The Most Unusual Art Class; Lauren Kent

Before all those orange artworks, I was posting about Figure in Interior; the most unusual art class I’ve ever been a part of. I talked about Cezanne, and how making small marks distributed around the page (thank you to Fran O’Neill) can be a way to integrate time and change within a drawing.

My premise for the Thursday Figure in Interior class was that there are three ways to have movement in a drawing:

1. The artist’s understanding shifts. We learn about what we’re drawing as we draw it, so a drawing with adjustments and changes within it is normal, and means the artist is paying attention, and not locking themselves or their drawing down before it has resolved it’s angles and proportions.
2. The scene shifts. The model shifts their weight, the light changes, a cup that was there before is now gone, etc.
3. The artist’s perspective shifts. Like Cezanne, we can pick up our easel and move to get a different view of a scene. We can also change methods or tools. This tends to be most useful when the artist approaches the drawing with enough skill that their understanding (1) no longer shifts as much, and in their observational accuracy, the drawings begin to be more static.
4. Not included in this class conversation, but a topic for another day: movement integrated in a drawing with influences of the artist’s body. I talked about a vision aspect in the earlier post about Kathy Paul. There are other physical and neurological aspects that can induce movement in a drawing. For instance, sometimes I draw and my hand has a tremor so my lines waver and are less in control. While this may at times be frustrating for the artist, I find as a viewer some of my favorite works are made through physical challenges like these, and they certainly aren’t static.

At the start of class I shared drawings and paintings that exemplify recorded movement. Work by artists such as Diebenkorn, Alex Kannevsky, Ann Gale, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Cecily Brown, Cezanne, Frank Auerbach, Ginny Grayson, Peri Schwartz, Stephanie Pierce, and Alberto Giacometti. Then I set people up with a scene. With a few exceptions, the scene stayed mostly the same-ish, but the model changed poses whenever they felt like it, and we drew a different model each week. Some artists chose to move around the room. Others marked the spot where their horse or easel was on the floor, and returned to work on the drawing from the same position every week. With a few exceptions, Lauren had her regular spot, and worked from a similar viewpoint every week.

Lauren Kent is new to the League. She comes to us from Rhode Island and Boston with degrees in fine art and education. I admire her beautifully adaptive and open mind. Given the challenge of letting go of the “thingness,” and the uncertainty of how these drawings would appear, she pleasantly released into a total free-fall, and drew some of the most unusual drawings I’ve ever seen. In class, she described how she was able to stay mentally engaged, but relax her vision to see the whole scene at once. It was wonderful to see her open and balanced drawings as they emerged gracefully from the page. As a viewer, we have the advantage of seeing these drawings complete, but from the artist’s perspective, spending weeks on a drawing that has so little form to hang onto, they are a total leap of faith! Remember, these drawings are slow. And by slow I mean slower than slow. Imagine spending weeks on a drawing, accepting it may not come of anything, not knowing if what you’re doing is working, or what’s going to happen, just making marks without context for hours and hours, enjoying each moment of focus without expectations. It’s very impressive work, and the drawings glow and vibrate from the mindset. The marks are interesting. I surprised myself, that walking around the room I could easily see which lines were made with focus, and which ones weren’t. You’d think one line looks pretty much like the next, but the lines made without deliberate focus looked different, they looked boring, as if the artist was starting to say something and then their sentences degraded to “blah blah blah.”

Below are Lauren’s answers to my questions about her experience in the class. As you can see, I’ve scattered her drawings in order of time between the writing. I have photographs of two drawings, labeled Figure in Interior 1 and Figure in Interior 2, for lack of a more poetic title.

RV: What is your usual approach or way of thinking through a drawing?

LK: “I have mostly been painting recently and have not done much charcoal drawing for quite a while… In my previous observational drawings, I would lightly sketch in the main shapes and lines of what I was looking at, erase and move those loose lines around until I was happy with the composition, then work into more detail in different parts of the drawing. If there was a model, I would spend most of my time and energy on drawing them. Unless I was doing a gestural warm-up, my drawings would usually be quite smudge-y and high-contrast and focus on value over line.”

RV: What was different about your process in this class? 

LK: “I went for the ‘data point’ mentality presented in the class – not making decisions, not trying to make anything look like anything, just making a mark, then moving on. I tried to force my brain to avoid caring more about the model than other parts of the scene. Make a mark where the shoulder is, where the collar is, bottom of the foot, move on. The composition emerged from the window of what I could physically see in front of me and where there was more information to make marks. I also made fewer marks toward the side of the paper – maybe because it was more physically difficult with my arm’s range of motion? Or out of focus with my window of vision? The only decision making was when to use the charcoal, eraser, or paint. The drawing emerged – I had no idea or vision for what it would look like when I started. So it kept surprising me, which was exciting, instead of following a plan or vision of what I wanted it to be.”

RV: What did it feel like to draw?

LK: “I found it to be really peaceful. Because I was trusting in a process, I knew that something cool and interesting would come out of it no matter what. Building on top of a drawing that was already started, full of data and interest, was also exciting. This trust in the process and plotting data points instead of making decisions took the pressure off for me and I could simply enjoy looking and making marks.”

LK: “When I drew, I sat in the same spot, tilted the drawing board in my lap, and looked at the scene in front of me. My eyes would move around the view in front of me and I would make small marks for what I saw as evenly spread out as I could – curtain fold, top of head, side of shoe, bottom of table, top of cabinet, side of lamp, move on … When I would get too caught in making marks in one area, I would refocus my eyes on the total window of vision and reset, starting new marks from this central viewpoint.”

“If I drew a line or angle slightly off, I would just draw it again without erasing.”

LK: “The lines didn’t ‘line up’ to previous marks and that was ok because it was the truth of that line and observation in that exact moment. The rest was just a record of what had been before. I actually was a  little bummed when they did line up! I found a lot of satisfaction with making a mark that felt right in the moment. Like, yes!, that is where the bottom of that shelf is right now! “

“I did allow my head to move side to side and up and down sometimes to capture parts that were outside of my fixed central window – my drawing board, scuffs on the floor to my left and right, part of the ceiling. Then I would reset / recenter back again. “

RV: What did you notice about your drawing?

LK: “It became a burst of energy and information in the center! Also, when I look at it, I can fill in what different parts of the drawing are starting to represent. Because I was staring at it for so long and know the series of scenes I was representing, I can kind of ‘fill in the data points’ in my mind. However, I have no idea what people who look at it without this context see. Which is different than drawing something stagnantly / ‘realistically’ and kind of exciting. Over time, the different elements became much clearer to me – the stage, the top of the curtain, the lamp. I think I had to stop before they became too clear!”

RV: What did you gain by doing this?

LK: “Oh my goodness. For one thing, this is never something I would have thought of or made time to do on my own! So thank you, Ruthie! I was so grateful for this out-of-the-box prompt and seeing it where it took me and all of my classmates. It was way cool to be a part of this kind of experimental environment, around other artists who were also diving in and going outside of their comfort zones. I think it mostly felt good to try something so different and create in a new way. I think I used the word ‘exciting’ a million times in this response. So, I gained excitement in my art-making!”

RV: How might this experience change the work you do outside of class?

LK: “I’ve been thinking about this. The way that I currently construct paintings involves starting with a structured sketch – cropping a photograph to my composition, lightly marking in the major shapes and lines in my underpainting, then going into more detail. Once I have a sketch that is fairly close to the photograph, I add thicker paint in a much more loose and expressive way. I mix a color, loosely mark it where I see it (or a color that is close to it), then move on to the next color. Once I have enough information and paint on there, I start making decisions about what to add and take a way, in terms of color, amount of realistic detail, precision in color-matching, openness/ abstraction, or expressive strokes. (These paintings show some of what happens with that process). Thinking about it, the process of my second stage of painting shares some similarities to the data point process – in terms of bopping around the canvas with color information. But, I have been thinking about what would happen if I also started the sketch that way… If it wasn’t as tight, and had the mis-matched marks of information to start with. This is something that I might play with at some point!”

You can see in Lauren’s drawings that even though all the lines are small and straight like toothpicks, the scene has emerged. Within the abstract is information that gives the viewer a sense of a figure in interior, full of space, depth, varying perspectives and movement. Truly amazing work!

More to come.

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