Drawing tip: a thousand points of darkness

Seated woman in profile, red and white chalk

I have a really simple drawing tip for drawing on toned paper with two colors, but in order to explain it, I'll describe my whole drawing process from the beginning so you know what I'm talking about.  It's not as complicated as it appears.

1.  Start out with loose faint marks to position the drawing on the page correctly.  Try to get the whole subject on the paper.  You don't have to fill up the whole sheet of paper, but maximize your use of the paper.

2.  Make loose, faint construction lines of big general shapes:  oval for head, column for neck, etc.  Draw the movement of the shapes in faint lines:  for example, a kneeling figure is a big C.  I always think of this stage as the "Big Picture" phase, to remind myself to see the Big Picture.

3.  Indicate the midpoints of the body - synthesis of the pubis for the body; the eyes for the head.  Make sure that the various axis lines are correct:  the axis lines running through the eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, chin should be parallel.  Check the shoulder, breast, hip, knee and ankle axis lines - are they doing what the model is doing?

4.  Now you can start to draw:  contour lines, shadows, background

5.  Define the bony landmarks:  anatomical details are important.  Accentuate the big masses.  Find your darkest darks, being careful not to lose your mid tones.  Establish all the values from lightest light to darkest dark.  Don't overwork your surface!

6.  Hit the highlights - the last little touches of light that bring the whole drawing into dimensionality:  tip of the nose, forehead, eyelid, eyeball, lips, etc.  Don't over use your whites!

7.  OK, here's the tip.  Everybody knows about  highlights. There's also the inverse of highlights, but "dark lights" makes no sense, so I think of them as "a thousand points of darkness", although it's not a thousand, but more like a few dozen.  These are tiny little points of darkness, usually triangular, that occur when there are several intersecting shapes creating shadows.  You don't ever want to make stripes of shadow running down the arm or leg, whcih flattens the forms and wrecks everything.  Instead, create the illusion of shadows with a thousand points of darkness.

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The rejection du jour

Drawing of Woman's Head, Leonardo da Vinci

"If you're not getting a rejection a day you're not trying hard enough."*

Rejection is a built-in feature of an artist's life.  You get used to it.  Constructive criticism can be negative, which can be good for you.  In art school, constant critiques from your teachers give you a thicker skin, which you need to survive in the art world.  Critiques also teach you how to be a good critic of your own work.  Accurate self criticism has to be learned.  You have to learn to look at your own work with a cool, analytical mind, seeing it for exactly what it is.  "He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement," said Leonardo da Vinci.  "An artist who lacks the power of self-criticism accomplishes but little. It is good if your work stands higher than your own opinion of it; bad if it is on the same level. But it is a great disaster if your work stands lower than your judgment of it."

A blast of negative criticism can be the best thing that ever happened to you if you learn from it, saving yourself years of wandering around lost in the artistic desert.  "Nothing is more apt to deceive us than our own judgment of our work. We derive more benefit from having our faults pointed out by our enemies than from hearing the opinions of friends,"  said Leonardo.  It's important to take criticism as valuable information you wouldn't otherwise have.  Humanity's capacity for self deception is apparently infinite.  It's important not to take criticism as a personal attack, but as potentially helpful advice, a tool against self deception.

Nobody wins everything.  At whatever level you're working, there's room for growth and development, and therefore, the possibility of failure and rejection.  To move forward as an artist, you have to continually apply to shows, grants, prizes, residencies, and commissions, etc., and you can't win them all.  But you have to apply, anyway.  You can't win if you don't enter.  And who knows - sometimes the rejection du jour will turn out to be a win instead.  Which is in fact what just happened to me.  Yesterday, I got an email from a show I entered, read the first line before opening it, "Thank you for submitting your work..."  and assumed it was a rejection.  The acceptance letters almost always start, "Congratulations!  Your work has been accepted..."  But I opened it and Eureka!  An acceptance email that started out like a rejection email!  An anomaly.  They want my work, but they want more info and clearer photos.  I can live with that!                                    

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*not Leonardo da Vinci.

The rhythms of nature

Star Magnolia Buds

Anybody trying to create on a regular basis eventually runs into the problem of the creative well running dry, or, writer's block.  I think it's important to remember that in nature, nothing produces new growth year-round, all the time.  Blossoming, fruition, and harvest happen in seasons that are best for that life form.  Bulbs and plants that have been forced to bloom out of season are weakened afterwards, sometimes irrevocably.  They haven't had enough time to replenish their systems and are exhausted and spent.  There are times to be tough on yourself and times to be gentle.  Forcing yourself to "bloom out of season" might accomplish an immediate goal, but be disastrous for you in the long run.

After the blossoms of spring, fruition of summer, and harvest of fall, there's winter, an entire season of dormancy, hibernation and rest.  If you've run out of inspiration, motivation or energy, let yourself rest.  Celebrate winter:  sleep, eat, rest, ponder, mull, consider, contemplate.  Don't force anything.

It's all about mountains and plateaus.  When you're first learning something, the improvements are like the beginning stage of climbing a mountain.  You can see the progress easily.  As you get better, your progress will not be so dramatic and you'll reach a plateau where you don't seem to be making much progress.  And those plateaus can seem to last longer than the climbs.  But plugging away in the plateaus are what make you strong enough for your next big push.  Keep plugging away and you'll get there, in your own time and in your own season.

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Getting Stuck

If you're spinning your artistic wheels, doing the same thing over and over again without inspiration, you're stuck.  Just like a car stuck in the snow, mud or sand, you need to stop so you don't get yourself into an even deeper rut.  The laws of physics apply:  objects in motion, stay in motion; those at rest, stay at rest.  The old kinetic energy and inertia thing applied to an artist means that if you're barreling along your creative highway working away at 90 MPH, you'll keep going for a long time.  If you're at a complete stop, you'll stay stopped.  What you need is something to leverage you out of your rut.

Supposedly, if you work at something for 10,000 hours, you're an expert. If you work at any kind of art for any length of time, you realize pretty quickly that you're going to have to pace yourself. Long before you've hit 10,000 hours, you will have hit a dry spell.  There's no shame in this.  It isn't a question or talent or ability.  It's a question of energy.  Sometimes you just have to recharge those batteries.  Happens to everyone.

I try all the quick and easy fixes first:  I try listening to jazz instead of Mozart while I work in the studio; or Nine Inch Nails instead of jazz.  If that doesn't help, I change materials.  If I've been working in fine clay, I switch to gritty raku clay, etc.  Mix it up.  Try something new.  On my current list are:  drawing really big on a scroll; drawing on new surfaces, like cardboard; funky glazes.  One thing you have to do is get rid of your preconceptions. How do you know you don't like it if you haven't tried? Go to the biggest art supply store you know and buy something you've never used before.  I like to keep a few of these, as treats, up my sleeve for the next dry spell - just like doling out treats for kids on a long trip.  (And what a long strange trip it's been!)

If that doesn't change anything, I go ballistic.  If I've been working two hours, I push myself to work three.  If I've been working three, I do four.  Whatever I've been doing obviously isn't good enough, so I push myself longer and harder, to do better.  I look at every single thing ever produced that's comparable to what I'm aiming at and see where mine is falling short.  I compare it to every single thing I've ever done, to see where the problem is.  I do anatomical drawings of bones, muscles, joints.  I do studies of hair, fingers, fur, claws, drapery, whatever.  Work harder, better, smarter.

If none of that works, you need some serious traction:  you need help.  Visit your trusty old mentor/teacher/guru, show him/her what you're working on and do everything he/she suggests.  If that isn't possible, invite some artist friends over and see what they think about your latest work, what you've been doing and whatever you're stuck on.  If that doesn't help, sign up for a workshop in your usual field, or take a class in a material or technique you've always wanted to try but never have.  My list:  casting in stainless steel, casting in cement reinforced with fiberglass, welding.

If none of that works, you need to get out of town.  Go somewhere.  Where have you felt the most inspired and excited about your work?  Go there.  Even if you can't stay long, even if it's just a few hours or days, the change can jolt you out of a rut.  The point is to see things in a new way so that you can go back to what you were doing and see what the problem is.

Everything worth doing in life is a marathon, not a sprint.  Go for for it.

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The icing on the cake

American Woman

Winning awards, commissions, grants and kudos of all kinds are pretty much the icing on the artistic cake. Winning stuff is not a reason to work at art, but it certainly makes the ride smoother. I have to say that 2015 was a very good year for me.  But I always wonder if having a streak of good luck is like hitting a run of green traffic lights when you're driving. Statistically, the odds are really good that the next trip will involve a lot of red traffic lights. Meanwhile, I'm basking in the glow of the past year's successes: more than a dozen shows; the Canadian exhibit seen by a million people a day; the magazine article; three awards; publication by a literary magazine; the solo exhibition.

Naturally, I ran into some red lights. One of my sculptures was damaged during installation in a gallery in NYC. The sculpture can't be repaired and it's committed to another exhibition in the spring. I haven't figured out what I'm doing about that yet. Plus, all that energy that kept me zooming around getting ready for my solo show just stopped like my electric plug had just been pulled once the show was hung and opened. Woof. No energy. No motivation. No inspiration. I'm trying to get some things framed for my next show in < four weeks and I'm struggling.  Fortunately, I have all the materials or I don't know what would happen.

The funny thing is that what I'm mulling over is that I haven't accomplished any of the things I expected myself to do when I was young. Many of the goals I had as a young sculptor are not even on my list any more. I started out as a sculptor working life size and over life size, so I planned to do a lot of monumental sculpture. What I didn't realize then was that I have a complete and total aversion to sculptures of DWG (dead white guys) so that anything likely to be monumental size would also be revolting subject matter. I applaud the work of my peers doing life size and monumental portraits of financiers, athletes and politicians:  better them than me! DWGs mostly look like a stack of cylinders which is very boring:  tube legs on a big tube torso with tube arms, all encased in a tube of a suit.  Repellent.

One good thing this week is that I discovered on a Google search that I won an award in an online show I didn't even know I got into.  Live and learn! The new year is off to a great start.  I can't wait to see what I do next.

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