Lots of books are available in the stores for people who want to learn to draw. I was once a person who wanted to learn to draw. I still want to learn. But I also know rather a lot about drawing these days. When I look among the didactic books, I am always amazed though at how many have titles like "Drawing Made Easy," "Learn to draw in X number steps," "Drawing for Dummies," (of course there's everything for dummies), and so on.
I have never seen a book on "Drawing Made Hard." That's the book I want. In the beginning drawing seemed very hard to me. I counted myself among those who couldn't draw. Having a deep desire to become an artist, though, I had to learn to draw. I took that as given. Contemporary art students, especially ones who go into university programs, might not think of drawing as in any sense a "requirement."
But I became an artist because I loved the old masters. I was a sixteen-year old kid when I first loved the old masters. And they didn't seem "old" to me. And they still don't.
The great artists were the contemporaries I sought for my teachers, but what they did was heart-breakingly "hard."
After many years of drawing, I do not find drawing "hard" anymore. And I wish it were. There is something so marvelous about the aching wish. This is not to say that I can draw like Raphael. But I'll skip the false modesty and acknowledge that sometimes I draw very well.
But I want it to be hard and now I'm engaged in a different kind of search than the one that got me started as a sixteen-year old kid. I want to recreate in myself the same naivete -- but one that rises to a different level. I want to be innocent and wise together. I want to find subjects that are very dificult.
And there are no text books to help me. So, I've taken Ingres for a teacher.
But what is hard for me wasn't hard for him. So the question is, had Ingres sought a "book" on drawing made hard (and I think he sought that very thing) what would it have been like?
What was hard -- for Ingres?!
2 comments:
Harold Speed - Practice and science of drawing would be the right book for you. If you want to draw something like Ingres. It really takes something like 5000 training hours to get the basic drawing skills.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14264/14264-h/14264-h.htm
Start from the
VII
THE STUDY OF DRAWING
and
VIII
LINE DRAWING: PRACTICAL
This is other great book. You should stury both
http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?cat=12
Start from the visual survey procdure and III block forms, planes, foreshortening and lightning.
Anthony Ryder has great book too. You can buy it trhought amazon.
Start just by the top, bottom, left, right marks. And then divide those to 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8. Then pick measurements with your eye between the marks. Use just few lines and try to guess the best you can first. It really practices the eye to see precise measurements and tilts. Draw everything inside this "box", where you had marked the middle and 1/4 etc. marks. After the best guess check everything with comparative measurement by your pencil or knitting needle.
Check out schools like florence academy of art, grand central academy of art, studio escalier and mims studios. They are carrying the methods of the past.
classical art student
I appreciate your leaving a comment and thank you for information about the various books.
However, I must say that on balance I disagree with the fundamental idea behind these books, which is that a particular canon of beauty and meaning was discovered (whether in Ingres or elsewhere) and henceforth can be learned by one's simple (or even not so simple) application of various rules, hardwork or whatever.
To begin, it didn't really take Ingres "5000" hours of training to learn to draw "like Ingres." Ingres's earliest signed and dated drawing was made when he was 13. In the early drawing he has already mastered various technical problems. Of course he grows enormously afterwards and his mature drawings have a carelessness and economy of thought that is breathtaking. But something ineluctable is present from rather early on. To be able to draw like Ingres, you'd really have to be Ingres (which is very impractical to say the least).
What I advocate instead of searching out schools that preserve the past is to use drawing as an exploratory tool for understanding the living world. Yes, one should study the old masters. Why not! Moreover, one ought to enjoy them because they're wonderful. But the "old masters" is a big group, encompassing artists as varied as the Rohan Master or the anonymous artists of the Book of Kells or the Lascaux painters!
But drawing itself need not fit into any preconceived set of rules to be a high art. A very intensely perceived and accurate depiction of "reality" might not ever look "real" if various frames of reference (and conventions) are removed. Bonnard's painting is very intense, complicated, full of visual incident and very "felt," but it doesn't look like "reality," although it does have a certain life-likeness to the kind of myopia that I suffer from when my glasses are removed!
I don't think beginning artists should be at all reluctant to explore with drawing because only in that way are new ideas discovered. The ideal is to learn from the old masters while adapting their insights to new situations. It's rather like science in that respect.
If one lacks the potential to be a "great artist" then one just does, but one might as well learn the maximum that one can learn -- and that is better accomplished, I think, by adherence to one's own nature than by imitating someone else even someone as grand as Ingres!
Best wishes, The ArtWriter
Post a Comment