Saturday, March 21, 2009

Ink Drawings, A Dream, Photography

Here are a few new pages from my sketchbook. What's different about the drawings? There are heads! Entire heads! Oh man---I took a deep breath and tried some faces.

I was still nervous enough that I worked out a pencil drawing first, then picked up my favorite lines in ink and corrected the drawing as I moved the brush. 

Pulling a brush across a page and slowly turning it is such a great action to be a part of! I closely watched the tiniest hairs on my brush tap the page and then stiffen up again. I absolutely love repeating the fragile creases around eyelids, and around corners of mouths, and in subtle folds of skin. Last night I even dreamed I was drawing these same pictures, and I was still paying close attention to those little creases and folds in skin.

A lot of these eyes look very photographic to me. Do you see it? I'm pretty sure that, even if I were making these drawings from life (which is also on my TO DO list), they would look pretty similar to these (which have been drawn from photos), because most of the images I've ever seen have either been photos or heavily influenced by photography. 

There is so much to be had from cave drawings and I'm always picking up a new book or looking for new pictures of them. For one thing, cave drawings have such a different visual language. Even the syle (for lack of a better word...I'll have to figure out what that word is, though, sometime) used by cave painters has such a life to it. 

These eyes I've drawn look photographic---like they're snapshots of someone who knows they're being photographed. It's funny how, in some ways, the camera doesn't really capture life after all. Think of a photo of a pitcher throwing a baseball and a blurred crowd in the background, standing anxiously. There is no time where we'd see a baseball frozen in the air like in the photograph, yet most people talk about realism as an integral part of photography.

That's not supposed to be a knock against photography---just a thought. A nice hike up the canyon Saturday led me to attempt drawing the rocks and water in the Provo River. I hope to do it again soon, even if it means coming back with sorry attempts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How wild! Alex was just talking about this same photography philosophy in class the other day. How what you see is not real because that moment doesn't exist outside of the photograph. He personified the camera as if it had an ability of it's own--to see things WE never would. "It's like a fly, it's got a whole different view".