010

These were also 3-minute poses, as I recall - 5 minutes at the outside. 
Perhaps because I was ready for it, the music playing that night was loud and dance-y, but I was able to work with it rather than trying to shut it out.  There were quite a number of tracks, like Gil Scott-Heron's "New York is Killing Me" that were new to me, but I liked enough to look up later.

4th entry for February 5, 2010

These were 20-minute poses, which finished up the evening. These studies fall within the range of post-worthy in my estimation, but aren't my strongest by far. In the last stretch of the evening was distracted by some information unrelated to drawing that a friend had shared earlier. So rather than getting lost in the drawing I was getting caught up in an internal dialogue, weighing responses and formulating an internal debate.

All of which was probably more an index that my focus was lagging as I got tired at the end of the evening's drawing. There are always thoughts to get occupied with if one wants to let them. In hindsight, I was a few days away from succumding to a nasty cold, so the first blush of that may have been manifesting in moodiness and diminished focus - that's usually how things go for me.

(when I'm in focus I like to try to `hear' snippets of music internally, or try to mentally replay a song that fits my mood. I far prefer that to an actual music player, as I find earphones or earbuds are intrusive and too direct. I think the process of summoning up some music works as a bit of a meditative device for me - it is something other than linear reasoning or concept formulation to fill my consciousness with.)

I think the feet are the redeeming feature in the reclining study. Because I usually work top-down drawing people, I often end up rushing through the feet. These I made a point of taking some time to focus on.

4th Entry for January 26, 2010

These are all 5-minute studies. For the 2nd half of the session B- was working with trapeze and an adjacent set of silks.

The music had changed over to some blues, I think. I believe the observation got a little more sharp, as I was more able to disregard the music. (The fact I can't remember it speaks volumes)

As you may gather from various entries, the tolerance for music while drawing is a narrow one for me - if it is too discordant, or the rhythm doesn't sync with mine, I have to slow down to tune it out. If I know it too well or it is too fast, I get caught up in its' rhythms and give over too much attention to listening to it, which either gets me sloppy or slows things down. If it is innocuous enough I can ignore it, but if it syncs with my mood - that is the sweetest feeling of all. But mood can change, and the music that matches it will too.

Brian Eno described part of his intent in making his Ambient Music series as making music that you can tune out if you wish to. I like music that fills that role while drawing.

Especially when drawing from life, because for me the short time spans require full presence and attention to get maximum results. Working on extended drawings is different - while spending a hunk of time building up an area of shading, listening to music is a valuable tool for keeping myself from rushing. It keeps the restless part of my mind occupied and diverted.

3rd Entry for January 26, 2010

These were 3-minute poses. B- has a big mane of hair, and along with the hoop there was the length of thick rope which she was playing with draping and twisting in various ways. A lot of busy elements to try to resolve in a short span of time. (but that's a part of the challenge that I like)

The music continued with the Tom Waits superset: a steady flow of songs from Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years. I really like Tom Waits' music, and the alternating melancholy and rambunctious carnival ambience of it suited the situation, but it was almost too much of a good thing. It isn't easy music to be settled to. Put that all together, and these aren't the most focussed batch of studies, but were among the more fun and exuberant ones to make. I'm not sure that that necessarily translated into the studies themselves.

For the full viewing effect of these posts, have a look while playing "More Than Rain" off of Frank's Wild Years.

2nd entry for December 15, 2009

These studies took 5 minutes each. They went fine as well.

Following the 5-minute poses, the radio station (Radio-Canada) switched from `easy' jazz to a concert of Prokofiev & Shostakovitch works. Good music, and lots of merit as music to listen to, but that was the problem.

For some reason that night, the music was like a jamming signal, and I just couldn't draw to it. The tempos were all wrong. It would be fast when I was trying to draw a long line, loud when I wanted soft, and the sonic textures just weren't working.

Sometimes I can shut that out as needed, but not that night. Every time I would get into a groove, the music would swell in some dramatic phrase that derailed my connection to the sketching.

It would have been interesting, I thought, to see what would have come out if I had run with that, rather than resist, but that wasn't the mood I was in that night. I wanted the familiar experience.

For me, I lean towards very un-challenging music to draw to. Give me an hour of baroque lute music and I'm happy. Dissonant music is much more hit and miss. Also stuff with big tempo or volume jumps are jarring. It would be different if the point was to sit and listen, and that is the trouble with some music - it uses means to grab one's attention that become an interruption.

For an hour onwards, the drawings were a write-off.