jayme del rosario | sketchblog

figure drawing, male study

Here’s a 12-day study of a male figure completed during our morning class at the studio. I’m experimenting with toned paper and the use of white chalk. For now, I’ve decided to stay with graphite rather than switch to charcoal and white chalk. I like (or am used to) graphite and enjoy the subtlety you can achieve in the values with this medium. In the end, however, I’d eventually like to incorporate both charcoal and graphite in the drawing so that I can reach the rich dark that you can get with charcoal in a much more efficient way. At the same time, I can still take advantage of the subtlety and control that I am used to with graphite. I’ve tried this before with a cast drawing of an arm and the charcoal helped me progress the drawing much further without any loss of subtlety in the refining stages of modeling. I find it much more difficult trying to do this with the figure in the interior.

Here’s a quick 3-hour portrait sketch of Whittnie that I did at the studio during Kate’s quick portrait sketch class. The exercise is a push towards color accuracy, but is highly dependent on a very good drawing and structural knowledge of the head/portrait. A block-in in 20 minutes is one of the hardest things I find that we do at the studio, though it’s great practice. It’s quite an adrenaline rush. Ay….3 hours flies!

3-hour quick portrait sketch, Whittnie

Andrew Loomis and Matthew Innis’ latest blog post on his blog, Underpaintings, offers great reading material for these quick portraits.

"Helicopter" Sketches/Drawings, Leonardo da Vinci

The lecture and discussion at Janus Collaborative this past Friday was not only intellectually stimulating, but fun. It was great to spend an evening meeting new realist painters and reconnecting with old friends from other schools and ateliers. Spending a majority of my time at the studio and working reduces my social time and “catching up” to checking status updates on Facebook — and even this time is limited. But I think that discussing our process and thoughts every now and then is just as important to art training and to the picture making process.

We were lucky enough to have Tony Mastromatteo give two lectures last Friday. During the regular day program, we focused on the painting life as a creative, professional life. He answered many questions, pulling mainly from his own experience, about how to survive as a painter and be satisfied with what we are painting once we are out of school. We discussed the transition, and both the short-term and long-term fulfillment of an artist’s career. He talked about how to make a living as a painter instead of one who paints/waits tables/takes odd jobs/freelances/ tutors/babysits/dog walks…you get my drift.

Tony also mentioned how he now understands the important distinction between emerging, mid-level and established artists. If I had more time, I would write more about the specifics of the lecture but one of the main things I walked away with that afternoon is that it confirmed how this type of training is crucial. Painstaking studies 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week is what it takes, and if we want to make a living as a painter we have to do the work and we have to be good at what we do whether or not we continue to paint the figure or paint apples. Otherwise we end up painting houses.

No doubt there is a lot of thinking and self-exploration that faces everyone once we are finished with art school and if you ask 10 different working artists, you’ll get at least 10 different answers of what has worked for them. Art school doesn’t train us for everything. We are here (in the atelier system) mainly to learn and perfect technique. From this starting point, in our own studios, we have a life’s work and much exploration ahead of us. Perhaps it sounds a bit daunting, but quiet exciting as well.

For the evening, Tony discussed what the atelier system is lacking: the development of ideas. Technical know-how is a given in realist paintings. Subject matter on the other hand is the next hurdle. In fact it is the hurdle (and will continue to be the following hurdles down the track on our run as realist painters). Ateliers, unlike the university system, is mainly (if not only) concerned with technical development and perfection. And for good reason, it takes years to perfect and execute “the how” so we have to turn down the volume on “the what”.

Whether we came into this type of training already knowing “the what” or not, “the how” is absolutely essential. It is our language and we have to be proficient in it in order to communicate and express what we want in any picture. So contrary to some discussions involving the topic of creativity and expression, we move forward on the premise that it is absolutely essential to learn and master technique. However, as Tony says, we can’t move forward very well with a bum leg.

I look forward to more discussions and lectures such as this one during the rest of my studies at Janus. It’s nice to have instructors who are supportive of developing a curriculum that sets a very high and challenging bar for us to meet, yet who also realize the importance of developing the “muscle” of creativity in conjunction with technical know-how. On a side note, it may be a good thing that painting is a “lonely profession” since there’s a study out there saying how we are far more creative in individual settings, than in groups. I agree that groupthink is often not the best way to solve a problem:

As far as more details of the specifics of Tony’s lecture, I will hand the baton to a blog post from one of the attendees from that evening. (Check out the rest of Hyeseung’s blog and website while you’re there. Awesome work!)

Here is my next completed Bargue drawing copy. The drawing is more highly rendered and required a lot of work in the halftones and a smooth transition between the shadows to the halftones. The first two drawings I completed were more “stop-modeled” and did not require a high rendering approach to give the impression of three-dimensionality.  For this portrait copy the forms were soft and rounded making the construction more challenging.

Bargue Plate 53, Jeune Femme (Young Woman), Graphite