Despair
I frequently ask my model to pick a pose that she is comfortable with. This day she hunched over and I did a quick sketch on a large sheet of paper. I asked her if she was okay and she said that she felt nothing but despair. We didn’t draw anymore that day.
I consider this drawing to be one of my finest. For the last five years I have relied on faces to elicit emotion from you the viewer. I try to create ambiguity amidst zero context and leave it to you to project your own feelings. I have discussed this several times. Now here is an example where posture and my strokes and shapes express the mood. How did that happen? Artist such as Oswaldo Guayasamin and Egon Schiele certainly knew how to elicit emotion but they almost always included a face full of cues.
I have been thinking a lot about drawing lately. I used to believe that my drawings were far superior to my paintings. Over the last few years I have developed methods and techniques where now the paintings are holding their own but, I think my drawings have suffered from lack of attention and so I am getting serious again about drawing which is to me the number one essential skill for painters.
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