Fran O’Neill’s Giant Figures Workshop, Day 1

Today, after skittering around with tasks, I was able to attend Fran’s Giant Figures Workshop, held in the spacious light-filled Drawing and Painting Studios at the Seattle Artist League. Years ago, when Lendy and I looked at this big Equinox warehouse space, we had NYSS style drawing intensives like this in mind, so it was a long awaited happy day to open up the rooms, set up stages, and fill the studios with enthusiastic artists and their energy. Many core members of the League were in attendance. It was a reunion of friends and skills.

For model privacy and artist concentration, I did not pull out my camera while people were drawing, but I did catch a some works in progress (WIP) during breaks, and by chance, the yellow hat trio.

Here are a couple of sketches, plus my own.

This is one long pose. Lendy Hensley, Connie Pierson, and Mary Shea are in the Painting Studio, and Jared Price and I are in the Drawing Studio. My model was in the center of the room. Across the room, over her shoulder, I could see Marina Vogman drawing. Marks in the background of my drawing are Marina, working. If you’ve taken a figure drawing class, you may know the specific silence of collective concentration, with the rhythmic whispers of charcoal on paper. It is, for me, the highest bliss.

I had a measuring error in the first 5 minutes of my drawing, and I knew it. For an hour after that, I was hunting down this error like a terrier hunts a rat. I criss-crossed my way around the figure, finding alignments and misalignments over and over and over. I find great enjoyment in finding new insights while I draw. Not because I feel the need for perfection, but because “solving” the relationships of line and shape is as satisfying for me as completing a sudoku puzzle. I glow in the shimmering dopamine release, and then ascend the sparkling steps up to the next stage of the study.

With this study, I criss-crossed the drawing in plumb lines and triangles, measuring and remeasuring, looking for things to line up. But they wouldn’t! Finally, with a laugh I realized that I was moving all over the place, the model was shifting her poses slightly with each sitting, and all my searching for “the truth” was just running me around, adding more spokes to the spirograph. Finally, I remembered that solving the puzzle is nice but it is not actually the goal of my drawing today, and I started darkening and lightening marks for pathways, composition, and space. It was incredibly fun.