First week of study (so far)

It seems to be about par for the course lately that I'm up in the middle of the night. There are a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head, so I thought I'd get at least some of them down (which might not be the best idea when it's 2AM, but oh well).

Earlier this summer I won a scholarship for a month of full time study at a local atelier in the fall. I was pretty shocked that they selected me as the winner, since I really didn't feel like I had done much in the way of good work. But I was told that the decision was based largely on what they had seen of my dedication and stick-to-it-iveness (I had been coming around for evening drawing sessions for a while).

I've been looking forward to this for months, and I started on Monday. Part of the day is spent working on a Bargue drawing copy (pictured above). The goal is to make an exact copy, virtually indistinguishable from the original (minus all the copier fuzz and all ;). I've worked on some copies at home, of course, but I usually try to choose something that sparks my interest so I don't get bored (and I'm probably not quite as meticulous about accuracy). 

This particular Bargue copy isn't especially interesting to me, so it can begin to feel pretty tedious (and I'm only about 4 hours in or so... the other students tell me I should expect to spend at least a few weeks working on it, whew). The point of this exercise is to be able to see accurately in the large shapes and continue to break the drawing down into smaller and smaller details. It's a good exercise, and as you can see, drawing with that level of accuracy is a slow process.

In the afternoons there is a 3-hour live figure session--I forgot to get a picture of that drawing, but it's not looking all too great at this point anyway. We will spend approximately 48 hours working on the same drawing, so I guess I'm about 1/8 of the way through. Honestly, thinking about spending that long on one drawing is pretty overwhelming right now, and I'm trying to figure out how to move forward from where I am at this point (which is approximately about as far as I get on a small 2-hour sketch--we draw much larger on the long pose). And figuring out how to sharpen fragile pieces of charcoal without breaking them into a thousand tiny pieces is a challenge, ha.

There are also the regular evening quick 2-hour figure and 3-hour portrait sessions (see first image for last night's figure). Last night by 7pm, I had been standing for 6 hours straight, which isn't something I'm used to, and I was tired. So I sat and drew this figure freehand, no measuring in particular except to check some angles here and there. I don't think it's too terrible considering how exhausted I was (I don't think I mentioned that I only slept about 4 hours the night before :P). I'm really trying to push myself to see the values more accurately that separate the figure from the background, and the shadow shapes within the figure. A light bulb went off several weeks ago when I realized that the terminating line (core shadow) is darker than the rest of the shadow. It sounds silly, because I knew that intellectually, and had seen all sorts of diagrams explaining it. But it hadn't clicked up to that point, and now that it has I just have to try to figure out how to execute that knowledge effectively.

Before I end this post, one more thing. I'm told that I need to have a reason for wanting to do this, if I want to have any hope of getting through this kind of rigorous training. Finding one reason for wanting to do something isn't really my style. I don't deal so well in absolutes, and it can make me crazy if I try. But I do know a few things about my reasons. Of course I want to be great at something, to create beautiful things, to say something meaningful that will take on some form of immortality. All of these are compelling reasons for creating art, and they all resonate with me. But when it all comes down to it, I think I do this because I can't NOT do it. I've tried to leave it alone--I just can't. Is this therapeutic for me? Not necessarily. It creates a lot of frustration and drama in my life that I could probably live without... except, of course, that I can't. Is that enough reason to keep it going? I guess time will tell.

Here's a little gem I found in my brother's closet last week, left over from that far-off time before I tried to let this all go (I got an A- on this one, ha ;).