Two weeks ago I had some down time when I was at SMFA, so I had the chance to drop into an open life drawing session for a short time. My work hasn’t concentrated on working from observation with a figure for several years now that my focus has shifted to a different direction. At the same time, life drawing has played a significant role in my development as an artist and picking this up again just for a short time was terrific. If you’re one of my students you’ll laugh when you hear this: I had forgotten just how insanely tiring life drawing is. The other aspect of life drawing which I had forgotten about was the insatiability that comes with the experience of life drawing; every mark I put down left me wanting to do more. There’s a feeling of desperation in that process which I really thrive on.

5 minute gesture drawing, crayon on newsprint

I had a math teacher once who was the only math teacher I can recall who ever took the time to justify why we had to learn math: it’s not that knowing the quadratic equation will be directly applied into your life experience, it’s about learning how to think mathematically. The same goes with life drawing: life drawing allows you to hone the necessary skills that can be applied within the context of other disciplines in the visual arts. There’s frequently such an emphasis placed on the drawings themselves, but I see the experience of life drawing as being about the process of collecting of visual information through observation, which is then manipulated and interpreted.

5 minute gesture drawing, crayon on newsprint

With the end of the academic year on the horizon, this is a point in the year when I like to take time to think about my philosophy as a teacher and how I can continue to improve in my classes. No matter how many times I’ve taught a class or a specific subject, I’m constantly revising my course materials and tweaking my slideshows to make them smoother and more informed. At the end of the year is the best time to do this: everything is fresh in my mind and I actually revise my course materials for the fall semester before I start preparing materials for my summer classes.

My teaching philosophy is always an organic thought, which shifts and changes itself on an ongoing basis. Lately I’ve been thinking about teaching as a series of opposite concepts, some of which I’ve listed below:

1. Art History and Contemporary Practice
2. Failure and Success
3. Group goals and Individual Goals
4. Control and Experimentation.

I think about these pairs of opposites as a way to understand and place landmarks at the extreme ends of the spectrum, so that what’s in between is easier to discern. These pairs also inform and support each other: without failure, success has no meaning. Without an understanding of art history, contemporary practice has no context to be seen in. Ultimately, teaching is about an ability to balance all of these concepts into a fluid process.  I try to keep my point of view on teaching relatively simple, especially because nothing is predictable in the classroom, precisely one of the reasons why I enjoy teaching. These pairs of opposite concepts have helped create a framework for me to work within and to reference.

I’m trying to catch up on exhibitions while my studio work is temporarily on hold because of the inevitable flood of work that happens at the end of the academic year. The other day I went to see “El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of King Philip III” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston during a lunch break when I was at SMFA. I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain when I was studying abroad my junior year at RISD and that experience alone cemented and heightened exponentionally my tremendous appreciation for Spanish painters like Velazquez, Goya, and El Greco. I visited more museums than I can count that year, and the Prado was hands down the best museum experience I had during that time.

The exhibition was primarily focused on oil painting, although there were a few life size figurative sculptures as well. Seeing the El Greco paintings in person in the context of other paintings of his time makes you appreciate how daring it must have been for him to push distortion of the human figure to the extent that he did. What I noticed specifically in looking at the actual paintings was the perfection of the feet of his figures which never seemed to hold any weight, as well as glossy and luminous eyes which stood out against the corpse-like fleshiness of skin. The portrait which struck me the most was his portrait of St. Jerome. The distortion is so extreme, especially in terms of the tiny wrinkled head and the arms which seem completely detached from the body.

El Greco, “St. Jerome, cardinal”, 1587-1597

A Spanish painter who I wasn’t familiar with before seeing this exhibition was Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. I found his portraits of the royal family to be quite bizarre, despite the fact that they were to represent the royal family. The portraits of children were uncomfortably stiff, and yet the obsessive attention to detail in the clothing was astonishing in it’s delicacy and gestural quality. It’s impossible to see in this digital image, but he painted every stitch in the embroidery of the girl’s dress. The most impressive passages was the lace on the collars: he put down a blur of grey paint to imply the form of the collar and then layered over that the tiniest brushstrokes you can imagine to precisely articulate the intricate lace pattern. I also thought the baby “walker” the boy is sitting in is just about the strangest piece of furniture: it’s a baby walker and yet it’s designed like a throne, symbolizing the boy’s future reign.

Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, “The Infantes Don Felipe and Doña Ana,” 1607

One of my intaglio prints from the Digging Series will be acquired by the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. A print collector who saw my work when I had a solo exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art is purchasing several prints from me this week. This print shown below is going to the Hood Museum’s print collection.

This print is an aquatint in which the image is drawn by an acid-resistant lithographic pencil, which is what creates the look and feel of a charcoal drawing in the plate. This technique frequently confuses people because after the black lithographic pencil gets processed, the pencil markings become the white parts of the plate, and the untouched areas become black. Therefore, you have to draw the tones in your plate in reverse as if it were a photo negative. When I used to teach Intaglio Printmaking I, this was always a very tough concept for people to get over, especially if you have a lot of drawing experience which allows you to get accustomed to seeing the results right in front of you the whole way through the process. It’s certainly an excellent technique in terms of preserving the direct translation of drawing in a print; I remember when I processed this plate I had very few states because the final etching of tones was so faithful to the original drawing done with the lithographic pencil.

“Line”, aquatint & drypoint, 12″ x 12″, 2004

I spent the afternoon at the Boston Print Fair at the Boston Public Library. I’ve been to the IFPDA Print fair in New York City before, but this was my first time at this fair. This event is nowhere near the scale or the NY event, but there was still a terrific range of work represented by many print dealers from across the country. I was surprised the first time I went to the IFPDA Print Fair that there were actually Rembrandt and Kathe Kollwitz prints for sale. One would think that they had already been scooped up by every museum out there, but apparently not. It was an amazing chance to get really close to a lot of historical and contemporary works. I caught a quick glance at an etching, “Night Shadows” by Edward Hopper as well as a woodcut by Kathe Kollwitz today.

Edward Hopper, “Night Shadows”, etching, 1921

I was asked to participate by the Boston Printmakers, so several of us did rotating shifts throughout the weekend showing our work as well as the process of making prints. All of us brought plates and prints at various states in order to demonstrate the printing process. The majority of the time, printmaking processes can be huge enigmas; it’s nearly impossible to look at a print and discern the process without a significant background in the process.

Today was a day full of long overdue museum visits. I went to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College to see “Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian”. The exhibition highlights a little known era of prints executed in unusually large scale, many of which served roles similar to that of a tapestry, a map, sculpture, or a book album. The scale alone transforms your interaction with the prints; I think that prints are inherently seen as more intimate and small in scale as opposed to paintings and sculpture which typically move into the monumental without hesitation. The exhibition was filled with prints that demonstrated incredible skill and ability to push the boundaries and expectations of the print. Many of the prints in the show were woodcuts, and nearly every print was printed from multiple blocks. The largest piece and most impressive work in the show was “The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I”, an 11 foot tall woodcut by Durer, printed from 192 blocks. It boggled my mind to even think about the conception of this print as well as the astonishing skill and labor it must have required.

“The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I” by Durer

A small Durer woodcut was humorous, playful, and amazing for it’s detail and range. I loved the mini-narratives between the tiny figures that seemed to play across this landscape. At one point I located two figures jousting in the middle of the field. Entitled “Siege of a Fortress” it depicts a hypothetical siege with numerous soldiers spread throughout like tiny ants.

“Siege of a Fortress” by Durer

This morning I went to the Danforth Museum of Art and saw Ana Maria Pacheco’s exhibition “Dark Night of the Soul“. Pacheco is a Brazilian artist who currently lives and works in England. The exhibition included one large sculpture installation, some large scale charcoal drawings and some small scale etchings. The etchings reminded me a lot of Paula Rego’s work and of Goya’s narrative prints. The sculpture installation was the undeniable highlight of the exhibition; when you enter the museum you have to enter through a doorway covered by a curtain to see the sculpture. The moment I stepped behind the curtain into the installation, I felt a chill in my blood and instantly felt myself holding my breath in. The installation is comprised of 19 life size, polychromed wood figures surrounding a kneeling figure of a hooded man who has been shot multiple times with arrows. The entire room is completely dark except for a few lights to highlight parts of the installation. I continued to hold my breath the whole time I was in the gallery. I can’t remember the last time I saw sculpture that affected me in a physical way like that. To put it simply, the work was terrifying, powerful, and moving. You can see more of Pacheco’s work at her website.

“Dark Night of the Soul” by Ana Maria Pacheco

Lastly at the Danforth, there was an exhibition of photographic transparencies by Katherine Gulla entitled “Cast Shadows”. Lighting and shadows have always been important elements in my work, and it was exciting to see someone taking on cast shadows in a such a specific light. The works were atmospheric, painterly, subtle, and full of depth, traits that I think are not inherent in photographic mediums and therefore much more challenging to achieve convincingly. I particularly liked the way the images are placed at a tilt against the wall, creating a whole new set of cast shadows on the gallery wall itself.

I had initially planned on moving ahead with a huge group composition on 18″ x 24″ sheets of sanded Dura-Lar. However, I sanded 2 sheets of Dura-Lar and then got really freaked out thinking about how I was going to actually work with these layers. I’ve never worked with transparent layers before in drawing, and when I sat down to actually do it, I realized how little I knew about how to organize the process.

I took a few steps back and decided to do some small scale sketches of a few figures on the sanded Dura-Lar, so that I could get myself used to this new surface before embarking on something more ambitious. One experiment I tried was sanding the Dura-Lar only in a horizontal direction, hoping that the direction might work well with the horizontal marks in the water. Contrary to my expectation, I actually found the horizontal sanding really limiting in terms of the different textures I could get with the crayon, so I nixed that option. Making this small sketch allowed me to realize what not to do in my crayon technique: smudging the lithographic rubbing ink ended up just looking sloppy, and I need a more thoroughly sanded surface to get more variety in the texture.

It’s tough to see in this digital image, but there are two sheets of Dura-Lar in this image.

In other news, I’m gearing up for the Boston Print Fair at the Boston Public Library this weekend. The Print Fair actually starts tonight, but I’ll be present showing my prints and plates on Sunday, May 4th from 3:00-5:00pm. Admission is free, and there will be many print dealers from across the country exhibiting prints.

The other day I had an experience which related directly to some of the themes I’m working with in these crayon drawings. I was with a relatively large group of people and everyone was milling about socializing and talking to each other. I will admit that socializing in a large group is usually torture for me, especially when I’m with people I don’t know very well but have to interact with nevertheless. I’m always worried about who to talk to and looking occupied to everyone else. At one point, I was in between conversations and floating around on my own. Someone came up to me and said “You look lost”. The way I see it, this person was both heightening my sense of isolation by this statement but at the same time brought me out of it by speaking to me, an oddly contradictory feeling. This got me thinking that loneliness or isolation in a group can also be seen as being “lost” in the group.

I’m now viewing my figures as being “unseen”, “unknown”, and “lost”. Just to keep me thinking about how to define these terms in the context of these drawings, I looked up the dictionary definitions to see if it might generate any visual associations. I’ve placed the most important ones here:

Unseen:
not seen; unperceived; unobserved; invisible

Unknown:
not known; not within the range of one’s knowledge, experience, or understanding; strange; unfamiliar
not discovered, explored, identified, or ascertained

Lost:
distracted; distraught; desperate; hopeless
no longer to be found
having gone astray or missed the way; bewildered as to place, direction, etc

I’m trying to put together a schematic which states in the simplest terms possible what this project is currently about and the “rules” I’m establishing for making these crayon drawings. My husband Alex who is an animator and filmmaker has told me in the past that there is a saying in filmmaking: you have to be able to sum up what your film is about in a single sentence. So although there’s certainly a lot more to these themes than what I’ve written below, it helps me to look at them in their most distilled form.

Rules for drawing
1. 5 sheets of clear Dura-Lar.
2. Each sheet is thoroughly sanded, in no specific direction.
3. Only the greasiest crayons are used: Korn’s #00 and lithographic rubbing ink.
4. All crayon marks are directly drawn, there is no smudging allowed.

Environmental Themes
1. Water as a sustaining and destructive substance.
2. Water consuming us, us consuming water.

Emotional themes
1. Isolation, specifically loneliness.
2. The most bitter form of loneliness is when it is experienced in a group context.
3. The experience of loneliness in a group context: feeling unseen or unknown in the group

In thinking about loneliness in its most concentrated form, I remember my sister once sent out one of those email questionnaires that have random questions for you to answer. One of the questions was “what is your greatest fear?”. Both my brother and I responded with “to die in a really terrible” way. My sister’s answer eclipsed our response: “to be all alone with no friends or family”.

I attended the Boston Printmakers annual meeting on Sunday. It’s great to meet up with everyone, some of whom are my former colleagues, and current colleagues as well. It’s odd how you can teach at the same school as someone else and almost never see them there if your schedules don’t line up. There’s also an informal print viewing session after lunch which is always the highlight of the meeting.

I brought the Wading monotypes and it was nice to get some feedback from various people, especially with their printmaking backgrounds. One comment I received from more than one person was the necessity to have each monotype keep the progression of five prints. This was reassuring, as I had been initially hesitant about whether the sequence of five prints was overly repetitive. The other reaction to presenting a set of five prints that I liked was that the sequence reveals the printing process, a feature which is not always inherent in a print. Sometimes the process in printmaking can be so enigmatic and hidden, making it nearly impossible for an untrained eye to identify the process.

Afterwards I stopped by the frameshop to sign a matt for a monotype I’m having framed for an exhibition. The five print format of the monotype made for challenging frame choices. While each print is only 22″ x 9″, when you put five in a row and add the matt the final scale is almost 60″ wide. I was very pleased with the finished matt; my framer had suggested not showing the bevel which I think in the end gave the print a cleaner look.