I’m in NY, doing a figurative sculpture marathon with Bruce Gagnier at the NY Studio School. I’m three days into a two week intensive, and I’m loving it.
One of the topics my instructor presses is contrapposto. I learned about contrapposto at WWU, but I’m understanding the real value of it now. Bruce Gagnier showed me how exaggerating the tilt of the hips, and then exaggerating a responsive tilt to the rib cage (not the shoulders, as I had previously thought, but the imagined/invisible rib cage) and moving it to the side makes for a dynamic drawing or sculpture. He’s trying to get me to push my drawings more into motion. It’s good.
See how the sections are tilted, but also pulled side-to-side?
For another example, here’s my classmate’s figure drawing. She tilted the hips one way and tilted the ribs the other way, but she didn’t off-set the pieces to the right and left. Gagnier ripped the drawing into 3 pieces so we could move and tilt each section. What a difference the changes make! I’m adding contrapposto paper dolls to my class lessons!
Here is how the pieces can be used to shift the figure’s segments left and right.
Effing Argots
I was slow to catch on to this lesson. Too slow. Gagnier speaks the most stubbornly convoluted art speak I’ve ever heard. For the love of Pete, it took me two days to understand what it’ll take me two minutes to show my figure drawing class. An articulate vocabulary is expressive and delicious, but exclusionary argots have no place in our Seattle Artist League.
Here’s a wee snippitty boob flick from The Patriot TV sequential, to illustriate my tantamount anti-idolatryius, in excelsis deo. https://youtu.be/P5-9Rfrui9A?t=1
This is day 8 of our 30 day creative challenge! To learn more about this 30SAL challenge, click here. Today’s challenge is to study a jacket. Choose one aspect to focus on. For example, look at it for lines, shape, geometry, volume, or light and shadow. Don’t try to do all of them at the same …
I’ve been talking about the the idea that shapes in a composition can be activated to hold each other in place. In this way, there is no background and no object, there is only the interaction of shapes on the surface of the canvas. Everything in the picture holds everything else in place. Intervals I’d …
Pop Quiz: Can you identify the painting above? [image_with_animation image_url=”2941″ alignment=”” animation=”Fade In” delay=”6000 Answer: It’s the lower portion of Susan Rothenberg’s “Butterfly” (1976). Seattle Artist League: art school, art classes, painting classes, figure drawing.
In my last post I shared Auerbach’s study of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’. This is another post about artists studying other artists. Did you know that Picasso did a series of studies in Velasquez’s Las Meninas? When we did modern studies of masterwork compositions in class, many students did one little study of a painting and figured …
The Dynamic Dance of Contrapposto
I’m in NY, doing a figurative sculpture marathon with Bruce Gagnier at the NY Studio School. I’m three days into a two week intensive, and I’m loving it.
One of the topics my instructor presses is contrapposto. I learned about contrapposto at WWU, but I’m understanding the real value of it now. Bruce Gagnier showed me how exaggerating the tilt of the hips, and then exaggerating a responsive tilt to the rib cage (not the shoulders, as I had previously thought, but the imagined/invisible rib cage) and moving it to the side makes for a dynamic drawing or sculpture. He’s trying to get me to push my drawings more into motion. It’s good.
See how the sections are tilted, but also pulled side-to-side?
For another example, here’s my classmate’s figure drawing. She tilted the hips one way and tilted the ribs the other way, but she didn’t off-set the pieces to the right and left. Gagnier ripped the drawing into 3 pieces so we could move and tilt each section. What a difference the changes make! I’m adding contrapposto paper dolls to my class lessons!
Here is how the pieces can be used to shift the figure’s segments left and right.
Effing Argots
I was slow to catch on to this lesson. Too slow. Gagnier speaks the most stubbornly convoluted art speak I’ve ever heard. For the love of Pete, it took me two days to understand what it’ll take me two minutes to show my figure drawing class. An articulate vocabulary is expressive and delicious, but exclusionary argots have no place in our Seattle Artist League.
Here’s a wee snippitty boob flick from The Patriot TV sequential, to illustriate my tantamount anti-idolatryius, in excelsis deo. https://youtu.be/P5-9Rfrui9A?t=1
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This is day 8 of our 30 day creative challenge! To learn more about this 30SAL challenge, click here. Today’s challenge is to study a jacket. Choose one aspect to focus on. For example, look at it for lines, shape, geometry, volume, or light and shadow. Don’t try to do all of them at the same …
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I’ve been talking about the the idea that shapes in a composition can be activated to hold each other in place. In this way, there is no background and no object, there is only the interaction of shapes on the surface of the canvas. Everything in the picture holds everything else in place. Intervals I’d …
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Pop Quiz: Can you identify the painting above? [image_with_animation image_url=”2941″ alignment=”” animation=”Fade In” delay=”6000 Answer: It’s the lower portion of Susan Rothenberg’s “Butterfly” (1976). Seattle Artist League: art school, art classes, painting classes, figure drawing.
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In my last post I shared Auerbach’s study of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’. This is another post about artists studying other artists. Did you know that Picasso did a series of studies in Velasquez’s Las Meninas? When we did modern studies of masterwork compositions in class, many students did one little study of a painting and figured …