avocare

Study portrait drawing with me from anywhere in the world in my online class Drawing the Portrait in Charcoal. It begins January 13, 2014, enrollment is limited, sign up today! Hosted by the great people at LAAFA! I've done my best to make this class the strongest such class on the market, it includes nine fully illustrated,  jam packed audio/video lectures, twelve video drawing demonstrations showing a wide variety of subjects, techniques and materials, and weekly homework assignments that will build on themselves to teach you a clearer, better way to work from life. I'll work with you personally each week, you'll get a full audio/video critique of your work where I'll talk through with you what's working in your drawing and what can be improved. I'll draw over your image to give you a personalized demonstration for every assignment you turn in. This class is designed to show you how to make drawing cease to be a source of frustration and become a ple...

"What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?"                                                             -- Bertolt Brecht This morning's newspapers bring the fun story of a massive art fraud, in which 63 "newly discovered" masterpieces by the greatest abstract expressionist painters (Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell) turned out to be forgeries, painted by a local artist in his garage. fake Jackson Pollock The paintings were sold over a 15 year period by prestigious art galleries for more than $80 million.  The New York Times reports, "How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery...

Here is another spot illustration by illustrator Robert Fawcett, this time a small ink drawing of his friend Austin Briggs who was giving a slide show presentation:   Despite the sedentary subject matter, close ups of the original reveal a vigorous knife fight:   Pausing over details, we begin to appreciate the extraordinary variety of Fawcett's marks on paper : Over the last few days we have focused on Fawcett's ink work, but before we move on to different topics, here is one of Fawcett's pencil drawings for a different perspective: This life drawing was included in Fawcett's book, The Art of Drawing but by looking at the original we can see that Fawcett (who was color blind) supplemented his drawing with shading from a red pencil.  Fawcett's eyes can't help but impose lines on a form:  but he understood tone and value as well:

Sketches in the vicinity of Crystal Springs Reservoir, California.

I feel this blog performs a public service on days when I can share close ups from an original Robert Fawcett drawing.  This drawing had everything going against it: It's a tiny, low budget spot illustration for an industrial brochure... drawn from a photo... of a deadly dull topic: a middle aged, anonymous instructor at a correspondence school, working at his drawing board. Yet, for Fawcett even a boring subject could be like working in a firecracker factory.   He starts out working fairly tightly on the head, even using a little white paint to sharpen his focus... ... but from there, he quickly gets wilder:     With energy and integrity, it's possible to overcome even the most uninspiring subject matter.   In the next few days, I will be  posting more unpublished original work and some of Fawcett's handwritten notes about his approach to drawing.