Monday, September 30, 2013

Drawing lessons in Amsterdam, The importance of Method

During this post about the drawing classes I offer in the center of Amsterdam, I would like to describe in very brief detail the importance of method in learning art, and describe the alternative results that can be obtained.

Perhaps I can relate to this closely not due to my drawing lessons, but because of another passion in my life, which is to play guitar.

I have been playing for a long time, and after over a decade I have certain dexterity with my fingers, as well as what seems to be a more or less innate ability to hear things correctly.  This last factor made me never look for musical education or method.  I would listen to songs I liked and learned to play them, having lots of fun in the process and laughing at friends of mine who would attend guitar lessons.

Proper art lessons back then seemed like the most boring and pointless thing.  They took away the spontaneity and turned this fun hobby into a boring methodical activity.  They introduced effort and consistency into something that I though should be loose and organic.

This is very often the felling we have about drawing lessons and how art should be done.

In fact for some time my natural ear and enthusiasm made it so that I was ahead of all these guys taking endless lessons and learning boring scales and other such things.  But then something funny started to happen.  The guys taking consistent lessons had built a huge strong foundation and when the time came, their skills skyrocketed, while my playing remained sloppy and repetitive.

It hurts me to say it but this was over 15 years ago, and though my guitar skills have improved dramatically since then, I cannot compete with someone who learned and mastered the principles such as scales, correct picking technique, etc. 

Such is the case with drawing lessons and art education in general.  You can wing it up to a certain level but unless you learn the principles and learn them well, you will plateau for lack of knowledge if nothing else.

As a concrete example of what this means during drawing and painting, we can take portraits.  It is indeed possible to draw and paint faces without any knowledge of anatomy, and to be fair the results may end up quite OK.  However, quite OK is not good enough and if you want your portraits to acquire that clean impressive result, learning anatomy and formal portraiture methods is the only way to go.

There is a distinct look and feel to a portrait made by someone with thorough academic drawing education.  The knowledge of line, value, planes and anatomy is unmistakable.  It simply comes through.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that, deep knowledge of your subject's construction will guide your eye into trying to find landmarks that are all but invisible to the untrained eye.

During art history the way drawing lessons has been approached has changed dramatically and shifted from masters who would argue you should be able to draw from knowledge as opposed to observation, and then back.  The old masters would be able to construct bodies and faces due to their very deep knowledge of anatomy, while the John Singer Sargents of this world would argue that the less you knew about the subject, the better off you were, relying only on visual perception.

This last tendency probably arose from the realization that you could never deeply know all subjects you wanted to paint, and while old masters limited themselves to drawing few subject matters, the new ones wanted broader subjects.  Hence reliance on principles of observation was a better base.

Nowadays things couldn't be more divided, with illustrators and digital concept artists relying on their knowledge and imagination, and classical atelier artists doing the opposite, and going visual, taking all their cues from the real world.

My personal take, and one I try to advocate during my Amsterdam drawing classes, is to learn the principles and then deepen your knowledge on subjects for which your time, interest or technical skills allow.  The human face and body would be examples where your knowledge must be deep because of the innate ability we have at perceiving inaccuracies in these subjects. All others subjects can begin with observational approaches which may become deeper if you so choose.

For what it's worht!


Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Drawing Lessons in Amstedam, Visit to the MBA Lyon

During my last holiday to France I had the chance to visit the museum of beaux arts in Lyon France and had a look at some of the most amazing paintings and drawings I've seen before.

As I mentioned in some of my previous posts, part of your drawing lessons and painting lessons homework should always be to visit museums and develop an eye for the art you're observing.  Learning to draw and paint is first of all learning to see.  Once that part is covered you can then start to grapple with using the medium of your choice to show the world what you are personally perceiving.

So on the practical side, how it is that I try to see a work of art?  First comes trying to absorb the whole.  The big skeleton of the picture.  I want to understand in very broad terms what the composition is doing.  You can almost imagine you are looking at a black and white postage stamp instead of the full size picture.  All the detail and color are gone and you're left with the most basic structure.

 In drawing lessons and painting lessons, composition is usually a topic left for last, because of its great complexity.  However I believe it's easier to break it down and start dealing with it's basics from the begining.  This is something I try to do in my lessons in Amsterdam.

The second thing that interests me is the use of color and how they achieve harmony in the light.  I don't memorize but constant looking begins to give you a feel for colors that create beautiful harmonies.

As this becomes clear and I have a grasp of the composition and color harmony, I want to then know how the execution was done.  I want to see the kind of brushwork that the painter used, and especially how he or she handled the edges in the painting, which are a big element that separates the amateur from the professional.

As for what I found on the museum that caught my eye, the piece I was most impressed with, ironically was a wooden sculpture of a court jester that was so realistic in it's carvign and posture that you couldn't help but expect it to jump to life at any second.

On the painting side of things, there was a large canvas of two women reading in a darkened room by Fantin Latour which was for me the greatest masterpiece in the collection. The composition, execution and play with light where absolutely masterful.