Cast drawing

[Lon Haverly]

This drawing is all form, but very little of you. I would like to see these kinds of studies with some evidence that it as drawn.

I know there are many here that promote photo-realistic cast works, I just like to see more style, rather than just copying reality. We have cameras.

Good copying, tho.

[Sharon Knettell]

Originally Posted by Lon Haverly

This drawing is all form, but very little of you. I would like to see these kinds of studies with some evidence that it as drawn.

I know there are many here that promote photo-realistic cast works, I just like to see more style, rather than just copying reality. We have cameras.

Good copying, tho.

Lon,

This is not photo-realist photo copying, but a basic exercise like learning the scales in piano. Degas and Sargent studied this way and they were quite individualistic to say the least. This was the basic foundation of the French ateliers taught many master painters.

She is not just copying reality, but training her eye on a non-moving object that has been done by a master, this, I think is a cast from Michelangelo's-"The Slave".

Many artists today have 'style', but not mastery.

[David Clemons]

Personally, I'd rather not see a photo of the cast. In doing so we'd be comparing the drawing to a photo and not the actual cast itself. What we're left with here is evaluating the work as a drawing, for which it is a very nice example of, by the way.

As Mischa was saying there are some concerns with edges that stand out somewhat. There's a line at the top of the head between the hair and background that seems a bit darker than I'd expect it to be, for example.

[Lon Haverly]

Question for the artist: did you work from the original cast, or from a photo of the cast?

I am not convinced that studies in super detail are of great value, no more than I am convinced that blind gesture drawing, on the other extreme, is of great value. The one locks the eye-hand into a contract with the subject. The other makes no connection between the eye-hand at all.

Somewhere in between is where the time should be spent. I was doing cast drawing from early childhood at art school. The purpose was not to extract photo-detail, but to learn about light and shadow, form, line, blocking-in and shading. We would draw the image, then it would be turned in a different angle, the lighting changed, and we would draw it again completely different.

We seemed to have lost the intent of cast drawing. It was less about photo-realism, and more about light and shadow, form, line, blocking-in and shading, and how all that changes with the same piece.

I was never told that extreme realism was the goal. Perhaps you were. May I suggest that if that is the case, you have arrived. Any critiques of form on this drawing is sheer nit-pickery.

[Sharon Knettell]

I think like any method of teaching, there are sheep and lions.

Many gifted people studied that method, many did not.

Picasso and Van Gogh both did. http://www.e.millner.btinternet.co.u...urriculum.html

[Sharon Knettell]

Lon,

I think this would be a wonderful discussion on the Cafe Geurbois section.

You could post your views coming from a lifetime in art and see what other people's experiences and opinions are. I think this artist has been 'critiqued' enough and now it is going into the value of the method.