Rain drawings

Sometimes on Foundation we had life drawing on an evening. One particular session involved drawing the model as if she was sitting under a rain storm. Working at easels on A1 paper, students would be asked to draw pencil lines coming down from the top of the paper. The drawing would focus on lines changing in intensity as they fell down the page and found important spatial relationships.  As these lines ‘hit’ the model they could be modulated, not changing direction but adjusted spatially so that a response was made to whether one form existed in front or behind another. The key artist was Giacometti. He was seen as a vital example of the search for a figure in space. The concentration would be on the searching, the vertical lines seeking relationships between points such as the end of a knee or the top of a head.

Usually using soft pencils, (2B-6B) (students would be asked to keep these really sharp, preferably sharpened with a knife rather than a pencil sharpener, as this produced a more sensitive mark) and drawing from the shoulder; students would be asked to consider the relationship between stance at the easel and ability to watch the drawing and the situation at the same time. If you were too close to the drawing, you could not scan properly between observations of the model and the growing image. If you used a fixed arm, with movement coming from the shoulder, you had more chance of achieving a long straight line. Control was therefore hard won and arms would ache after a while. (As always rubbing out was as important as adding marks).

The ‘trick’ was to be aware of the floor plane. Rain would fall in front of and behind the model. If you could establish some lines ‘stopping’ at regular intervals in response to carefully measured points on the floor, the space would begin to open out, then as other important points were established; shoulders, bridge of the nose or tops of legs for instance, a ghost like image would begin to appear.  The figure and the space would be inseparable, the advantage of the lines being that you had to draw ‘through’ the space, only changes in line quality revealing that the space had been ‘occupied’ for a moment by the mass. Each line could be adjusted in thickness and mark weight, but lines were never to be made into ‘ribbons’, they had to perceptually sit within the overall mark field. In fact what worked best was a type of atmospheric perspective, sharp edged dark lines moving into the forward spaces, lighter, softer lines sitting behind. The moments of finding the mass within the space would be subtle hardenings or gaps in lines that allowed the space to emerge through the vertical matrix.

Again this was a difficult thing to do, because students wanted to ‘illustrate’ the situation, rather than finding through looking. It was also a very particular ‘reading’ of Giacometti. Students would be told that in a sculpted portrait he was searching for the back of the head as much as the front. By paring away he would eventually close the search by reducing the head (or body) to virtually nothing, hence his ‘stick figures’. The rain was seen as a metaphor for this struggle.