Month: April 2009

Here are some examples of my attempts to draw a figure within a minute, attempts to dash onto paper a man or woman’s potential without much self-

awareness or reservation. I am primarily using line to draw the contour of the form, at the suggestion of Bob Cenedella, though I times my hand wonders back toward old habits by working into the figure.

After my morning class at the Art Students League, I usually walk up to the Met to look at and draw from their collection. When I asked my teacher, Jane Morris Pack from the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts what I should look for as I am going through the galleries of the museum, she responded with the following:

In terms of your wanderings in the Met, I think that you should draw whatever gets your attention and in that way start to accumulate a sketch book of ideas that intrigue you.  They might be things that are technically interesting and they might be things that evoke emotional responses. Most of the time we are not stuck for ways to improve our technique but we are seeking ways to improve our tastes, our refinement of our vision and a way to express our inner self. You can figure out more about yourself by discovering what you are interested in.  When we are young that interest is fairly shallow and often trite but it deepens into something more subtle if we pay attention to what catches us and then try to explore those areas.  You may discover a whole new genre of art which has been thus far unknown to you but which speaks to you like no other.  You won’t know until you’re exposed to it. So without any restrictions I would just wander until something grabbed me.

With this in mind, I have been getting enthusiastically lost in one of the world’s great museums. Here is a bit of what I have found.

These sketches have been pulled out of a growing number of drawings made of Still Lifes over the last three months. They have become a regular excersise for me, mostly as studies of light and form. The subjects vary

from commonplace objects as they were found, often left in place absentmindedly to more careful arrangements.

These drawings were made over the past 6 months. Some are notes made from a lecture series given by Robert Beverly Hale. Others are copied from plates by the German, Dr. Richer.