Linda teaches art

Why not draw from a photo?

A student asked me, this week, if she could use a photo "from the internet" to make her drawing. Leaving aside the interesting questions of intellectual property, there are still some problems with that. Here's what I said.

As for your question about whether you can work from a photograph... I wouldn't be surprised if more than one student uses photographs (from the internet, from books and magazines, or by posing a friend and snapping their own) as reference for the drawing. I will expect all of them to cite their sources. However, I'll also warn you that there are at least three ways that can contribute to making weak drawings.

1. The first problem can be avoided by exercising good judgment. The internet is full of cheesy cliches and you want to avoid picking a sentimental seen-it-a-million-times greeting-card type image as a source. By definition, the images that float to the top of a Google Images search are commonplace and widely referenced, so there's a real danger of getting only the most stereotypical pictures. Dig deeper. Use some off-the-wall search terms.
2. The second problem is a serious one of originality. This is a fine art course and we are artists. Our interests (and our livelihood) lie in creating original work from a personalized viewpoint. While that may sometimes reference the work of other creators, there's no call--in this course--for outright appropriation. On this assignment, I do not want to see a drawing that is a flat-out copy of a photograph, especially not someone else's photograph. I'm expecting a much higher level of originality and observation than that. If you must work from someone else's photograph, use more than one reference image and set yourself the objective of combining them in non-trivial ways to create an image that is truly your own. (And then cite all your sources.)
3. Finally, there is a practical problem with working from photographs. A photo gives you less information than you'd have if you had the scene in front of you. As a result, drawings from photographs are sometimes inaccurate and often disappointingly flat. When artists work from reference photographs, we usually make an effort to emphasize depth in the drawing as a way of compensating for that.

Cameras and photography are so cheap and ubiquitous these days that I encourage you to get in the habit of setting up your own reference photographs. Then your only limits are in your own imagination.

Everything is an acquired taste.

Overheard in a Big Art Gallery: "I guess I keep thinking that if I expose myself to enough art, I'll appreciate it."

What does she think, that learning to appreciate art works like erosion? Stand under the waterfall and let it wear you down?

Does anything work like that? Everything is an acquired taste.

Think about something you know really really well. Maybe you're into vintage cars or leading-edge cameras or specialized cosplay. I'll bet you've seen people--smart cool people, people you know and like, even--dismiss that thing you're into, based on an isolated arbitrary experience of it. And you probably thought, "Hey, that's not fair! Let me introduce you to it the right way!"

Art, music, food, literature, haute couture... It might not be enough to expose yourself to it. You might need a tour guide or at least an introduction. Ask a friend who's a big fan where she thinks you should start. Take an intro course. Check Wikipedia. Read a "for dummies" book (and then hide it because, well, really) or, better still, visit the children's library and see what they're telling ten-year-olds about the subject.

I'm not suggesting that you settle for a ten-year-old's introduction to a new subject. I am suggesting you start there. Start somewhere accessible and friendly and non-specialist. Get your bearings. Find something likeable and get to know it a bit better.

That's how you learned to love that thing you love, a bit at a time. You started with an easy-to-appreciate bit, and eventually, you acquired a taste for the more demanding stuff.

I think I stared at this bit of a Mark Rothko painting for at least ten minutes. It's hard to say, because when I get drawn into a painting I lose all sense of time. But if I were going to introduce you to abstract painting, I wouldn't start there. I'd start here or here or here.

 

To become the poet worthy

So I went to see the Abstract Expressionist show from the Museum of Modern Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario this week. I caught myself staring intently at the brutally layered surface of Willem de Kooning's famous Woman 1  . Maybe I was trying to maintain a poker face while the couple behind me discussed the work: "I couldn't live with that one. I see its greatness but I couldn't live with it."

The Woman paintings have always alienated me--all ferocious boobs and teeth, painted as if by someone who regretted every woman he'd ever known--but I was drawn into this one, into the surface. Like many of the abstract expressionist painters, the surface told the story of an artist repeatedly trying to get it right, to get better, to get good enough to finish the painting he'd started.

I read an interview with playwright Tony Kushner where he said something that I think about every day:

"There’s this great quote in Hugh Kenner’s book on Pound where he’s talking about Goethe . . . He says that the job of the epic poet is to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet worthy of finishing it."

(My only problem with that quotation is that I've never been able to tell from the interview transcript who said it, Kenner or Pound or Goethe, and the only way to find out would be to read Kenner's entire book on Pound. Amazon says it's 606 pages. Yikes.)

But to hell with the attribution. Those words, those words. "To become, while writing the poem in public, the poet worthy of finishing it."

 

 

 

 

The basics of squaring up & transferring an image

You can do this with a projector. Let's assume you don't have a projector and/or that you want to do this old school.

1. If you want to draw the image of the buildings onto the gray panel, you need to cope with the fact that the images are two different shapes.
2. Even if you grow one or shrink the other, they won't match perfectly. You're going to have to leave something out or make up some stuff to fill in. Extending the diagonal of the building picture shows you the shape it would be at the same height as the gray panel.
   
3. Sketching in the diagonal of the gray panel shows you the shape your piece of the building picture will have to be. Any picture that's going to fit has to share that diagonal.
   
4. Do some geometry or get out the scissors and hack up some cheap photocopies. Choose the portion of the building picture you want to transfer.
   
5. Superimpose a grid on both the building picture and the gray panel.
   It has to be the same grid. The size of the squares will be different, but there must be the same number of squares in each row and there must be the same number of rows of squares.
   
   
6. Copy the building picture carefully, one square at a time.

 

 

 

Reasons for rejecting ideas

Know what I found out in grad school? Ideas are cheap. I come up with zillions of ideas every day. The tricky part is how I decide which ideas I'll work on. I figured out that what I usually did was reject ideas rather select them; my method was entirely destructive rather than constructive. So I made a list of all the reasons I used to reject ideas and then I set out to break 'em all and see which ones still seemed valid. 

As an exercise for the reader, make your own list. What reasons do you use to reject ideas? (Hey, mail 'em to me. I'd be interested.)

Linda's favourite reasons for rejecting ideas:

• It's not controlled/finished use of materials!
• It might damage the workspace!
• The work couldn't be shown!
• The work couldn't be moved!
• The work couldn't be moved with a Chevette!
• I can't afford the materials!
• The subject matter violates my privacy!
• The subject matter violates someone else's privacy!
• It's slight!
• It's derivative!
• It's not serious!
• It might even be whimsical!
• It's funny!
• It's got no content, just formal exploration of materials
• It's not planned all the way through!
• The materials aren't archival!

Some good advice I received that year:

• "Turn your practice upside-down, do things you wouldn't normally do."
• "Dislocated? Disoriented? Do work about that."
• "Look at the specific rather than the general."
• "Where is the emotion in the finished work?"
• "Think about why you're concerned with 'productivity'."
• "Develop the piece as a whole rather than letting one part get too far ahead of another."
• "You've only got two years."

More reasons to reject ideas:

• It's decorative!
• It's not in good taste!
• It's breakable!
• It's silly!