human nature
ruiz_drawing
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.
Study of a Youth 2012
2011_headofman
E
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
in progress
When painting ceases to be fundamentally linked to any form of discovery, then for me it ceases to be anything at all.