Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Reclining Woman; Seated Woman in Blue; Seated Woman in Pink



Drawn today, from life. Half-hour poses.

All are pastel on 12"x16" black pastel paper.

12 comments:

  1. I very much like the middle one. Once again, nice work

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  2. Jean,
    very good your works!
    are much more than a drawing
    they have personality ...
    congrats!

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  3. all great, the first one has a shadow very very nice

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  4. The salmon colored figure. You really rocked that blue in the shadows. Also gravity. The way the hip enlarges and melts into the pillow

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  5. And the salmon is cezanny.

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  6. For me the first blue looks totally contemporary, the second is drifting into Cubism, and I can't decide about the third because that hue isn't in my palette. It looks like you made it on time that day.

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  7. I might choose "Red and Green" for figure and composition, but I like the blues of today better for color. And "Seated Woman" ties "Red and Green," I think.

    How do you decide which one MOMA will want? Or which one deserves revision after revision?

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  8. Very nice. My favorite is the blue one - wonderful composition - makes me ponder what's happening in the shadows.

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  9. Thanks, all.

    PA and AH, I drew the pinkish figure right after a break, during which Dr. Suess and Avatar were topics of casual conversation. I wasn't consciously trying to incorporate those two, but I could see it after I was done.

    Paula, I was very late; ended up at the periphery again. The first figure, I drew standing and holding the sketch pad in my hand. (For the other two, I used an easel.)

    BANJO52, I'll think about MOMA should the need arise. But, seriously, part of the creation is deciding which to keep, which to change, which to draw over.

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  10. Writing is endless revision, moving words around, or killing words, deciding what's subordinate to what, and which order for sentences and paragraphs. So I'm interested in the drawing and painting equivalents to that, if there are any.

    Or this: "A piece of writing is never finished; in the end, the writer just gives up on it." Somebody's old adage, which I think everyone over 20 subscribes to, including me. Is it the same in the visual arts?

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  11. Banjo, it can be. And some visual artists do that. They only stop because "time's up"--there's a deadline for a show or a client. Some media are more conducive to that kind of process, too, for example, art done with a computer.

    What I'm doing now, drawing from life, only allows a bit of that kind of behavior. First, there's the physical limitations, like how long the model poses, how much media a piece of paper will accept, the size and shape of the paper I start with. Then, there's self-imposed limitations, e.g., not washing away or erasing stuff once I put it down, stopping drawing when the model stops posing.

    There's ways around all of these limitations, and sometimes I take them, but mostly I'm keeping within these sketching parameters right now, partially because I want to and partially because I don't have a studio set up yet.

    But lots of times I stop working on a piece before time's up and just move on to another. The way I know when to stop is when I step back and look--and I only know this if I'm paying enough attention to remember to step back and look frequently. It's part of the reason I draw standing up--so that I can move away easily.

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