So Joe Parks figure drawing class this past Tuesday was awesome. I was originally going to go back into these drawings and touch them up... But I have far too much other stuff on my plate to spend an hour reworking life drawings. I mean, I want my drawings to have more 'Finish' and finesse; but I have always kept my gesture drawings pretty much free from touch ups. I've made small changes from time to time, but rarely more than one or two lines.

But... We did a lot of "two-pose narrative storytelling". Which is a fancy way of saying that the model showed us where the two poses were going to be so that we could get them to interact, and change them if need be. And Joe at one point during the day said that we could be free to interpret the poses... and if anyone knows anything about how I draw gestures... I attempt to interpret and exaggerate the pose. And, man oh man. This was a brilliant exercise. I had so much fun; I was grinning ear to ear by the end.



Keep rockin, friends.

I will soon photograph and upload a large part of the sketchbook that I recently completed.
I think I'll upload it in chunks to keep it from being a humongous post and so that I can update the blog more regularly... I'd like to update regularly with up to date drawings but it is hard to find the time to photograph, edit and post images after I get home close to midnight most nights.


Wow. I don't mean to pat myself on the back or anything. But I feel as if I've learned a lot from these paintings. Firstly about the way I think, and secondly but certainly no less I've learned about the craft of creativity. I mean walking in I had no idea what I was doing I just knew that this was something that I wanted to do. And here I am, still knowing nothing about how colors work, or the proper way of doing things and I'm learning how to make choices. It may not be the fastest way to learn how to do things, but it is so very rewarding. I mean, in my free time... that is generally between the hours of 11pm and 3am. And between the hours of 6am and 11am I get home; I'm tired and cranky and... I want to be creative.

So because my workspace doesn't change I can leave my painting area (clean-ish) but intact and just hop in the chair, flip on my hyperaggressive overhead light... look in the mirror. And start doing something that less than a month ago I didn't even know what doing it was supposed to feel like; and here it is now one of the more rewarding aspects of my life.

Don't get me wrong. Some nights, oh man.... last night was a doozy... I get home. I've been working all day and... my back is sore, my hand is cramped, I'm exhausted... I just spent an hour next to a smelly homeless guy on the ttc... and I really don't want to paint.

But sometimes, most times, the simple act of sitting down at my desk where my paints are is enough to make me want to be creative. And the worst and best part about this for me is that hours can go by like water for me as soon as I start working creatively.

Be forewarned: this is a text heavy post.

I believe that music and poetry and literature and dance and visual art and acting and science and everything that require creative and critical leaps of logic are extremely closely related. And, I find it almost funny how they also share the same terminology sometimes. And, in my head; and, in my sketchbook, I write notes to myself. Oftentimes this refers to music because I find that the closest association to the creation of visual art.


And the funny thing is they share so much wonderful terminology:

• Rhythm
• Structure
• Tone
• Harmony
• Repetition
  
• et cetera

And the funny thing is is the vocabulary that describes music is wonderfully expressive:

• Crescendo
• Drone
• Dissonance
• Melody
• Staccato
• et cetera

Isn't it just lovely how they correlate?

So when I draw... I try and draw the music, if that makes any sense whatsoever to anyone aside from myself.

And I love to dissect terms and apply them abstractly to other parts of my understanding of the world; especially if I have no other sympathetic words at my disposal, or if that application creates an interesting thought relationship that I can attempt to explore.

So;

phrase: Everyone knows what a phrase is, but it also applies to music (Music. a division of a composition, commonly a passage of four or eight measures, forming part of a period. (dictionary.com)) and dance (Dance. a sequence of motions making up part of a choreographic pattern.(dictionary.com). So... can't it apply to the description of visual art? The phrase in dance is essentially a division with time, or step count acting as the bounding markers. The phrase in music is again bounded by time, but due to the formal method of musical notation it can be divided into measures (of time). So, to me this means that in visual art this can apply to a fragment of a larger composition. However I believe that, just as in music and dance not every random selection of notes or motions will make sense, not every random fragment of an image is a phrase. Therefore a phrase in terms of visual art, to me, applies to a composition within a larger composition...

Everything applies across all mediums.



Draw music.


The second thing that I try and draw. Is I try and draw movement. This is slightly less abstract because movement is seen, and so it can be visually analyzed. You can describe it in vectors, in left, right, up or down. But... it is a little more complex than that. Because you need to give the viewer a starting point and a finish line... sort of.

I mean... movement is distance over time. How do you get time in a still image? Well... simple really. Give the eye places to stop. You will create a visual beat. So the speed of the movement is the amount of space you cover over a visual beat. Yeah. I try and draw movement.

I'll try and describe this more later, but I think I covered the gist of it.

This painting was the most challenging one yet. It fought me tooth and nail every inch of the way. Painting is hard, but I think I love it.

Yeah. I'm having fun painting. For some reason my camera pulled the hue of the blue waaaay up.