Drawing Class 01

Thursday, 5 March 2015

Carolee Schneemann (1939 - )

Up To And Including Her Limits was the direct result of Pollock's physicalized painting process....I am suspended in a tree surgeon's harness on a three-quarter-inch manila rope, a rope which I can raise or lower manually to sustain an entranced period of drawing– my extended arm holds crayons which stroke the surrounding walls, accumulating a web of colored marks. My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body's energy in motion." - Retrieved from this link

Watch this video to get a better understanding of Schneemann's "performance art", where she incorporates the body into her work:

From this link

Wednesday, 4 March 2015

There is a lovely rough, gestural quality to Emin's work. Her use of line is very fluid, awkward and uneven. I get the sense from these drawings that they were done quickly. There is a wonderful loose and vague quality to her work, like she has stopped drawing as soon as she thought that she had communicated enough information about the form. Some of her work reminds me of Matisse's line drawings, especially in the way they only communicate pieces of visual information which the viewer then has to piece together.

From this link

Antony Gormley (1950 - )

"In Antony Gormley’s remarkable drawings the body is not so much seen from the outside as felt from the inside. The drawings express physical and spiritual experiences of what it is like to be a human being in the world, with fear and loneliness as well as joy and sharing. The figure is not standardised and ideal, but can be small or large; it is not isolated and complete in itself but interacts with the space and the light and dark areas around itself." - Retrieved from this link

I like the fluidity of Gormley's work, especially his work in ink where it appears he has used a large amount of water to dilute and distort the body. I like how the body is hinted at in some of his work. The human form is often silhouetted and blocked in, with no facial features or details recorded, adding to an ambiguity and anonymity to his work. He doesn't get caught up on that the ideal body should look like, but explores and describes the human form in a free and gestural way.

From this link

Ideal image of a man

"About 500 years ago Leonardo da Vinci made a drawing of a man. With his feet together and his arms stretched apart, the outer limits of his body are juxtaposed on a square. Superimposed on this is the same body with feet apart and the arms stretched slightly higher, this time a circle is drawn joining the outer tips of his limbs. Leonardo drew the ideal image of man in a universe described by mathematics: man is seen from the outside in terms of an abstract ideal of perfection at the beginning of the modern technological age." - Retrieved from this link

from this link

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Key points on Meyhew's 'The Naked and the Blind' excerpt

Life drawing as images and life drawing as a practice
Figurative representations
Gender and sexuality
Art images conform to the dominant social modality of figurative representations
Gender bias, misogyny and violence in the images
Life drawing as symptoms of a misogynist culture
The practice of life drawing as a specific set of techniques in order to reduce the representation of women's bodies to empty surfaces upon which meaning can be inscribed
Assumption that the artists and viewers are male and that all models are female
Male centre spectatorship
Collectively performed process of figurative spectatorship and responsive mark making
Contemporary practice of life drawing often uses the life model as a pretext for executing an internalised ideal or representation of what a naked figure should look like
Highly contrived set of stylistic conventions
Academic life drawing
Controlled mark making
Copying from classical images and casts
Copying
Stylistic conventions
The history of life drawing classes has been explicitly concerned with training students to generate a figurative representation based on what the knew, rather than what they saw
The naked model functioned less as a source of visual information, then as a theatrical deice to contain and control the pedagogical theatre of the academy.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988)

"Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol." - retrieved from this link

Notice Basquiat's childlike style, the linear quality of his work and the graffiti elements? He stylises the human form, creating cartoon characters reminiscent of stick figures or doodles. His work is very colourful, bright and vibrant. He also uses quite a bit of black in his work. There is a lot of linear patterning in his work, similar to the dysgraphic scribbles of children. There is something very distorted and disrupted in his work, as well and it being increasingly unskilled.

What is Neo-Expressionism?

Neo-expressionism is a style of late-modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials. Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognisable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colours. - retrieved from this link

From this link

What is dysgraphia?

In order to get a better understanding of dysgraphia, I looked it up on Google to see what information I could find on the web. I found some interesting information, such as it being an issue with coherence, organisation and expression.

"Dysgraphia is a condition that causes trouble with written expression. The term comes from the Greek words dys (“impaired”) and graphia (“making letter forms by hand”). Dysgraphia is a brain-based issue.

For many children with dysgraphia, just holding a pencil and organising letters on a line is difficult. Their handwriting tends to be messy. Many struggle with spelling and putting thoughts on paper.These and other writing tasks—like putting ideas into language that is organised, stored and then retrieved from memory—may all add to struggles with written expression. "