Looking Beyond Form
February 1, 2010 by Janice
Seashells, Sumi-e ink, Yoga Journal, and tea, photo, Janice Cartier, February 2010
Core practices. Some people call them fundamentals, some people call them workouts. Some people call them basic skill sets. Whatever you call them, we never outgrow our need for them. In fact, every good artist I know builds them into his or her practice every week. In Santa Fe, Tuesday mornings and all day Friday I was in session with my private figure groups. Quick poses with a nude model for over 3 hours in a morning is draining. The pose changes every 1,2,or 3 minutes. I love that. It will keep you fluid, flexible, and remove doubt and hesitation from drawing form. Any form. On Fridays, with a different group and way out on Lamy Downs, we extended the poses a bit, added some color or some paint and went at it all day. Yep, naked. Or at least the models were.
But a practice that includes simple exercises with form, strips the artist naked too. Or it can. Form, and line and shape. Translations, over and over again. Small explorations, slightly random, teach us a lot about ourselves. They give us time again. And space. To just be in that moment… responding.
And that keeps us very fluid, and flexible , and strong.
So, no naked models here. But I do have some forms I intend to explore.
With some delicious sumi ink.
Looking beyond form, by looking at form may sound like a contradiction, if you don’t get the thing about all that negative space. And by negative space I do mean the space the form does not occupy.
We stand in that space too.
We bring ourselves fully to it.
And in the time, the little area of breathing we create by exploring simple form,
Discovery can make an appearance.
So on this Organizing Monday I am organizing some of that.
What about you? How much time in your professional practice whatever it is, would you say you devote to ”working out”, playing with form and fundamentals, as part of your week?
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4 Responses to “Looking Beyond Form”
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tee-hee
My eyes got stuck on the “strips the artist naked too” sentence.
You gotta be kidding!
No one is gonna see me naked..but if your bi-weekly drawing group could do it..well, Hey why not?
Always something to chew on over here, though I was expecting the Monday countdown to begin.
I miss that…
Too soon?
Looking beyond form by looking at it – I love that! There is a Shakespeare quote inside my head, I think it’s from Macbeth: “…and nothing is but what is not.” Seems like “what is not” is pretty much shaping our concept of “what is”.
Dear PB,
I think there should be something like 52 -5 Mondays to go which might be a little soon…but we only have what? 3 Mondays left in February..so hm…maybe we should make those really count..I picked 4 things off the map to make happen this month so…have at it too.
Detlef,
Well, after “Dancing on the Karma Plains” ( which I thoroughly enjoyed BTW) no wonder Shakespeare is close in your thoughts.. I will have to look that quote up..we DO deal in what isn’t there, don’t we? Or maybe it is there for us, we just have to make it known?