PRELIMINARY SKETCHES BY BERNIE FUCHS

I love the wildness in these preliminary sketches by illustrator Bernie Fuchs:




They were done quickly, and with some violence:




They look completely unfettered.  Not a traffic light in sight.

  
 Yet, these are not random spasmodic brush strokes.  If you look closely, you can see the fruits of years of discipline and technical skill.

Fuchs spent his first years out of art school working in a small studio in Detroit learning to paint tight, highly realistic car illustrations.  Eventually he left that world behind, but decades later-- working with the palette of Bonnard and using free, spontaneous brush strokes-- Fuchs still retained all that hard earned wisdom about how to convey the weight and volume of a car. 


Fuchs' apprenticeship taught him lessons about form that Bonnard was never forced to learn.  Look beneath the apparent freedom of his brushwork to the subtle treatment of those purple hubcaps (with no wheels), or his reduction of the shapes of light and shadow, or his highlight on the corner of the fender, and you'll see that Fuchs was in full control the whole time.

There are a dozen subtle choices in that "freely" painted sunset.
Similarly, Fuchs spent two years in art school learning to draw the human form.  Years later, when roughing out a human form at lightning speed, Fuchs didn't need to pause and think about the way fingers bunch together, or the way an elbow works.


Look at the way his apparently free line captures the character of those wooden chairs.  This is a line that has definite opinions about its subject matter.


Some like to think they can save time by skipping over the long hours of basic exercises and turning straight to abstraction, or to copying photo reference, or scanning material into Photoshop.

But those dues we pay, they build up equity for us.  And they pay off not just when it comes time to paint that 100th car, or that 500th elbow, but also when it comes time to paint the nameless and formless abstractions as well.

Popular posts from this blog

THE SKETCHBOOKS OF ALBERT DORNE

Image
Albert Dorne was one of the most remarkable characters in the history of illustration.  The upcoming book,   Albert Dorne, Master Illustrator  (out in November from the fine folks at Auad Publishing) describes how Dorne used his drawing ability to climb from the depths of poverty and illness to international renown as an artist, business leader, educator and philanthropist. Detail   From the introduction to the new book:      Starting with nothing but a talent for drawing, Dorne became (in the words of advertising titan Fairfax Cone) “the highest paid, most successful commercial artist of his time.”   From that position,   he used his drawing skills as a platform for building a multinational corporation that trained tens of thousands of students around the world in the creative fields of art, writing and photography.   Now a wealthy man, he went on to use drawing to help the disabled, became nationally respected for his charitable work a...
Read more

ERICH SOKOL

Image
John Ciardi once said, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.” Since we've been rambling for the last few weeks about modern art trends, I thinks it makes sense to heed Ciardi's advice and spend a moment visiting the paintings of Erich Sokol, the gifted illustrator / cartoonist for Playboy magazine. Sokol had a splendid sense of light, color and atmosphere. He was far more talented than traditional pin up artists such as Vargas, whose uninspired paintings now sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Note the confidence with which Sokol handles the stripes of light on the beach in the following painting, or his treatment of the foliage in the background. Nothing is labored, and no unnecessary details. Although the beautiful girl was always the centerpiece of the cartoon, if you look closely you will see that Sokol had more fun painting the male counterpart-- the fat doctor, the grizzled farmer, the blusterin...
Read more

FIRST CONTACT

Image
. Every once in a while we do a post on science fiction stories here. For me the genre is just endlessly interesting thanks to remarkable storytellers who break new ground with each advancement in technology, biology, evolutionary psychology, etc. If you add into the mix recent discoveries of planets potentially capable of harboring life in other solar systems, suddenly novels of "first contact" have intriguing new playgrounds. A recent novel I haven't been able to stop thinking about is Blindsight by Peter Watts . It in part explores the questions: If an extrasolar intelligence arrived, would it even be possible for us to parse a completely alien psychology? And how would we react if it seemed to refuse contact or took no notice of our attempts to do so? We have a poor track record in dealing with things we don't understand and that frighten us, and Blindsight is a frightening novel. It has a kind of Richard Dawkins fueled bleakness that makes the story compelli...
Read more