Archie Rand - Part 2 Lives of Artists

Duhrer would spend hours on end drawing crabs, moose, and lobsters. All subjects he had not seen before just to see if he could draw them accurately.

Stravinsky was impressed by Picasso’s line drawing of him. He noted that Picasso was the
only one to observe the slant in his eyes. Indeed, Stravinsky had Mongol blood in him. 

 Michelangelo would look at his stone and simply believe that the sculpture already existed in the block of stone and that it was just a matter of getting rid of the waste. Rand then went on about M’s pieta. There, Christ is held by the Virgin by the armpits, and with meticulous observation and sculpting, M actually showed how the subtle pressure of Virgin Mary’s hand caused a slight bulge on Christ’s skin. 

Da Vinci would look at cracks in the wall and find forms and figures. He’d rely on instinct to draw. For six months some monks put him up and fed him to commission a painting. For six months all Da Vinci did was stare at a blank wall. By now the monks were irate and they kicked Da Vinci out of the monastery. DaVinci thought they were crazy, he had come up with the idea of the Last Supper in his head and subsequently painted it elsewhere.

Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler. Pollock had 2 brothers, both classically trained artists. He could never keep a job and his art was ridiculed. He once had a job polishing sculptures in parks. He was fired because he would polish the genitalia extremely shiny.

Matisse was a trained lawyer. He only started drawing at the age of 22!

Renoir and Matisse once got together to paint a bouquet of flowers. Renoir was 40 years Matisse’s senior. Matisse arranged the flowers and started to paint. Renoir said “You’re doing it all wrong”. Matisse replied” What’s wrong” R- “whenever I arrange a bouquet, I set it down on the table and right before I’m about to paint it, I turn the vase ½ way around. That way my view is not biased by my act of arrangement. The painter and object have no connection, he just paints an unfamiliar object and can paint with startling reality without prejudging his subject. 

 

Picasso would use hairspray on his charcoal drawings to fix his charcoal in place and to create a yellow crack filled appearance.

Morandi is famous for living with his sisters who were nuns and painting bottles all his life