Finding MY line
I went through a patch directly after my BA that I hardly drew at all. All my life up to that point, I had been trained rather rigidly in realism, and, I admit had little respect for much else. All the principles of form and line that are still in my head are pretty much exactly as they are taught to all youngsters in traditional curriculum.
The problem with this approach though, is that it doesn't really provide a clear avenue for the young artist to develop THEIR OWN vision. In some respects, everybody's line - the stroke of the pencil they use to represent what they see - is different, individual. However, we all learn to apply the same rules to that line. We don't always learn how to apply those concepts while allowing your line to remain, in essence, yours.
Artists who never stop drawing develop their line I believe somewhere between their mid-twenties to their early-thirties (a completely baseless feeling of mine). Having given up my illustration to intermittent doodling over a period of two to three years, give or take, I feel now that I've cheated myself out of time that I could have been using to find that line.
I now feel that my line must be one of expression, the simpler, the better. I've found myself drifting away from the uber-detailed and the super-realistic artists I idolized in my adolescence, and towards the succinct, expressive artists I maybe didn't appreciate as much back then.
Essentially, over the past year or so, I've been increasing the frequency of my drawing, and with the increased frequency, exposing myself to different ideas and techniques from new influences. I go through months of very derivative, repetitive stuff. Hopefully though, there's going to be a wall that I break through over the next year or so (with some commitment) that gets me to MY line.
Thanks for listening.
The problem with this approach though, is that it doesn't really provide a clear avenue for the young artist to develop THEIR OWN vision. In some respects, everybody's line - the stroke of the pencil they use to represent what they see - is different, individual. However, we all learn to apply the same rules to that line. We don't always learn how to apply those concepts while allowing your line to remain, in essence, yours.
Artists who never stop drawing develop their line I believe somewhere between their mid-twenties to their early-thirties (a completely baseless feeling of mine). Having given up my illustration to intermittent doodling over a period of two to three years, give or take, I feel now that I've cheated myself out of time that I could have been using to find that line.
I now feel that my line must be one of expression, the simpler, the better. I've found myself drifting away from the uber-detailed and the super-realistic artists I idolized in my adolescence, and towards the succinct, expressive artists I maybe didn't appreciate as much back then.
Essentially, over the past year or so, I've been increasing the frequency of my drawing, and with the increased frequency, exposing myself to different ideas and techniques from new influences. I go through months of very derivative, repetitive stuff. Hopefully though, there's going to be a wall that I break through over the next year or so (with some commitment) that gets me to MY line.
Thanks for listening.
posted by Rich at
6:33 PM
0 Comments
