The Crucifixion Expert

Pieter Paul Rubens drew a crucifixion with special expertise. In the long war between his patrons, the house of Hapsburg in Flanders, and their opponents, the Dutch protestants, there was a crucifixion or a hanging at almost every crossroads in the Netherlands. Thus are memes replicated: the holy symbol becomes reality on the highway.
Here's what one website writes about the war: "(The Duke of ) Alva's errand was to punish those who had been concerned in the disorders at Antwerp and elsewhere. For this purpose he established a Council of Troubles, which was soon called by the people of the Council of Blood. Thousands of men and women, guilty and innocent, were put to death. They were hanged on scaffolds, on trees, at the door-posts of private house. Many of them were poor; but some were the chief citizens and nobles of the country. The whole business of the land was stopped; grass grew in the markets. Every family was in mourning. And against these cruelties the people could do nothing. They had had no experience in war. They were shopkeepers and schoolmasters. The Spanish soldiers had them at their mercy, and they showed no mercy." (The Baldwin Project)
Men crucified everywhere were morbid enough, but Europe had not yet witnessed the first Great Terror, in which the revolutionary government guillotined thousands of French nobles while "les tricoteuses" knitted and gossiped in the front row of the assembled crowds. The British internment and elimination of tens of thousands of the Boer warriors' families in South Africa followed. Turkish genocide of the Armenians came shortly afterwards. The unthinkable slaughter on the battlefields of World War One followed. Then in the 1930s, the Soviets introduced famine as a political weapon, and the knock on the Kulak door in the night. "This is nothing personal, you are being exterminated as a class." Finally, the appalling debauchery of the so-called "final solution", and the complete prostration of Roman Catholicism before the madness of the Bavarian Nazis (Bavaria being Roman Catholic territory). So, you can't help wondering how the Crucifixion of their founding martyr, and its memetic use over the ensuing millennia, helped the Christians develop a fierce sense of compassion for their fellow man. The only Europeans who displayed such feelings were the on-the-ground Communists who actually fought Nazism door-to-door, instead of hiding piously behind their crucifixes.

Five minutes

Life-drawing jams always include the one-minute impression and the five-minute sketch. I'm trying to improve but I usually spend time on just one part of a nude instead of capturing the essence of the whole in a few broad strokes, as Susan Underwood did here. She also used a big drawing surface and treated it like a memo pad. The result has a zen-like finish.

Manography

This picture is by Tara Juneau, who drew it before my eyes at Xchanges a few days ago. Tara says: "I am mostly self taught and have always been passionate about drawing. About two years ago I became very inspired by realist Tony Ryder after reading his book 'The Artists Complete Guide to Figure Drawing' , and have just recently taken a figure drawing workshop with him in Seattle."
Mostly self-taught: that just shows what passion can teach. Tara is working adjacent to the New Realism school and IMO would enjoy hugely a spell with Daniel Greaves at the atmospheric Florence Academy of Art.
She employed an unusual drawing method for the picture above which she explains as follows: "I used masonite prepared with tinted gesso. I like the surface that the gesso gives, it has a little bit of tooth. It was drawn in 4h and hb graphite (pencil), heightened with white charcoal. I used the harder pencils because they have a higher clay content and give a softer, lighter tone than say a 4 or 6b."
In pondering this realistic mode of drawing, I had several thoughts:

1. Realism, while ostensibly reducing stylisation to a minimum, is actually a strong stylisation of its own; and
2. Hockney's book The Secret Knowledge is proved false by the knowledge of these artists, which is no secret; after all, I saw Tara draw the above picture, using no machinery at all and barely the use of a pencil-tip to take the odd bearing; and
   
3. Monochrome photography is being beaten at its own game.

In the shower, I decided that a new coinage is required: Manography, derived from Latin manus for hand, and Greek graphos for design. Welcome to the world of manography and Tara Juneau.

Signature Portrait

Is this a portrait? A cartoon? Or a signature? Answer: it's a bit of all three: a signaitoon. The wonderfully precocious Jean Cocteau drew this when he was just 21 years old for his older pal Eric Satie. Imagine having the chutzpah to hand someone this idiosyncratic sketch, confident that it would one day be worth big money! Perhaps it's surprising to think that the composer of those delicate Gymnopedies for piano was a Sigmund Freud look-alike. But he had looked somewhat wilder 10 years earlier, in 1900. Cocteau captured him making what was evidently a characteristic gesture, pinching his pince-nez, or spectacles, on to the bridge of his nose. It would have been instantly recognisable to friends of Satie. Picasso met Cocteau and his circle in 1917 and worked with them and Diaghilev on the ballet Parade, to Satie's music. Picasso duly did his own portrait of him in 1920. It's interesting to compare the two, because Picasso much later did signaitoons himself. But his came decades after Cocteau's. Everything Cocteau did had his imprint all over it, and he didn't change styles every few years, the way Picasso did. Cocteau's last hot love affair was with Jean Marais, and get him. His confidence over the Satie sketch was warranted, because Cocteau ended his days, not dying in the gutter like Modigliani, but wearing smart suits in a nice comfy chateau in the country.

Image manipulation

These two nudes found their way on to one sheet of paper, showing how artists manipulated images millennia before computer whizzes resized, altered and pasted them on screens. In both images on the page, I portray the same model, and so the impossible is laid out before our eyes. It has been shown that Degas used the same method to place dancers originally drawn individually in his studio into groups. In fact, just about all groupings in historic art were produced in the same way. An individual (human, animal) was drawn in the studio, either directly into the group-work, or resized and added to it. You can be sure that Rubens did not gather the family of Jan Breughel the Elder into his studio to paint them all at once. Nor did Botticelli happen upon beautiful, blonde, identical quintuplets in the streets of Florence and invite them to pose for La Primavera. In this way, historic art was closer to drama or masque or tableau than to photography. The artist, in turn, was closer to a magician or conjuror, as he not only created images, but manipulated them. In the virtual worlds conjured digitally today such manipulation is anonymous and routine. In the case of my drawing, it was originally a way to save paper before I noticed its aesthetic appeal. Shame about the missing left hand.

Simulacra

Simulacra are vague likenesses, and they starred in Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulations. Baudrillard loved juicy disinformation, and illustrators are past masters of it. Nothing can distort and misinform quite so well as a thoroughly misleading drawing. Here's an example: on the right are shown three different skulls in profile, Caucasian, African and Chimpanzee. The African profile is faked to look like a chimpanzee's. On the left are the three supposedly corresponding faces, sharply emphasizing the vast chasm that separates in appearance the god Apollo, a so-called "Creole Negro", and a particularly poorly-drawn chimpanzee. The purpose of these images is to reinforce white racism and Imperialist overlordship. The victim here is the African: such simulacra were deployed by the Nazis to degrade Jews.
The chimpanzee skull is accurate enough, as is the human one. However, the simulacra do not include the skull of the baby chimp, which is far flatter than the adult's, reflecting the Darwinian observation that human adults have an infantilised face.
Meanwhile, the "Creole Negro" skull is a grotesque forgery, as demonstrated by this African skull found in a slave cemetary in the USA. Such racist forgeries were common at the time, and even corrupted the world of science in the notorious case of the Piltdown non-man. Note the latitude for forgery in drawing, as opposed to photography.

Sketch portrait

Don Bachardy is a master of the sketch portrait. This one of my hero, Aldous Huxley, probably took him no more than twenty minutes. It's hard to persuade a subject to stay still for much longer than that. It's always been a fantasy of mine to wear a bottle-green corduroy suit, carry a clipboard and pad, and do sketch portraits for money in Montmartre. Bachardy did the same, except around the salons of Los Angeles. (His book of portraits was called Stars In My Eyes.) Last year, it was reported he was still doing it, drawing movie-diva Angelina Jolie in Paris, the pictures to go into the Jolie collection at her hide-out in Namibia.
The sketch of Huxley was done in August, 1962, just fifteen months before his death, which occurred an hour or two after the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. To me, there's something wrong with Huxley's hand in the picture, and I don't mean just that it is pointing towards the tongue in which Huxley had suffered fatal cancer since 1960. Either his palm folded in a most unusual way, or Bachardy simply fudged a finger that went wrong. That, or he relocated the edge of the hand. That aside, Bachardy makes Huxley into little more than one line, from above the elbow through the narrow face to the carrot-top hair, which Huxley kept just a little long in the Oxbridge intellectual style. Huxley was very tall, and that's reflected here in the length of the wrist, which looks vulnerable. The eyes are a bit soppily done, glamourised even, considering that Huxley was nearly blind (originally from a nasty disease caught from horrid surroundings at exclusive and expensive Eton College) and normally wore spectacles with thick lenses.
Bachardy's entree into L.A. celebrity circles began when as a young man he moved in with Christopher Isherwood, another Cambridge U emigrant (like myself, although I got my Honours degree, he didn't). They were together for decades, and Bachardy has done numerous nudes of young men. His spare drawing style became his trade-mark, with shadow and line given equal emphasis. However, this sketch of Huxley is a bit of a "sell". I'm not sure Huxley would have approved, assuming he ever saw it properly.

Getting the outline right

This model I drew at a workshop in West London, England. She grew larger each time she posed. She is Brazilian and with her partner was saving up to buy a home in Brazil. I had only just begun life-drawing, and found in this session just how slow using a pencil is compared with Conte pastel. With Conte, which is a stick of solid medium, you can shade with the broad side, filling swathes of paper at a stroke. With your sharpened tip, you can pick out line and detail. But with a pencil, you just have your sharpened tip and nothing else. The shading you have to do by cross-hatching, something I had not learned then, and still have not studied.
You can see that I was obsessive about getting the outline, a characteristic I can't shake off. I wanted to express the image in a single outline before I did any other work on it. Wrong! You can do just as well by first drawing only the shading, and detailing outlines later. Here, I have not learned more than a French or Spanish cave-painter two-hundred and seventy centuries ago.

Cheesecake nude

This is a copyrighted image from the 1940s by T.R. Braithwaite, who after art training spent his life toiling in the "creative" departments of corporate advertising. Advertising permanently taints the creations of those who practise it. Braithwaite probably drew a decent nude before he put on the spectacles of commerce. The result is a nude that has been cheesecaked. It means the picture is selling the attractions of the model to me, instead of just delineating them and allowing them to speak for themselves. The genre grew (inevitably) out of US consumerism and the popularisation of young female beauty through Hollywood leg art, which is neither about legs nor about art, but about merchandising. At the same time in the 1930s and 40s, arted pin-ups entered circulation. The most famous exponent of this genre was Vargas. I think the cheesecake giveaway in Braithwaite's nude, called Diane, is the foot, which looks as if it is in a high-heeled shoe, even if it is not. The most famous exponent of shoes in the 1940s and 50s was Andy Warhol, who had already made a fortune out of drawing shoes commercially, long before he launched into his second career as a pop artist. Vargas pin-ups are rarely without high-heeled shoes. The conjunction of legs, degrees of nudity and high-heeled shoes was obviously a powerful turn-on for earlier generations, being a uniquely American blending of consumer packaging with ancient lust. It was so pervasive at the time that poor Braithwaite was unable to draw a nude in any other manner.

Schematic drawing

Here's a drawing by a Finnish sceptic of how the World Trade Center towers were primed with explosives to make them collapse after airliners hit them. The drawer notes that "This drawing is schematic only. The actual towers were much taller and the observed arch of destruction of the energy-directed thermonuclear device was correspondingly more narrow." Schematics like this must have been the birth of drawing, as early people shared semiotic images drawn with a stick in friable ground. The drawer's text continues:

The Ground Zero here is in the original sense of word, a nuclear blast site. Thermal energy may absorb heat at a rate of 10 E 23 ergs / cm2 sec and near the bomb all surfaces may heat to 4000 °C or 7200 °F igniting or vapourizing violently. Source: US Department of Defense & US Department of Energy, Glasstone – Dolan: 'The Effects of Nuclear Weapons' (1980).

The thermonuclear bomb used was a 'pure' hydrogen bomb, so no uranium or plutonium at all. The basic nuclear reaction is Deuterium + Tritium > Alpha + n. The ignition of this is the fine part, either with a powerful beam array or antimatter (a very certain way to get the necessary effect of directed energy in order not to level the adjacent blocks of high-rise buildings, as well).

What? Nuclear bombs at the Twin Towers in 2001?
It's plausible, know why? Because liquidized metal was found under the ruins many days later, and those hijackers (if they existed) could not have known that the towers would collapse as a result of their kamikaze attacks. All the airliner impacts promised to do was make holes and cause dramatic fires, as indeed happened. But after half an hour the fires were actually burning out, something the blackness of the smoke proved. Living people were photographed right at the point of impact, proving that the fires had effectively burned out. A team of firemen high in the south tower radioed HQ expressing confidence that they could deal with the limited blaze confronting them.
The south tower fell first, although it was hit second, precisely because the fires were burning down and the firefighters reported they could deal with them. The brazen Imperial criminals at the controls, probably from the vantage point of the NY emergency bunker in Building Seven, chose that moment to detonate. Later, they ensured that WTC7, too, bit the dust, although it appeared to be undamaged except for a few minor fires that were unattended by the depleted NY fire department. Three steel-framed towers collapsed, ostensibly as a result of fires, on 9-11 although they had never done so in history, and have never done so since.

Gesture

Here it is, my first submission from an Xchanges artist to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue. It's from Joan Steacy. She calls it Gesture. Joan always has her conte pastel exactly the right shape, for perfect execution. She demonstrates gesture with a drawing that gives the illusion of being dashed off, but is actually the accumulation of many years of practice. Not only do the sweeps of conte-edge grab the essence of a pose in a couple of seconds; Joan then highlights the crucial parts with sharpened conte-tip to complete her zen-like statement. Note how the weight is perfectly distributed, through the shoulders, down the twist of the spine on to the left leg, while the right leg gestures from that position of strength. The axis of that posture is in the parts of the picture highlighted in dark pastel, from the left waist, through the hips and down the right leg. These limning gestures are then pointed up in line. The picture both illustrates a gesture (of the leg), and depicts it by gestures (of the hand).
This contribution is a fine start to the exhibition catalogue that I have been charged with producing, for which I have just half a dozen pictures at the moment. I'm hoping for at least thirty.
Joan is author of So That's That!, an illustrated memoir of life with her Dad, 'Junky Jack' Thornborrow. He raised her in a motor vehicle recycling plant, otherwise known as a junkyard, in which richly inventive environment she grew into a gifted illustrator and here. Joan is married to artist Ken Steacy, who runs kenspublishing.com, promoting the work of artists such as Ralph McQuarrie (copyrighted image).

Desnuda

This is a half-hour pose from a workshop at Xchanges artists' co-operative in Victoria, Canada. Pat Martin Bates, who helped found the co-op exactly 40 years ago, told me yesterday there's no place left for a small art school in today's economy. By the same token, Xchanges definitely should not exist, but it does, and I am thankful for it.
This drawing immediately presented a foreshortening problem, as the model was recumbent with her head towards me. I drew it in early days at the co-op, over eighteen months ago, while I was still tackling the matter of hands and feet. No drawing is any good that does not grapple with these crucial parts of the anatomy. They are like the signatures of study. Both hands are imperfect here (the left hand and forearm elongated), and both feet unfinished, indeed the right one is hardly recognisable.
Other faults are in the ribs which are too heavily drawn, and the right nipple which gets lost in the blanket (causing my outspoken daughter to name the picture: "the woman with one tit").
Nevertheless, there is a ripple to the whole picture that appeals to me, and I branded it with the Spanish word for naked, desnuda.

The runway nude

This nude I drew at a workshop in Richmond-Upon-Thames in England in 2003. It's a half-hour pose. The model was about 40 years of age and well-preserved in the midriff and legs. Perhaps she did not own a car and walked a lot. She also had shaved a "runway" into her pubic hair which, at the angle I was drawing her, and with her tight tummy, gave prominence to her pubic mound. I wanted to capture this, and paid attention to getting right the proportions of her legs, pelvic and stomach areas. It was particularly sensitive getting the almost 90-degree angle of her left inner thigh without the use of the plumb-line that John Singer Sargent always recommended an artist should have handy for drafting a drawing. At this stage, I had only a few months' experience of life-drawing, and I had some progress to make on chiaroscuro. I also left too little time to attend to a vital element, her hair. It should have been sketched in with wavy lines instead of heavily hatched in a lifeless way. But I have to admit that in spite of its obvious evidence of inexperience, I like the way this nude leaps off the page. Her right forearm is brave, and her lower body is wonderful --- except for the truncated right foot, of course.

Drafting a nude

I drew this picture of Eva (a 30 year-old macrame artisan from Barcelona) in my studio in San Miguel de Allende in February, 2007. Aesthetically, it works. By the rules, a body should be about six and a half heads long. This one is more like eight. Of course, it is her left leg and torso that are extended. However, this is a case where the limner can get away with breaking the rules, because Eva is reclining horizontally. If she were standing, the distortion would be instantly discernible by those with an eye for the studio style. By "studio style" I mean the vintage rules for human-figure drawing, deriving from the Renaissance obsession with mathematics and proportion. Many of the Renaissance artists cheated, using mechanical devices to reproduce their subjects exactly, as David Hockney illustrates in detail in his excellent book Secret Knowledge. But equally many, among them Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci, believed there were scientific rules of beauty and form. Durer actually travelled to Aachen (with his sour wife) to seek a secret book owned by the court painter of the sister of the Emperor. She, however, foolish woman, wanted to give the book to her new court painter, and so it vanished from history, along with its gnomic formulae.
There's another error in my drawing of Eva: the shading behind her is not completed around her face and folded arms, thus destroying the illusion of contrast between her figure and the wall or background.
But all the same, I like this drawing because it came to me all-of-a-piece and I think it shows. Her head and arms are glamorous, while the rest of her body is all-too-human. In the contrast is some dynamism.