Figure Drawing Intensive Workshop

This past weekend, I conducted a figure drawing intensive workshop at the School of Light and Color in Fair Oaks, Ca. When I agreed to do the workshop, I wasn't sure how I'd approach condensing a whole lot of information into just two days. "It would be pretty intense", I thought. And so I threw in the term "intensive" in the title of the workshop. And it was pretty intense.



At my old studio, I taught a weekly drawing class but this was the first time I'd done a drawing "workshop". I'm glad I did. It forced me to think more clearly the process of seeing, analyzing, and interpreting the figure, and try to break it down into digestible bits of information.




We don't have to worry about color when drawing, so one can say that drawing is easier than painting. On the other hand, it's also true that you don't have color and gooey paint to hide your weaknesses. You can't fake it, in other words. It is frustratingly difficult to pack a whole lot of information and expression in a single line, but when done well there's nothing like it. Da Vinci said simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. He knew what he was talking about, didn't he.




What I teach in my drawing workshop is not the exacting rendering of the Academic tradition. You know where the model sits for hours, sometimes days on end in the same pose and the students painstakingly copy what's in front of them as precisely as humanly possible. No, I never liked doing that in school, and I still don't like it.

My own opinion is that the gesture is the most important element of figure drawing, followed by depiction of form.




I stress in my class, that our job is to communicate what the model is doing, not what she looks like. I think it's important to define the purpose of our endeavor, else we're lost in the sea of conflicting methods and philosophies.

I have my students do 15 second drawings of what looks like stick figures. I'm sure some students thought "I'm paying money to draw stick figures!?" But we quickly progress to longer poses, each time I add one or two new elements to consider. Like the addition of cross contours, form overlap, and foreshortening.



You can't learn to draw in just a weekend, but given enough information and tips on how to see, and analyze the figure, you can at least know what to look for. Indeed, everyone - and I mean every single student in my workshop - made great progress. I can see light bulbs going off as they drew their cross contours and that's very exciting and rewarding to me.




The first day was spent entirely on line work. No "shading", because I wanted everyone to be able to depict form without using shading to suggest volume. Nothing wrong with using tones to show volume, but I didn't want it to be a crutch. Too many people rely on tone and fail to understand the full potential of the line. If you can draw the form with just line, then you have so much more freedom of expression with the tone, because the volume is already there before you even indicate any shadows.




Anyway, I learned a lot by teaching this workshop, and I believe I will be doing this again in mid July. If you're interested, please make sure you're on my mailing list so that you don't miss it.

Last Child

Except for the Friday figure sessions, I haven't done any painting in the last three weeks. I have been spending my time in front of the computer, working on my new and vastly improved(!) workshop handout. Since I have my Napa workshop coming up in less than a month, I'm really racing against the clock to get that done.

As I have no paintings to share with you today, I thought I'd dig up an old illustration job I did and talk about that a little bit.

As you may or may not know, before I became a full time painter, I made my living as an illustrator for such clients as Time, Newsweek, Rollingstone, SI and hundreds of other publications. I was mostly an editorial illustrator, but from time to time I got to work on book jacket assignments. Because of my moody style, I got moody stories which was just fine by me.

Last Child by Michael Spooner was one such book. It was written for early teen readers, I think, and it featured a central character named Rosalie, who is half Caucasian, half native American. She struggles with her identity as she transitions into adulthood, which came on too soon due to a tragic smallpox epidemic that wiped out her tribe.

I really wanted to work with the identity thing, so I chose to do a portrait treatment for the cover. I did not know any 14 yr old half Native American half Caucasian girl with a "defiant gaze and a determined chin", and dark, wavy hair as described in the script, so finding a model that exactly fit the description was pretty much out of the question. So I made her up, and fortunately, the art director and the editor loved how she looked.

After I got the OK on her looks, I did several different designs using a few choice symbolic elements from the story; the feather in her hair, the buffalo, fire, smoke. The client and I fine tuned the design, and I finalized the illustration by refining color, texture, edges, etc.


This is the dust jacket spread. The flattened look of the illustration style is my nod to a couple of my illustration heroes, Bernie Fuchs and Mark English.

The illustration was done entirely in Photoshop. The girl and the buffalo are basically tablet paintings, with texture worked into them. Below is how Rosalie looked at an early stage.



As you can see, it's very loosely done, and like my tonalist paintings, built around a single color theme. I "toned the canvas" as it were, and simply used lighter and darker versions of that color to start the painting. Working transparently, I gradually (but fairly quickly) built up the forms, just trying to get the general feel for her personality.


I saw that she was looking too young and meek, so as I developed her features, I tried to imagine what a "defiant gaze" would look like on a 14 yr old girl. By and by, I started to recognize her as the character in the book, and by this stage, I was pretty sure I had her.

I didn't worry about going much tighter than this because I knew I was going to work with a lot of texture and details would be lost anyway, and also because I wanted that Mark English flatness. Too much realism would surely have worked against that goal.




A detail shot of Rosalie after I worked out the surface texture. I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

My typical editorial illustration had this kind of dark moodiness, but I did more of the digital collage thing for magazines, not so much painting (albeit tablet painting) like this. I loved fiction projects because they gave me opportunities to draw and paint. Not that I didn't enjoy the digital collage assignments - I really liked those too, especially since I got to do gloom and doom kind of stories. I'll show ya some of those another time~

Backlit

Bohemian, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

My strategy for painting this backlit situation was to key up the shadow side. The idea being, it takes illumination to see anything. If the shadow side is dark, we really can't see much. So I like to make it light enough where it makes sense for colors to not only be visible, but have some saturation. (Ever try seeing color in the dark?) This often means that I am painting the shadow side much lighter than it actually is.

Consequently, the light side becomes even lighter. Almost washed out, really. Which is just fine because it simplifies shapes, knocks out unnecessary details and allows me to link together unrelated objects to create abstraction.

The darkened background further helps to make her shadow side (which is most of what we're looking at) seem illuminated. My palette is usually pretty gray anyway, but in this case, the few notes of color was enough to make the painting seem full-colored, so I felt at liberty to make the rest as muted as I pleased.

Kevin Courter and Terry Miura; Two Northern California Painters

I'm excited to (finally) announce the upcoming two-man show!

My friend Kevin Courter and I will be presenting our recent landscapes at the Holton Studio in a few weeks. Kevin's masterful and refined tonalist paintings are among the best of the genre today, and it is a privilege to be showing with him. I think you'll find the juxtaposition of our two styles very interesting, especially since they depict similar landscapes and are heavy on the mood and the atmosphere.

From what I've seen, the show is going to be pretty sweet. But as if that's not enough, every single painting will be framed by master frame-maker Tim Holton, in his immaculate Early-California Arts and Crafts style frames. What a treat!

The show opens March 27th, and the reception is open to everyone; 5 ~ 7 pm. If you're anywhere near the Bay Area, (even if you're not) Come!! Say hello and see this special exhibition. Share a glass of wine with us!

See more of Kevin's work.
Holton Studio: 5515 Doyle Street, Emeryville, CA (510)450-0350


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Busy Spinning Wheels

The Arroyo, Evening 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I've been so busy lately but not because I've been painting. I'm busy spinning wheels, not getting anywhere. Well, that's not true exactly, but all this non-art stuff I have to take care of is making me cranky. Taxes? Haven't started yet. Don't even mention it!

The biggest part of my time away from my easel these past two weeks have been spent in front of the computer, updating the handout material for my plein air workshops that's coming up. Several years ago I did my first demo/lecture and I typed up a bunch of what I thought was practical, key information and handed it out to everyone. That turned out to be 12 pages of well received wisdom. (Everytime I mention wisdom, I have to remind people that it isn't my wisdom, but an accumulated art knowledge of hundreds of years of painting tradition. I'm just passing on the parts I've been able to understand)

Since then, each time I do a plein air workshop, I've edited and added to that material. It's become heftier each time, and this year, I am giving it a major overhaul. It looks like it's going to be about 55 pages, fully illustrated (full color!) and perfect-bound. It's turning into a book! I'm pretty excited about it. At this point, I only plan on making it available for my workshops, but if it keeps growing - and I can see that it will – someday, I'd like to see it published. It's chock full of practical information and it gets into some theory as well. Every bit of Do's and Don'ts is backed up by logic and reason, which is my forte, I think.

Anyway, my first plein air workshop is coming up in mid-April. (Sorry, it's filled up. Actually, it filled up in about six hours after I sent out announcements via e-newsletter – a new record!) and I am racing against the clock to finish my workshop book. I'm hoping there won't be any speed bumps between now and then. Knock on wood.

If you're interested in attending one of my workshops, please make sure you're on my mailing list. (there's a link to join on the side bar) Because that's where I announce it first and it typically always fills up within a week, by the time you see it announced on my blog or website, registration is already closed.

I'm thinking about doing one in early August on the coast. Anyone interested?

Group Show at Christopher Queen Gallery

Dawn Cypress, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I'm in a group show at the Christopher Queen Gallery in Duncans Mills, Ca. Duncans Mills is a tiny little town on the Russian River, a few miles inland from Jenner. The gallery hosted the Russian River Plein Air event a few years ago, in which I participated and had a blast painting the diverse landscape of that area. It really is a special place, what with giant redwood forests, wineries, riverscapes, beaches and spectacular cliffs of the sonoma coast all within a few miles. Paul Kratter, Dave Sellers and I had a merry ol' time hanging out and having too much to drink at this dive punk bar, the Pink Elephant. Kind of a weird place to have a punk bar, but then the whole area is strange. It has a sort of "forgotten by time" feel to it. Modern pop culture is irrelevant there. I kept thinking, "I could get used to this..."

The painting I'm posting was done during that event, and It's a view of cypress trees on a small island on the Russian River, very close to the Pacific Ocean. The town... if you can call one gas station a town... is called Jenner, and it really feels remote. I slept in a little cottage overlooking the river during the week I was there. No TV, no cell reception, no street lights...very, very quiet. If you want to get away from civilization for a while, I highly recommend it.

But I digress. This painting was the last of the bunch I did in and around Duncan's Mills, and every time I drove on that rode (and I went back and forth on that rode many times) I noted the light on these Cypress trees. I loved the shape and if only I could get good light on it, I knew I had a painting. So I observed it from dawn to dusk, and decided that early morning was best. Fortunately, there was a small turn out on the road where I could park my truck and set up, protected by the glare of the morning sun and the sometimes unpredictable wind.

If I were to paint it again now, it would come out differently. But I remember liking it a lot then.

Christpher Queen Gallery has a lot of early California art in their collection, a real treat if you're into the California tonalists of the early 20th century. It's a bit of a drive from... anywhere, but the drive along the river and the coast is beautiful, and would make a fun day trip if you're looking for something interesting to do this Sunday, which is when the show opens.

Christopher Queen Gallery is located #4 John Orr's Gardens, Duncans Mills, CA. Google map here.

"Lesser Artists Do That"

On my last post, by my quoting Carmean, I didn't mean that "lesser artists" do portraiture, or that portraiture is a lesser form of art. On the contrary, it not only requires mastery of the medium, but also a capacity to embrace, understand, interpret and express infinite varieties of the human condition. No small task. That's why I'm not a portrait painter.

Carmean often said "Lesser artists do that" about what the student was doing with line work, or shading, or some other basic technical thing. Basically telling us we sucked.

I just wanted to make that clear.