Drawings

Although oil painting is the most revered of the visual arts--well, mostly--drawing in all of its forms ought to be revered as much. Painting is about masses of color and value; drawing is about lines but also about value and shape. Drawing accurately isn't as difficult as many make it but accurate drawing is the cornerstone of much graphic art.

In my own practice, drawing takes a front seat much of time, as it probably does for others. That's because it's easy to draw; all you need is a surface and something to make marks. Painting is much more complicated. So when an artist sees something remarkable or memorable, drawing is usually the first thought.

Long ago, when I was beginning, I read an article about the virtues of sketching and drawing. I remember almost nothing about the piece except the exhortation to "fill your sketchbooks." At the time it seemed to me that filling even a single sketchbook would be the work of months if not years. But as time passed and images piled up, so did sketchbooks. Those sketchbooks are now useful resources for painting ideas, review of methods, and a look back at skills acquired or honed.

Here are a few drawings that have survived.

The first is a charcoal of a woman who was sitting for an oil portrait. The sitter was a vivacious woman who smiled often, and liked the really joyful

"Marjorie,"charcoal, 2008

image she presented in this sketch, but a more solemn, modern portrait won out. This is about 11x14 on toned paper.

"Gettin' Funky,"graphite, 2014

Graphite is another medium for sketching and it's considerably easier than even charcoal since all you need is pencil and paper. Graphite is the medium I nearly always use for initial sketching, laying in watecolors and other water media and just doodling. This particular image grew out of a photograph I saw online that made me think of the stereotypical older man with two left feet--the one who can't dance at all but is making a heroic effort. In this case I grabbed a pencil and sketched this on a piece of toned paper about 9x12.

"Reverie," silverpoint, 2016

Next is a silverpoint, done on a toned gesso panel. Silverpoint is a considerably more deliberate drawing medium than most others because it's nearly impossible to efface the marks once laid down. In this image I used memory and a photo reference to evoke a dreamy state of mind. This image is larger than usual to show the silver marks. 

"Biddy," brush and ink, 2015

The final image is a sketch I did using black ink and a round watercolor brush. Brush drawing with ink is a method that has entirely gone out of fashion since the middle of the 20th century. This is a copy of an image in one of the Famous Artists School textbooks. You can see the brush marks but there are no touches with a pen in this drawing. As an aside, those books are useful as guides to certain kinds of drawing and composition. The series I have are from the early 1950s.