degas

I first encountered you at age 15. And after all these years I’m still gripped by

The architecture of your forms
The rhythms of bold and subtle colour
The shimmer and audacity of light rippling across flesh, sinew, and surface.
Your work’s sense of air and space,
of raw substance and weight
The quiet, yet relentless drive to reimagine the ordinary into moments of spectacle.

Degas, Melbourne welcomes you this Winter.

Drawing Near

At 5Walls.. The under drawing (barely visible now) was removed after an hour of persisting with it. Resisting temptations to describe forms, more intent on evoking and suggesting it. Switching between willow and compressed charcoals works well for me now.

The Figure Less Immutable

I visited Vienna Art & Designat the National Gallery of Victoria today, and kept returning to the Schiele drawings - they have a physicality, emotion and psychological tension that lingers.

Yet it's a physical reaction too, the drawings so intense and well executed they compel responses to the sensory data that may have inspired Schiele himself. Auerbach once said he wanted to capture through his drawings the haptic and tangible in human experience, "what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark". Seeing Schiele's work feels like that.

Klimt's Portrait of Johanna Staude 1917 drew me back to it several times. The attitude, the gesture of it all from barely tamed hair to that nebulous pout (lips never finished in the hope, of course, that she would return to the studio).

A quote from Godfrey's Painting Today:

"the continuance of figurative painting and its ongoing validity are a key aspect of contemporary practice....figurative work that seeks to deal with the body as it is understood now: more vulnerable, less immutable, still the seat of identity but an identity that is understood as problematic, not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated."

Not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated.

Below, some shots of development work and studies....

ruizstudio

inprogress_figure

This Unfinished Business

Inside the studio, April 2011. the studio is a place sanctuary and uncertainty. 

Drawing continues in between bouts of painting. These also undergo various states of transition, and the energy that comes from this feeds into painting.

studio drawing

drawing