I used to think drawing was something I had to learn so that I could to get to painting. Lately I’ve grown to enjoy drawing for its own expressive abilities. Drawing is a spontaneous and immediate art. It is a direct record of the movement of the artist’s hand, a record of movement in time. Drawing can be quick, agile, and impulsive, but as a drawing progresses, the marks accumulate into something less movable.
Sketched quickly on subways and other New York spaces, these drawings by Gregory Muenzen have in them a quality I often see in blind contour line drawings, in which the hand is encouraged to follow a line made by the eye as it moves across the detailed crevices of a subject, and the artist is “blind” by not looking at their paper while the pencil is in motion. I often find these drawings have in them a special infusion of interest. Placement and proportion is secondary to curiosity. The pencil records the intimate act of looking.
Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed Text from Stanford.edu: Throughout his long career, seminal California artist Richard Diebenkorn (Stanford BA ’49) always kept a sketchbook—a “portable studio,” as he called it—to capture his ideas. The books contain 1,045 drawings that span the artist’s career and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored—both gestural renderings …
Abed Abdi, Muslim Painter Lately I have been interested in what happens to the focus of making art when artists live in politically turbulent times. What happens to your artwork when you feel anxious, confused, frustrated, angry, blindsided, and destabilized? What happens to your artwork when you feel like your opinion is valued, and what …
[image_with_animation image_url=”6644″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] Installation view of work by Raúl de Nieves, in the 2017 Whitney Biennial Raúl de Nieves What does it mean to be an American artist today? From his basement studio in Ridgewood, Queens, artist Raúl de Nieves creates an epic stained glass mural for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Born …
Thursdays are vocabulary day in our 30 day challenge. Our inspiration is actually two words: smatchet / menge, both from A.Word.A.Day with the incredible wordsmith Anu Garg. smatchet PRONUNCIATION: (SMACH-uht) MEANING: noun: An insignificant contemptible person.ETYMOLOGY: Of Scottish origin. Earliest documented use: 1582.USAGE: “Again he wondered how Mieka could be such an infuriating, impossible little …
Gregory Muenzen
I used to think drawing was something I had to learn so that I could to get to painting. Lately I’ve grown to enjoy drawing for its own expressive abilities. Drawing is a spontaneous and immediate art. It is a direct record of the movement of the artist’s hand, a record of movement in time. Drawing can be quick, agile, and impulsive, but as a drawing progresses, the marks accumulate into something less movable.
Sketched quickly on subways and other New York spaces, these drawings by Gregory Muenzen have in them a quality I often see in blind contour line drawings, in which the hand is encouraged to follow a line made by the eye as it moves across the detailed crevices of a subject, and the artist is “blind” by not looking at their paper while the pencil is in motion. I often find these drawings have in them a special infusion of interest. Placement and proportion is secondary to curiosity. The pencil records the intimate act of looking.
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Diebenkorn’s Sketchbooks
Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed Text from Stanford.edu: Throughout his long career, seminal California artist Richard Diebenkorn (Stanford BA ’49) always kept a sketchbook—a “portable studio,” as he called it—to capture his ideas. The books contain 1,045 drawings that span the artist’s career and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored—both gestural renderings …
Abed Abdi
Abed Abdi, Muslim Painter Lately I have been interested in what happens to the focus of making art when artists live in politically turbulent times. What happens to your artwork when you feel anxious, confused, frustrated, angry, blindsided, and destabilized? What happens to your artwork when you feel like your opinion is valued, and what …
Raúl de Nieves
[image_with_animation image_url=”6644″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] Installation view of work by Raúl de Nieves, in the 2017 Whitney Biennial Raúl de Nieves What does it mean to be an American artist today? From his basement studio in Ridgewood, Queens, artist Raúl de Nieves creates an epic stained glass mural for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Born …
30SAL Challenge: Smatchet / Menge
Thursdays are vocabulary day in our 30 day challenge. Our inspiration is actually two words: smatchet / menge, both from A.Word.A.Day with the incredible wordsmith Anu Garg. smatchet PRONUNCIATION: (SMACH-uht) MEANING: noun: An insignificant contemptible person.ETYMOLOGY: Of Scottish origin. Earliest documented use: 1582.USAGE: “Again he wondered how Mieka could be such an infuriating, impossible little …