Week 4 Preview

Next week, February 18, we will be drawing, exploring organic vs. geometric lines and marks, so bring whatever tool(s) and paper you like, keeping that in mind. I'll bring references that we can use as a starting point. Looking forward to seeing everyone.

Week 3 Reflections

Attendees: David Alvarado, Kevin Budnik, Angela Caggiano, Chris Dazzo, Nick Drnaso, Sanya Glisic, Betty Heredia, Erik Lundquist, Marieke McClendon, Max Morris, Matt Novak, Ness Rago, Naji Sierra, and Matt Soria. 

Documentarian: George Burnett.

Pedant: Ivan Brunetti.

Our exercise for Week 3 was "Interiors." We all brought photos or clippings of the inside of rooms (or just one room, or the same photo repeated). We spent the first 90 minutes cutting, tearing, and/or rearranging the photos into a collage.

At that point, we had a choice: either continue working on the collage, or create a drawing, based in some way on the collage. The remainder of the session was spent working on our collages or drawings.

Below are some snapshots of the Week 3 session.

 

 

Week 3 Preview

Our exercise for Week 3 is tentatively titled "Interiors."

Homework: You'll need to collect at least 12 photos (they can be your own, or someone else's). Since we'll be cutting and pasting, you might want to bring duplicates, cheap printouts, or magazine clippings, or some combination thereof.

The subject should be: the inside of a room.

You can bring 12 images of the same room, perhaps from different viewpoints. Or the images can be of 12 different rooms, if you prefer. Or you can bring 12 duplicates of the same exact image. They can be close-ups, panoramic, mid-ground, or any combination thereof. Any images of a room or rooms will do, really.

Bring whatever paper, tools, and/or materials you like to work with. First, we'll do a short collage exercise (I'll provide scissors and glue), and then we'll spend close to 2 hours working on a drawing (or painting, or collage, or sculpture, or... you get the picture.)

Week 2 Reflections

Attendees: David Alvarado, Kevin Budnik, Angela Caggiano, Chris Dazzo, Nick Drnaso, Marieke McClendon, Ness Rago, Naji Sierra, Matt Soria, Carl Zeller.

Documentarian: George Burnett.

Bloviator: Ivan Brunetti.

This week's exercises revolved around memory and translation.

A few words about drawing: This, to me, is everything, the alpha and the omega. The culmination and distillation of thought. As a medium of expression, it is direct, intimate, and all-revealing. You can't fake a good drawing; bravado, prevarication, and coyness simply wither, exposed and helpless.

When I am in the presence of a beautiful painting or a sculpture, I feel an an instability beneath my feet, outside my skin, as if the magnetic field around me has been disrupted. In the presence of a beautiful drawing, the stirring is internal. Something within me feels altered, shaken.

There's something vulgar and disrespectful about human hands handling a painting or sculpture, like surgery performed with clumsy puppy paws, but I think a drawing begs be held, touched, not placed on a wall or on a pedestal.

Granted, I could be completely wrong about all this.

Exercise 1: The group divides itself into teams of two, so... 12 people equals six teams. One person acts as the Describer, the other as a Drawer. The Drawers get their butcher-paper pinned to the wall and their tools handy (large markers, charcoal, or brush and ink). The Describers are each handed a printout of a portrait drawing (by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Degas, Rubens, and many others), which they must stare at for 5 minutes, absorbing every detail of the content and composition, including textures, the quality of the marks and lines, etc.

The Describers put away the portraits, and then must verbally describe the image to the Drawer. While hand and body gestures are allowed, there is no sketching allowed by the Describer. The Drawer attempts to draw the image, based on the Describer's memory and description. (The drawings took between 15-20 minutes.)

Next, the team members reverse their roles: The Drawer now becomes the Describer, and vice versa. New portrait images are given to each Describer. This creates a new set of interpretive drawings by the Drawers.

We ended up with a total of 12 large sketches on the butcher paper, each drawn by a different person.

Exercise 2: Through a random redistribution, everyone was assigned another person's drawing. This would then become the basis of a new drawing. We had a little over an hour to create these more finished pieces, and everyone was allowed to choose whatever tools, materials, and dimensions they preferred. The butcher-paper sketches served as jumping-off points, and everyone was free to "translate" these drawings as they wished, faithfully or unfaithfully, which led to surprising results.

At the end of the session, the original portrait drawings were revealed to all, for further comparison, edification, and amusement. Here are a few examples.

Apology

Please accept my sincere apologies if you were one of the attendees on Week 2. I was in full-on pedantic mode, complete with "teacher voice." Ugh. I swore that this workshop would not turn into a class, that we'd avoid critiques and over-analysis. Yet I found myself over-amped, overbearing, agitated from the listless class I taught just before our workshop, and, God help us all, trying to force a "discussion" by the end of the night.

This is antithetical to my original goals for the workshop, and I promise to restore a less-pressured atmosphere, so we can enjoy each other's company and be inspired by each other. I want our Monday evenings to be enjoyable, above all.

Week 2 Preview

I'm developing some projects for the upcoming weeks, and I have some ideas for an exciting 3D endeavor, as well as more drawing exercises. I also want to set aside a day for "open studio" time so that we can spend the session working on whatever we like. We'll sort all this out in the coming weeks.

For Week 2, we will work on a two-part drawing/memory/translation exercise, with a collaborative element, for which we will require the following materials.

First half of the session: Brush and Ink (or a big marker) for some large sketches. We'll use the butcher paper available in the room.

Second half of the session: Whatever tools, materials, and paper you like, for a more finished piece (using the sketches as a jumping-off point). The size is up to you as well.

I think these will be enjoyable, and should lead to some surprising results. I hope to see you there!

Week 1 Reflections

Attendees: David Alvarado, Kevin Budnik, Angela Caggiano, Pete Clodfelter, Chris Dazzo, Nick Drnaso, Sanya Glisic, Betty Heredia, Erik Lundquist, Marieke McClendon, Jeremy Onsmith, Ness Rago, Naji Sierra, Matt Soria, Carl Zeller.

Documentarian: George Burnett.

Ringleader: Ivan Brunetti.

Our first week got off to a good start, with 15 attendees participating. We started with variations on two exercises from the Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice book. I asked the group to suggest some words, things we might like to draw today. We made a list and I chose some promising-looking words as the basis for our exercises.

First, we drew ever-quicker sketches of three items: Santa Claus, a unicorn, and a bathroom.

Second, we went around the room, round-robin style, and everyone said a word (person, place, thing, idea, etc.), and we had to draw that word in about 10 seconds. This second exercise took about 45 minutes.

After a short break, we began our third exercise. We chose another word from our list of suggestions ("monsters"), and we had to draw 100 of that word in 30 minutes. So, 100 monsters in 30 minutes (could be 100 different monsters, or the same monster 100 times, or what have you).

This exercise was admittedly a poorly planned experiment; the basic idea was to force a sort of desperation as a means to jot down some unexpected shapes. The number of drawings and the time limit were somewhat arbitrary. Few people, understandably, got past 50 monsters, even in 40 minutes.

Jeremy made a good suggestion to improve the exercise: make it 30 drawings in 30 minutes. Since many people felt that, in the first exercise, a sort of "sweet spot" for the sketches was at around 1 minute, a 1:1 correlation would make sense. So, for those of you playing at home, try 30 drawings in 30 minutes.

Next, we looked over our drawings from the day. For our fourth and final exercise, we had 20 minutes to make a new drawing in some way inspired by, or riffing off, one or more of our sketches.

The final sketch could then perhaps serve as the starting point for a whole new drawing, or a more finished piece, if anyone wanted to continue working at home.

That was the week that was.

We also voted on next week's project; see the following post for details.