I didn’t really think about what he was saying. Pencils, erasers, sketch pad, and other
paraphernalia I continued to lay out, ready for this class I’m enrolled in, my
first ever in the art of drawing. After
three weeks I’m learning a good bit, some of it well beyond technique.
As for technique, charcoal proves to be as interesting a
medium as it is messy. Scott Hutchison
is an adept. He puts his expertise to
good use, modeling for his students the way to measure, reproduce shapes,
create on paper what the eye actually sees rather than what the mind
anticipates.
Scott collected sheets of sketch paper from the dozen or so
students, carefully measuring and cutting them into 12” squares. He carved up a photograph into 2” squares,
laying them out on a table, numbered on their backsides. There was no way of telling what the
undivided image had been. It lay in
pieces in various shades of white, black, and gray, random streaks and swirls here
and there. We watched. He explained step by step what he was doing
as he chose one little square and began to replicate it on one of the larger
squares.
First he took a very thin piece of charcoal and with it
rapidly coated the paper. Then he
shocked me by smearing the whole thing with his palm until the paper was a
shade of light gray. With an eraser he
created white spaces. With a thicker
piece of charcoal he gradually darkened the grays to blacks as dictated by the
section of the image he was copying. A
piece of face began to appear, although I don’t know I’d have figured it out if
he’d kept it a secret.
“Now, go to it,” he directed." I chose one that I could tell had a section
of eyeglasses. Other than that, it was
completely abstract. The job was to pay
attention to shapes, lines, values, paying attention only to the details
relative to each other, translating the small image to one ten times
larger. I felt reasonably good about my
creation, finished in about forty minutes or so. I began working on a second, simpler piece that
interestingly was harder to reproduce than the more complex one.
In the last quarter hour of class, each completed square of
the twenty was put up on a wall in the pre-numbered order. Before our eyes emerged the billboard-size
photo of an elderly man, remarkably like the original photograph posted beside
it.
 |
| click the image to compare with the original |
 |
| the finished product |
“I kept thinking that I was doing it all wrong,” commented
Mazie. “I couldn’t imagine how what I
was drawing could possibly fit anything.
But it does!” Confessions of
pride and awe followed the initial surprise.
The finished product looked to me quite like a cubist’s work. Each square was distinctively different, yet
everyone’s style was consistent with the whole.
Some squares matched up uncannily well.
The mind, in viewing the image, corrected the mismatches so that the
whole metamorphosed into more than the mere sum of parts.
“Life’s a bit like that, Mazie,” I said, quoting an old comedy routine of “Beyond
the Fringe.” We think we must be messing
up, doing something wrong, certainly something that cannot possibly be what is
intended. In the end, we find that what
we have done was exactly right. The
picture is whole. Every piece
mattered. It all hangs together.
It always does and always will.
Trust the process.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment