Buttnekkiddoodles

OK, it’s now been just over two weeks since I gave a drawing demo at The Norman Rockwell Museum. I highly recommend dropping in if you find yourself in western Massachusetts. My contact there was the engaging and way gracious Tom Daly, the NR Museum’s curator of education. Tom, a blast to hang with, hails from the area, is quite the historical resource about the region and recalls seeing the elderly Norman as he trekked about.

    The Museum building, designed by Robert Stern, is handsomely layed out in a wooded area with ample parking about a 2 mile drive west of Stockbridge’s main drag. During the peak seasons for the museum, that would be during foliage, the skiing season, and summer, they really pack ’em in. I had missed the throngs by a couple weeks and found viewing the work comfortable and noncompetetive. Tom even provided me with a chair so I could sit and draw from the paintings at length. Did you get that? They actually encourage folks to really study the exhibits and draw from the work. I brought 2 sketch books with me; a 10″ x 7 1/2″ leather bound ruled journal and a 17″ x 11″ cloth bound ledger with prior entries from 1932 -1946. I love them old ledger books. God knows many of them are archivally challenged because they aren’t always 100% rag, but, they’re meant for linear clarity so they have a smooth surface and usually have some sizing or gelatin which partially seals the paper and means that ink stays pretty much where you put it. That is unless you’re using some of the solvent based markers that will penetrate the page giving you “ghost” images on the reverse side. I was drawing with ball point pens and gel pens and water based pigmented brush pens, drawing tools actually discouraged in some Museums and I don’t really want to mention a couple of those places even though I do still love the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute. Still draw on site when I visit. With the required pencil? Uhhhhh…….

    Anyway, the two head studies, first column third row and second column third row, were draw on the spot in the old ledger. You can see if you blow ’em up that I was able to get crisp lines and edges as well as hazy tones by smearing the inks before they set up. The 3 drawings, third column first row, third column third row, and first column fourth row, were drawn in the newer journal. Nice enuff book and size, flexible leather cover, but the bleached white paper has  little or no sizing so it tends to wick the ink just enough that I don’t get quite as fine an edge and hampers my ability to smear the quickly absorbed ink.

    The other drawings in this post were draw on planes or in airports in route to the NRM or are studies for my paintings, some based on hands and figures of Norman’s. I like a number of his poses, postures, groupings, how objects like shoes, prevoiusly mentioned in another post, can feel so sculptural and how one can feel form and structure under clothes and skin. Sure, he made extensive use of photos,  but for that matter so have Degas, Picasso, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, combat artists, and truck loads of mid century book, magazine and pulp fiction illustrators. The NRM had an exhibit running of NR’s photos of himself and models acting out the scenarios for the paintings. He could be pretty faithful to some foto’s while taking liberties with others. The Museum’s extensive collection of photograhs, preparatory and finished drawings and paintings give real insght to his working methods as well as his capabilities which to this pair of eyes were considerable. He liked solidity and Mr. Bridgeman must of hammered on him sufficiently in those life drawing sessions at The Art Students League. It was NR after all who composed the images which brings me to the last image of this post. A figure drawing from a session at one of the area art centers where I drop in for open life drawing.

   Norman Rockwell was a narrative artist and as such everything about the people in his paintings, their postures, expressions, clothing and props, were all maipulated to convey the theme behind the image. At those life drawing sessions, I sit and watch, sometimes for more than 10 minutes, as some of those who attend the workshops look to get an interesting arrangement for the longer poses. Moving a spot light back and forth and back and…never minding the flock of fluorescent tubes overhead. Most agree that the quicker the pose the more the model is capable of holding something athletic and dynamic. Now static or “quiet”, contemplative poses can be just as interesting, no? In fact, getting the right balance, sense of weight, contraposto and subtlety of a standing figure just so, so that it doesn’t come off wooden is hard. You know, that Apollonian thing. At rest but with latent energy and all the promise of action. Always found that challenging.

     Also, I’m one who subscribes to the belief that there are no bad poses, just bad drawings of poses. I show up, shut up, and just try to go to work. But, I do think there are such things as dumb arrangements and dumb drawings. Again the last drawing. I sat there wondering what in the world they were going for? The throned virginal and shrouded Fatima as apple offering temptress? Norman has meant a lot of things to a lot of folks; I get a little sticky from all the corn syrup. And boy howdy, would it have been fun if economics had forced his hand to wring out some greasy and sordid James Avatiesque pulpy noir covers. It didn’t. But spend time with a big body of his work and tell me you don’t come away with a sense of an intelligent guy,  with buckets of ability and a sense of humor, that honored his craft and pushed himself hard. A guy who just happened to make a couple handfuls of iconic images.

OK, so some days you walk into a life drawing session, maybe relaxed, maybe full of fire, sit down to draw and…”who the f*ck is noodlin’ on my sketchbook?” Even within the course of 3 hours, either Misters Jeckel or Hyde could wrestle away your crayon and push you off your bench.
In the first entry above, first row first column, the model, C, is full figured, very pale and somewhat like alabaster in that she seems to absorb light and seldom has very dark shadows. To make matters trickier, at the Palette and Chisel, the primary venue where I go to draw from the figure, there are scads of fluorescent lights which kill any dramatic chiarscuro. So with C I usually have 2 concerns. (I concede on trying to catch a facial likeness, as portraiture has never seemed to be my bag.) First, try to convey her sculptural, solid form while maintaining her feminine characteristics. Second, avoid overwhelming a translucent presence with tones that are too deep or harsh. Many times I draw her interior contours in grey to keep a tonal delicacy. If she has dark fabrics as a backdrop she becomes a fleshy lightbulb. On this occasion I did a countour drawing of her first with a bold-point, gel pen, some pentimenti, otherwise content with initial lines and proportions. All fine and good so far, then skin tones swept in with a light warm grey Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pen, used a cool grey PAP on the fabric between her feet and a medium grey for the draped crate she sits on to contrast with her thigh. Twenty five minutes, again, I don’t know if you’d recognize the drawing as C were she to pass you on the street but I can live with the effort. Glance to the right of this drawing, first row second column, or the one underneath that, second row second column, or below that, third row second column and you see things going haywire.
I also attend an open life drawing session elsewhere in Chicago where the model begins with gobs of 20 second and 40 second and 60 second poses. On and on this goes for the first 2 hours until the poses start slowing down to 15-20 minutes. I usually skulk into that joint with a sense of dread of facing my comeuppance. Yea, yea I know, it’s good exercise, good for the craft. Hey I draw on the bus and in public on a regular basis but I psych myself out for some reason at this place. And I’ve had some ego-bruising moments that reminded me of bad matches in high school wrestling where some muthafugga was filing my nose off on the mat. So the drawing at the top of the second column is a page where I’ve reworked a pair of 60 second poses that irked the daylights outta me. You can see a quick study of one of the artists in the group (whose drawings were kickin’ my ass) cause I needed a pause from all that tricky flesh. Later, when I was reviewing the days’ work I obliterated or reworked that and other pages by adding anatomy or wigs or tattooes or high heels or beards or text or just about anything that would make light of the carcrashes that had taken place during the sessions. The standing figure in the second row second column is five timid minutes worth of reworking areas for God knows what reason and stacking a torso on some stumpy little legs. I can’t seem to box in basic shapes or just allow the line to run freely. To the right of that drawing are a couple of 3 minute gesturals that I returned to play with during the model’s breaks, adding a barrel and bone studies to hide my misery.
But it’s the drawing at the bottom of the second column that really shows that at times, two minds are at work on the same page. I’m watching my tones there, I remember moving at a fair clip, quickly notching in some details, torso’s o.k., hands fine, fan and heater good, no fussing around but who stuck the shrunken head on while I went to the bathroom. And how about her left knee? I seem to remember thinking while I was drawing “no…that’s not quite right.” Things seem to be cool, then you’re going off the rails. I mean, it’s why we love drawing from life, no? Decision making with the clock ticking.
At some point, I’ll post a cluster of drawings I’ve done over the years while in transit. Till then, bon chance with yer doodles. Don.

This work spans 30 years of drawings. Most of the drawings were completed in the last 8 years and are mostly in ink.