Studio Escalier Workshop Day 8

tonal study, pencil on paper, 6 hours

(detail of above)

Day 8 of my workshop at Studio Escalier in Paris.

This is a drawing of a 6-hour pose. Yesterday for the first half I focused on the inner movement curves, the block-in, and finally the detailed contour. Tim and Michelle are teaching us to think of the contour three-dimensionally. So I am thinking of the contour wrapping around the body, moving towards and away from me.

I've taken my drawing into Adobe Illustrator and used the software to recreated my original inner movement curves to diagram the process I am learning:

As Tim teaches the technique, we draw three interrelated movements:

We start with the theme, which is the fundamental inner movement curve. The theme starts at the crown of the head, and flows down the center line of the face, down to the big toe of the standing leg, or the leg holding the most weight.

This is a precise curve, it describes specific points on the body and the relationships between these points. (In contrast to simply "expressing" the movement. This is a record of what we see and know about the body, it's not exaggeration or expressionism.)

The second line we draw (above) is the countertheme - the orange line. It's a secondary inner movement curve that travels from the top of the head, wrapping around the body the opposite direction and down the non-standing leg.


Third, we draw the ornament (above). This is the third interrelated movement. As with the theme and countertheme, the ornament wraps around the forms, moving side to side and back to front.

All of the curves wrap around the body three dimensionally. Above is the same countertheme curve, but I've created dotted segments to show where I am imagining it wrapping around the back side of the form. (I do not modify the figure to fit these curves, it's amazing the interrelations it's possible to see once you start looking this way.)

Above I've shown how adding more and more interrelated movement curves begins to describe the form. As I get more and more detailed with my contour line, I can see how every form on the body follows this wrapping helix pattern.

It's interesting to recreate the curves in Adobe Illustrator. The program creates Bezier curves that have a certain mathematical tensile force, and you have to learn to manipulate them to create flowing curves without awkward bends. The behavior of of Bezier curves is amazingly conducive to the Inner Movement Curves - it was shockingly easy to recreate the curves with the software. I have a feeling there is an implicit relationship between the cohesive, efficient, and functional forms of the body and mathematical curves.

Update added 5/03/08
Bezier was a 20th century French draftsman! Wikipedia has a great entry on Bezier curves, and near the bottom of the page you can see elegant animations for how Bezier curves are calculated.

After spending so much time on the contour, I moved on to the tonal value shading. I was surprised how quickly the value study progressed. I think learning the contour with this method gives me a deep understanding of the three dimensional figure, so flowing the light across the form is easier.

I'll end with a quote from Tim:

"I think the idea of theme, countertheme and ornament has the power to revolutionize the way you think about the figurative subject, to really marry your eye to your gut to your mind to your hand, and liberate your imagination."

I agree.

Studio Escalier - Drawing Movement

Afternoon Pose, pencil on paper

I'm practicing drawings based on the "inner movement curve" method in my class at Studio Escalier, and today I really felt something click.

This drawing feels more solid, more believable than my previous drawings. I feel like I am suddenly seeing the relationships between all the parts as a whole, and feeling the three dimensionality of the pose. It has everything to do with what I studied with Ted Seth Jacobs, but Tim Stotz's emphasis on movement is making Ted's teachings come together for me. (Tim was a student of Ted's, so no wonder).

The drawing above started with this drawing of the interior lines of movement:

Afternoon Pose, Phase I

The first gesture lines aren't much to look at. In fact they look somewhat random and loosey-goosey. But it's actually quite precise. They correspond to very specific points I see on the body - and more importantly, the relationship between those points.

Next I started fleshing out the drawing, starting with the legs and drawing more and more inner movement curves to create the full line drawing. The outside curve of the knee has everything to do with the interior angle of the ankle. Everything wraps around and appears again in a logical place.

Afternoon Pose, Phase II

Once I started seeing all the relationships it became like a treasure hunt to find more. They are everywhere, all the way out to the fingertips and I am sure down to the tiniest tissue structures.

Afternoon Pose, Phase III, final

In contrast, this is the drawing I did in the morning, when I was really struggling with the concept. I think you can see it does not have the same energy as the afternoon drawing.

Morning Pose

Studio Escalier has arranged several evenings for us to draw at the Louvre from the sculpture gallery. Tonight was the first night, and it was incredibly exciting to see all the sculptures so powerfully describing the same concepts we have been studying.

This is my drawing of a 30-inch marble sculpture by Dumont, done in 1712. It was in a room full of similar small-scale sculptures, which Tim explained were the final thesis projects which students of the 18th century French sculpture academy had to submit in order to graduate and go on to be professional sculptors. These small works represent the pinnacle of the art of figurative sculpture.

The figure has a clenched fist thrust directly at me... I don't know why I choose such a difficult view. But it made me interested to do more hand studies.

By the way, the Louvre website is amazing. I just found out you can browse the entire collection, room by room. I found the room we were drawing in today here.

Photos of the Louvre Pyramid

See my photos of the Louvre at dusk

Studio Escalier Drawing Workshop

Pencil on paper, 2 hours

Pencil on paper, 5 minutes

These are a couple of my first drawings done at Studio Escalier in Paris this week.

Tim Stotz has us focusing on "inner movement curves" to establish the proportions, instead of using the straight-line block in. Also, we are doing 5-minute to 2-hour drawings. Both are very foreign to me after a year if doing 20-40-hour block-in drawings. But it's a good approach for me to practice and I'm enjoying a more responsive and less analytical way to draw.

Paris Photos

See photos of my walk to school and the art studio.

See photos of my perfect day Saturday 4/19, walking around Paris.

Paris! A tale of ethernet cables and "veau"....

I arrived yesterday and until a few hours ago it was mostly tedious and boring, dealing with getting a functioning local cellphone and accessing the internet in my apartment which both required trips to several locations in the city to buy wires (NEVER travel without an ethernet cable!!!) and special parts to make the phone work. I learned that the French word for ethernet cord is......... "ethernet cord". On the plus side, it gave me many opportunities to parle en francaise with the natives, and everyone replies to me in French, so even though I never learned any grammar and have forgotten what miserable shreds of tense conjugation I once had, I think I am successfully speaking French.

There were a few brief moments last night and today when I felt like I was in Paris - crossing the Seine over an uplit bridge as I walked home after dark last night, catching my first glimpse of that special tower which holds rank as the world's favorite keychain fob. But mainly it's been a maze of hunting down the closest Monoprix grocery store and returning to my apartment to repeatedly enter a 30-digit passcode into what I have come to believe is an imaginary "wireless" connection. Thus the cord.

But eventually I got myself trussed safely back into the various virtual networks I need to feel sane (and connected to my painfully far away husband) and finally I was able to relax and start feeling the Paris vibe.

And now I'd like to sing the praises of Monoprix.... a store that is the prettiest, most compact and city-fied Walmart you'll every see. I bought a travel sewing kit, asparagus, kelloggs brand cereal, a grid-ruled notebook, proscuitto, and a polka dot scarf, among other things. If I were so inclined I also could have bought baby girl dresses, plastic picnic ware, a sack of croissants, and the entire Neutrogena line of skin care products. I restrained myself, at least for now.

When the groceries were put away in my microscopic fridge I went to a cafe around the corner for dinner and and despite the goofy dancing tomato logo on the awning the food was divine: I had "veau" which I need to look up because I don't even know what kind of meat I was eating, but it was sooo good, tender meat on a t-bone with a creamy sauce. Had that along with a carafe du vin bordeaux and finished it all off with mousse au chocolat which unexpectedly had little chips all over the top which at first I thought were chopped nuts but turned out to TOFFEE and wow... if there is ever a proper topping for chocolate mousse it is little bits of toffee.

So, now I feel like I am here :)

Oh, and the apartment I rented is just lovely - artsy and quirky as only the french can manage, the owner has decorated with tiny antique chests and huge gold-framed mirrors paired with modern reflective tile in the bathroom and kitchen, with pickled white hardwood floors throughout. Very cute, very eclectic. Buddahs and framed oil paintings and weird little lamps on doilies abound. And a tiny 6-inch window above the bed, just big enough to crack open and let in a tiny whiff of damp Paris nighttime air, the best air on the planet in my humble opinion.

Belgrave Ave Plein Air SOLD

oil on panel 5 x 7 inches

Today my friend Janell and I set up for side-by-side plein air painting. We painted in the neighborhood up the hill from my house, called Ashbury Heights. This yellow house sits on a sharp corner, where one fork of the street goes downhill and one goes uphill. My favorite part of the composition is the shadow the streetlamp cast on the pavement.

The weather here was amazing today, almost 80 degrees and clear skies, which is very unusual for us this time of year. Unfortunately, the 10-day weather.com report for Paris predicts clouds, showers and high-50's there for the foreseeable future. So my plein air painting opportunities may be limited!

Michael Grimaldi: Final Notes

I've already summarized the workshop with Michael Grimaldi, but I also wanted to record some of my notes from the class:

Artists Referenced

The New Objectivists
Menzel, Kollowitz - responses to the breaking down of Victorian society because of WWI and the sinking of the Titanic. In these extreme situations, codes of chivalry and honor were broken and violated the previous conception of human dignity.

Ernest Meissonier
Successful artist of the late 19th century. Fell out of favor because his paintings came to represent something people no longer believed in.

Edwin Dickenson

Jules Bastien-Lepage

Gerard Richter

Antonio Lopez Garcia

Ann Gale
We talked about the current exhibit on view at Hacket Freedman here in San Francisco. I asked for Michael's interpretation for how it's possible to see such amazing drawing ability in Ann Gale's work when it's impossible to see any edges - all the shapes are dissolved, so I can't understand how I can feel so moved by the drawing. What is drawing without edges and shape, especially when her values and hues are so compressed? Michael feels that it's because her proportion of masses are so accurate - for example the way the hands fall in the lap of a figure so convincingly. He says her precision of drawing is like Sargent, where the actual strokes seem abstract but our brains complete even the edges that aren't delineated.

Book Recommendation
The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed


On Painting
Paint large to small, dark to light. Painting is stacking smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter shapes. Capture variations of hue, value and chroma, faceting as we move across the form.

Start in 2 dimensions - block in the color with faceted patches of paint like we block in the drawing. Slowly transition into 3 dimensional form.

Anything we know use to confirm what we see.

All of our decisions are optical i.e., paint what you see, not what you think you know. However, we can't paint what we don't know to look for.

Even when focusing on one particular area, don't zone in, look at everything.

"You don't finish a painting, a painting finishes you."

(As always, these are my interpretations of Michael's words, and I can't say if he would agree with everything as I have written it here.)

Michael Grimaldi Workshop: "Curiosity"

Melissa Phase III
11 x 14
Oil on panel
Final painting

Melissa Phase III
11 x 14
Oil on panel
Color underpainting continued

Melissa Phase II
11 x 14
Oil on panel
Color underpainting

Melissa Phase I
11 x 14
Oil on panel
Graphic composition in neutral values

Today was the last day of my two-week workshop with Michael Grimaldi. I learned so much, even though after the long workshops with Ted it felt incredibly rushed to study for just two weeks. Watching Michael's demonstrations and talking with him about art made for an amazing experience.

Michael's favorite word is "curiosity". He feels an artist must be truly curious to evolve, and must be interested enough to pursue ideas, technique and personal expression in whatever direction moves us. He has no adherence to "the way to paint" and encourages students to develop their own methods. He references artists and art movements and films and philosophers constantly.

I am not very happy with my final painting. Today, the last day, I was rushing to complete the "final pass" of the painting, and to my dismay I find after looking at the photos of the stages that I like earlier versions better. But Michael's process and technique are with me, and I'm looking forward to doing a series of painting this summer to try to get better at the technique.

Next Tuesday I fly to London, and Thursday I take the Chunnel to Paris! I'll have my laptop and will be bloggiing while I study with Studio Escalier, so stay tuned. (Please sign up for my RSS feed or email notifications in the upper right column on this page to be notified when I update my blog.)

At Studio Escalier we will be working in the historic studio of the Romantic painter Gericault. When I was a student in Paris in 1992, I had a free pass to the major art museums of Paris (that's France for you - "les etudients des beaux arts" are allowed in museums for FREE!). So I would jump off the bus on my way home outside the Louvre, cut the long line of tourists, and go straight to my favorite paintings whenever I wanted. Gericault's Raft of the Medusa was one of my favorites, and I often went to the Louvre just to see it.

If I could have known that 15 years later I would be returning to Paris to study figure drawing in Gericault's very own studio I would not have believed it.

Michael Grimaldi Workshop: "Tight"

11 x 14
charcoal on gessoed panel

With the method Grimaldi is teaching us, this block-in line drawing is done in vine charcoal directly on the canvas panel, based on the thumbnails we composed yesterday. Eventually we'll do the final painting directly over our charcoal line drawing.

My favorite Grimaldi quote so far:
"The goal is to be tight, that's what we're going for. What we are not going for is to be uptight."

I really like that. Made me think a lot about that word, "tight".

"Tight" was the worst thing you could call an artist or a piece of art in my art school. "Don't be tight" and "loosen up" were the phrases drilled into us, and then we drilled them into each other. If you really hated someone's artwork, you'd say they were "too tight"; it was the most cutting critique.

It's interesting to now be part of an art world where it's ok to be "tight". The idea is that by practicing being precise and highly controlled, you learn to see the most subtle variations of value, color, form and proportion with a high degree of sensitivity - and you can always loosen up later. But the horror story repeated over and over back in my art school days was that if you practiced being tight you risked being unable to ever loosen up again. It reminds me of what mothers tell their children: "Don't make that face or it might get stuck like that."

I still don't know where I stand on it. I love seeing the expressive hand of the artist, the juicy brushstrokes and scritchy scribbles. I also love refined sensitivity and precision. I like to think there can be a happy marriage of the two. Tight but not uptight.

Michael Grimaldi: Portrait Painting Workshop

Portrait Study
charcoal and graphite on paper
about 4 x 4 inches

Two years ago, in Summer 2006, I set up an art studio in my loft, hired a series of models for a few weeks and started figure painting after nearly a decade away from art.

I was totally out of touch with the art world, and so I started poking around on the internet to see if any US galleries were showing figurative/realist work.

I immediately found Arcadia gallery in New York and was inspired, intimidated, and fascinated by the amazing work I found there. The painting "Nude with Tattoo" by Michael Grimaldi in particular stood out to me, and so I Googled his name to find out more about the artist.

One of the first search results was for a workshop Grimaldi had taught right here in my own back yard at Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier... but I had just missed his workshop by a few weeks! The BACAA web site said Grimaldi wouldn't be returning until 2008, so I had nearly two years to wait for his return.

In the meantime I looked around the BACAA web site and was amazed by all the incredible artists teaching there. So I signed up for a March 2007 workshop taught by Juliette Aristides, and began a new era of my art life. (You can read my blog post about that workshop with Juliette here.) I have since spent the last 14 months taking workshops with Juliette, Dan Thompson, and Ted Seth Jacobs.

Now, this week, the Michael Grimaldi 2008 workshop I have waited so long for has begun! The class is portrait painting, and we are starting with small thumbnail sketches to work out the composition and design of the final painting. Tomorrow I'll start blocking out the design and major proportions on my canvas. (The above sketches are charcoal on paper, each just a few inches.)

FRANCE
Two weeks from today I fly to France for a 3 week workshop at Studio Escalier. After the class Nowell is joining me and we'll spend another 3 weeks just hanging out in Paris. I'll be bringing my new pochade box, so watch for upcoming plein air oil sketches of Paris!

JULIETTE'S BOOK: CLASSICAL PAINTING ATELIER
Juliette Aristides' new book, Classical Painting Atelier has just been released and I just received my pre-ordered copy from Amazon today! I plan to spend the next couple hours poring over it before bed. From a quick peek it looks like a gorgeous follow-up to her first book, Classical Drawing Atelier. These are incredibly inspiring books, with beautiful reproductions by both classical and contemporary realist artists. I highly recommend them both for any art lover.