Oh dear! My last post seems to have been two months ago! A lot has changed in those two months-- I live in a new house now in Arlington and I am 25 now and I quit one of my jobs and I went to Ithaca and came back and I started a new art class.
It is that last one I want to write more about-- my class is called Drawing for Illustrators and is the next course in the sequence towards my Illustration Certificate from the SMFA. It is a crash course in how to draw everything. We started with basic three dimensional shapes-- ping pong balls, wooden blocks and cylinders, then moved on to faces, eyes, shading, hands, and we will soon be doing fabric, the figure, and more. We spend about half of our time in the classroom studying from copy plates or still life setups and half of our time at the Museum of Fine Arts drawing from statues and paintings.
I am surprising myself by really enjoying the copy plates because in every other art class I've ever taken, even waaaay back in middle school, I have always detested copying things. In seventh grade, a substitute art teacher gave us a packet of drawings to copy and instead of copying the drawings, I wrote her a long note about why copying things wasn't art or wasn't creative or was not worth my time, or something like that. She wrote me back a note about how no, copying things is a really useful tool as an artist and I should copy things. Her note did not convince 12-year-old me and I probably failed the assignment, but I didn't care because righteous outrage against The Man.
In eighth grade, we had an assignment to draw an oil pastel self portrait based on a photo that our teacher took in class and then for the background, we had to do a copy of a famous painting-- as though we had stuck ourselves in a painting. 13-year-old me again was outraged at being asked to copy another artist's painting (and working from a photo rather than the mirror?! All wrong!) and so to deftly avoid copying another artist's work, I chose to put my self portrait in an Ad Reinhardt painting. He was an abstract painter who painted a lot of solid black canvases, or grids of dark grey and black squares. Most of the rest of my class did Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was like, "Van Gogh is so overdone" while I filled in my grid of abstract black squares." (Now Van Gogh is one of my favorites though).
In my high school, I avoided art classes until my senior year and instead took classes at the Community School of Music and Art to build up a portfolio because I was a big art snob, basically. The studio art classes at my high school had the reputation of being a big joke that people just took to get their art credit out of the way and I did not care to be around that atmosphere (cough*art snob*cough). I did however take AP Art my senior year which included all the creative problem solving and self expression I had ever dreamed of! I was also taking a drawing class alongside it where I encountered, you guessed it: copying things. "Aaargh! Copying things!" 17-year-old me lamented, but I plugged through packets and packets of pictures of bones to copy. I got a 2 on the AP Art portfolio review. You don't have to be familiar with the AP grading system to know that 2 is a terrible score. I doubt it was related to copying things though.
In college, we mostly drew from life, but there was some copying involved. We got a book of master sketches and copied things from it every week. We did Da Vincis and Michelangelos and all those Italian guys and I didn't hate them as much as I used to, I just found them boring and I was really impatient about it. I have fond memories of 21-year-old me doing master copies from this book while watching the Colbert Report with my friends at their house during my last semester of college.
So basically, I have never liked copying things ever, which is why I am so deeply and pleasantly surprised by this class! More than half the class consists of master copies and I really, really like it! I am finding it really kind of meditative and zen. I get so focussed and calm while I do these drawings! It is incredible! I think I have arrived at a place where I understand the lessons to be learned from copying other people's work (because you can never make it an exact copy, you are bringing your own eye and your own hand to it, you're not a machine. The practice can only help you). And Da Vinci for example, studied cadavers and understood that every shape your body makes is because of the muscles and the bones underneath and how they fit together and in fact, copying his work will make you a better figure drawer than drawing a living person because he knew what was under the surface and all of that information is in every line he put down and copying his drawings teaches you to see that way because drawing is seeing.
However, I do not think that I was wrong at earlier stages of my life. I think that developmentally, as a human and an artist, I had to go and figure out what I wanted to do before I would arrive at a place where I wanted to be learning these lessons. I guess 25-year-old me wants to learn these lessons. I needed to experiment and gather my own ideas about drawing first. The time is now right and I am speaking the same language as the copy plates.
The darker image in all of these photos is the copy plate,
the lighter pencil sketch is what I did.
The sketches below are Roman statues from the MFA.
