As part of my drawing classes in Amsterdam, I offer guided visits to museums in order to develop a good eye for how the masters achieved their impressive results. These visits are not historical, but purely analytical.
My last visit consisted on attending the Kazimir Malevich exhibition on the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It claims to be the largest collection of the artist ever assembled and judging by the number of works on display, I'm inclined to believe them.
I still have mixed feelings about this art exhibition as it seems to me Malevich navigated a fine line between being a genius and a fraud. On the one hand he was able to produce exquisite drawings and paintings, the degree of finish of all his work was impeccable and it is obvious he invested an immense deal of time and energy in his life, exploring art and his concepts and ideas about it. He was in other words honestly and highly dedicated to his craft, and not just some nutter making weird stuff.
Thus far so good. So where does it go wrong for me?
Perhaps it's in putting too much value on the ideas at the expense of the art itself. All the isms that he came up with are interesting concepts, but the art they inspired was rarefied and distant. Of course, a modern art curator would take those words and at the flip of a hat, give them a spin and turn them into what makes his paintings brilliant, but I'm not convinced. Malevich started by heavily imitating Gaugin and Cezanne, and then went off into some tangent, from which only a Russian government prohibition on abstract art brought him back.
It is of course impossible to take art out of its historical context, so I would never venture saying that for a painting to be good, it would have to fend for itself anywhere and at any moment. I do believe though, that a painting should fend for itself regardless of who made it. Otherwise, we're appealing to authority, and making the piece itself second in line.
What I mean to say is that if Malevich's black square is so brilliant, it should be hailed as such regardless of whether he made it, or someone else did. Ironically my point was proven in the same exhibition, where some lesser artist also produced a black square, except nobody talked about this one. That sounds to me more like religion than being objective about whether the work is good or not.
The situation reminds me of the movie Vanilla Sky, where Tom Cruise plays a millionaire playboy who's face is disfigured. Since surgery was not possible he is offered the most advanced facial prostetic in the market, which adapts to his features, allows the skin underneath to heal better, and has plenty of other advantages.
In a fit of irony, Cruise appears impressed and pleased a the suggestion and says he's grateful that they tell him all about these features and benefits, because otherwise he would have thought they were trying to make him wear a f@#!ng mask!
Well, I feel the same about a lot of Malevich's work. It requires so much explanation, so many isms and conceptual framework, that it makes me wonder if we're not just being offered a bloody black square. Once again I don't question his dedication and honest pursuit of pushing the boundaries of art, but what resulted may not look outstanding, which is to me THE test of a visual piece.
Some of his work, and that of his followers is worthy of a 3 year old. However, if modern art has shown us something is that adults making 3 year old worthy art can come up with really good concepts and excuses to justify it.
My 2 cents...
Showing posts with label drawing classes Amsterdam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drawing classes Amsterdam. Show all posts
Monday, October 28, 2013
Monday, September 30, 2013
Drawing lessons in Amsterdam, The importance of Method
During this post about the drawing classes I offer in the center of Amsterdam, I would like to describe in very brief detail the importance of method in learning art, and describe the alternative results that can be obtained.
Perhaps I can relate to this closely not due to my drawing lessons, but because of another passion in my life, which is to play guitar.
I have been playing for a long time, and after over a decade I have certain dexterity with my fingers, as well as what seems to be a more or less innate ability to hear things correctly. This last factor made me never look for musical education or method. I would listen to songs I liked and learned to play them, having lots of fun in the process and laughing at friends of mine who would attend guitar lessons.
Proper art lessons back then seemed like the most boring and pointless thing. They took away the spontaneity and turned this fun hobby into a boring methodical activity. They introduced effort and consistency into something that I though should be loose and organic.
This is very often the felling we have about drawing lessons and how art should be done.
In fact for some time my natural ear and enthusiasm made it so that I was ahead of all these guys taking endless lessons and learning boring scales and other such things. But then something funny started to happen. The guys taking consistent lessons had built a huge strong foundation and when the time came, their skills skyrocketed, while my playing remained sloppy and repetitive.
It hurts me to say it but this was over 15 years ago, and though my guitar skills have improved dramatically since then, I cannot compete with someone who learned and mastered the principles such as scales, correct picking technique, etc.
Such is the case with drawing lessons and art education in general. You can wing it up to a certain level but unless you learn the principles and learn them well, you will plateau for lack of knowledge if nothing else.
As a concrete example of what this means during drawing and painting, we can take portraits. It is indeed possible to draw and paint faces without any knowledge of anatomy, and to be fair the results may end up quite OK. However, quite OK is not good enough and if you want your portraits to acquire that clean impressive result, learning anatomy and formal portraiture methods is the only way to go.
There is a distinct look and feel to a portrait made by someone with thorough academic drawing education. The knowledge of line, value, planes and anatomy is unmistakable. It simply comes through.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that, deep knowledge of your subject's construction will guide your eye into trying to find landmarks that are all but invisible to the untrained eye.
During art history the way drawing lessons has been approached has changed dramatically and shifted from masters who would argue you should be able to draw from knowledge as opposed to observation, and then back. The old masters would be able to construct bodies and faces due to their very deep knowledge of anatomy, while the John Singer Sargents of this world would argue that the less you knew about the subject, the better off you were, relying only on visual perception.
This last tendency probably arose from the realization that you could never deeply know all subjects you wanted to paint, and while old masters limited themselves to drawing few subject matters, the new ones wanted broader subjects. Hence reliance on principles of observation was a better base.
Nowadays things couldn't be more divided, with illustrators and digital concept artists relying on their knowledge and imagination, and classical atelier artists doing the opposite, and going visual, taking all their cues from the real world.
My personal take, and one I try to advocate during my Amsterdam drawing classes, is to learn the principles and then deepen your knowledge on subjects for which your time, interest or technical skills allow. The human face and body would be examples where your knowledge must be deep because of the innate ability we have at perceiving inaccuracies in these subjects. All others subjects can begin with observational approaches which may become deeper if you so choose.
For what it's worht!
Perhaps I can relate to this closely not due to my drawing lessons, but because of another passion in my life, which is to play guitar.
I have been playing for a long time, and after over a decade I have certain dexterity with my fingers, as well as what seems to be a more or less innate ability to hear things correctly. This last factor made me never look for musical education or method. I would listen to songs I liked and learned to play them, having lots of fun in the process and laughing at friends of mine who would attend guitar lessons.
Proper art lessons back then seemed like the most boring and pointless thing. They took away the spontaneity and turned this fun hobby into a boring methodical activity. They introduced effort and consistency into something that I though should be loose and organic.
This is very often the felling we have about drawing lessons and how art should be done.
In fact for some time my natural ear and enthusiasm made it so that I was ahead of all these guys taking endless lessons and learning boring scales and other such things. But then something funny started to happen. The guys taking consistent lessons had built a huge strong foundation and when the time came, their skills skyrocketed, while my playing remained sloppy and repetitive.
It hurts me to say it but this was over 15 years ago, and though my guitar skills have improved dramatically since then, I cannot compete with someone who learned and mastered the principles such as scales, correct picking technique, etc.
Such is the case with drawing lessons and art education in general. You can wing it up to a certain level but unless you learn the principles and learn them well, you will plateau for lack of knowledge if nothing else.
As a concrete example of what this means during drawing and painting, we can take portraits. It is indeed possible to draw and paint faces without any knowledge of anatomy, and to be fair the results may end up quite OK. However, quite OK is not good enough and if you want your portraits to acquire that clean impressive result, learning anatomy and formal portraiture methods is the only way to go.
There is a distinct look and feel to a portrait made by someone with thorough academic drawing education. The knowledge of line, value, planes and anatomy is unmistakable. It simply comes through.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that, deep knowledge of your subject's construction will guide your eye into trying to find landmarks that are all but invisible to the untrained eye.
During art history the way drawing lessons has been approached has changed dramatically and shifted from masters who would argue you should be able to draw from knowledge as opposed to observation, and then back. The old masters would be able to construct bodies and faces due to their very deep knowledge of anatomy, while the John Singer Sargents of this world would argue that the less you knew about the subject, the better off you were, relying only on visual perception.
This last tendency probably arose from the realization that you could never deeply know all subjects you wanted to paint, and while old masters limited themselves to drawing few subject matters, the new ones wanted broader subjects. Hence reliance on principles of observation was a better base.
Nowadays things couldn't be more divided, with illustrators and digital concept artists relying on their knowledge and imagination, and classical atelier artists doing the opposite, and going visual, taking all their cues from the real world.
My personal take, and one I try to advocate during my Amsterdam drawing classes, is to learn the principles and then deepen your knowledge on subjects for which your time, interest or technical skills allow. The human face and body would be examples where your knowledge must be deep because of the innate ability we have at perceiving inaccuracies in these subjects. All others subjects can begin with observational approaches which may become deeper if you so choose.
For what it's worht!
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, for the Patient Painter
My academic drawing classes in Amsterdam for beginners and intermediate artists who wish to learn the way the old masters learned the craft.
When joining a drawing class in the academic style you may discover that some of your ideas about how to draw, and whether you were born to do it or not are not exactly correct. In a sense everybody was born to draw, and nobody was born to draw.
The most brilliant draftsmen (drawing artists) from the past, some of which indeed lived in Amsterdam, reached the level they did, not through flairs of genius which was obvious from an early age. It's almost guaranteed that their first doodles were as poor as those of everyone else who wanted to learn drawing. The difference is that they didn't reach any wrong conclusions from this, other than the obvious one: they had never done it before, and therefore, a bad result was inevitable.
Turn the clock forward 3 or 4 centuries and the image of the artist shifted from that of a craftsman to that of a creative bohemian. I find this to be a terrible idea, especially for people considering to take drawing classes. They may give things a try, and when their drawings are not brilliant and effortless, the conclusion is: "Oh well, I guess I'm just not the artistic type".
The title I used in this entry, the 'patient painter' stands for someone who above all is willing to put in the time and the effort, and go the distance. The only failed drawing is the one that you consider finished before it reaches a standard that you consider excellent, whether produced by yourself or somebody else.
Many of the discussions in my drawing classes in Amsterdam, will revolve around the idea of measuring thoroughly, slowing down, using your lines and tools carefully in the beginning, almost as if you were planning a crime. Did I mention slowing down?
Take for example the portrait of a religious man which I made in a visit to my home country of Guatemala this past march:
I frankly don't recall how many hours it took to create, but I do know it did not happen in one afternoon. It took days of careful observation, of letting the work 'rest' and coming back the next morning with a fresh pair of eyes and also trying different compositional decisions of lines, values, edges and atmosphere, all of which you will learn in my Amsterdam drawing lessons, and which are difficult to crack in a couple of sessions, unless you are an accomplished master with decades of drawing under your belt.
This is one of the reasons that during my drawing classes in Amsterdam I strongly encourage people to carefully choose what they want to draw. It has to be something that keeps you motivated to give your best and stick to it as long as humanly possible. Until it is perfect and not a moment less.
What you will find during the drawing lessons, is that the secret behind amazing works of draftsmanship has little to do with old secrets or artistic genius. It's just plain old hard work, and some techniques that should be always kept in mind.
So I guess the bad news is that it's not easy, but the good news is that anyone can do it!
When joining a drawing class in the academic style you may discover that some of your ideas about how to draw, and whether you were born to do it or not are not exactly correct. In a sense everybody was born to draw, and nobody was born to draw.
The most brilliant draftsmen (drawing artists) from the past, some of which indeed lived in Amsterdam, reached the level they did, not through flairs of genius which was obvious from an early age. It's almost guaranteed that their first doodles were as poor as those of everyone else who wanted to learn drawing. The difference is that they didn't reach any wrong conclusions from this, other than the obvious one: they had never done it before, and therefore, a bad result was inevitable.
Turn the clock forward 3 or 4 centuries and the image of the artist shifted from that of a craftsman to that of a creative bohemian. I find this to be a terrible idea, especially for people considering to take drawing classes. They may give things a try, and when their drawings are not brilliant and effortless, the conclusion is: "Oh well, I guess I'm just not the artistic type".
The title I used in this entry, the 'patient painter' stands for someone who above all is willing to put in the time and the effort, and go the distance. The only failed drawing is the one that you consider finished before it reaches a standard that you consider excellent, whether produced by yourself or somebody else.
Many of the discussions in my drawing classes in Amsterdam, will revolve around the idea of measuring thoroughly, slowing down, using your lines and tools carefully in the beginning, almost as if you were planning a crime. Did I mention slowing down?
Take for example the portrait of a religious man which I made in a visit to my home country of Guatemala this past march:
I frankly don't recall how many hours it took to create, but I do know it did not happen in one afternoon. It took days of careful observation, of letting the work 'rest' and coming back the next morning with a fresh pair of eyes and also trying different compositional decisions of lines, values, edges and atmosphere, all of which you will learn in my Amsterdam drawing lessons, and which are difficult to crack in a couple of sessions, unless you are an accomplished master with decades of drawing under your belt.
This is one of the reasons that during my drawing classes in Amsterdam I strongly encourage people to carefully choose what they want to draw. It has to be something that keeps you motivated to give your best and stick to it as long as humanly possible. Until it is perfect and not a moment less.
What you will find during the drawing lessons, is that the secret behind amazing works of draftsmanship has little to do with old secrets or artistic genius. It's just plain old hard work, and some techniques that should be always kept in mind.
So I guess the bad news is that it's not easy, but the good news is that anyone can do it!
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