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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Purple bunnies


 (Wiki Commons)

One of my favourite art books has always been The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. He was an instructor at my alma mater, The Art Students League of New York, but eons before I got there. Still, I expect his teaching permeated the building, along with the century-old scent of turps and printer's ink and clay and fabric sizing and lousy food from the student-run cafeteria and grime from the New York streets that blew in the door and up the stairs to the dark, gray hallways lined with lockers lined with grunge And students.

I don't know why I picked up the book the first time, or where. One of the main features of the League was that there was no reading list. One learned by doing, not by reading. Still, since I'm also a writer, I'm a reader; I can't resist an art book, either instructional or coffee table.

I could have found the Nicolaides book at Lee's Art Shop, a huge emporium of art materials and books almost across the street from the League. Or it could have been in the now-vanished bookstore at 57th and Broadway. No matter. It helped me in the early years, and then I left it behind when we moved to the UK; we only shipped essential books, costs being what they are.

So, last week, I bought a new copy from amazon.co.uk. And I began to read it again.

"Through constant effort, patient groping, bit by bit, certain rules have been established relating to the technique of picture making. These rules are the result of man's ability to relate the laws of balance, which he has found in nature, to the business of making a picture," Nicolaides writes in the introduction.

Later, he writes, "Man can make only the rules. He cannot make the laws, which are the laws of nature. It is an understanding of these laws that enables a student to draw. His difficulty will never be a lack of ability to draw, but lack of understanding."

And from there, he goes on to advocate that which I think professionals in any art form do: Learn the rules, and then break them according to your understanding of the universal laws that apply to your art form.

If, for example, you wish to explore the possibility that finches generally fly upside down, at least in the green sky you are painting, your work will go better if you actually know what a finch looks like and have done enough learning of the rules to produce it, either realistically or in the abstract. If you know that grass is green and sky is blue, if you are going to break that rule, then you need to know that if you make them both green, there will be no difference and viewers will not get the point. And you do, as an artist, want them to get your point. Why else communicate with pictures?

Frankly, the part about breaking the rules has been the most difficult for me to achieve. It wasn't terribly hard to learn the rules and even to intuit and/or observe the underlying laws. But I am, by nature, fastidious and somewhat given to academic standards. For example, when I was in kindergarten and we were all told to draw Easter bunnies, the other kids drew green ones and pink ones and blue ones. Mine were all brown. The teacher asked me why I drew only brown bunnies. I told her it was because that's what color bunnies were; bunnies didn't actually come in pastel hues, something I knew at five years old and was willing to fight for.

I drew pictures with brown bunnies and green grass and blue skies and pretty flowers and all of it was, for a five-year-old, quite realistic. The problem is that I'm still doing it. And yet, photo realism bores me, and I have no patience to recreate what the camera sees. For me, that doesn't answer the musical question who gives a rat's ass. So my "realism" is compromised to begin with. 

I think it might be time to break out of the mold. In that vein, I ordered a box of 120 Crayola crayons last week. I was thinking about some of my favorite colors, among them leaf green and salmon and there was a sort of alizarin crimson--called something else by Crayola, but on those lines. I'm hoping when the crayons arrive I can relive my childhood, revise it and actually draw a couple of purple bunnies. You can call it artistic self-analysis, if you like. Or you can call it Fred for all I care.

But I'll let you know how it works out.

Purple neon bunny....from Wiki image by Picasa


LATE BREAKING NEWS: The Crayola Crayons just arrived!

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