Archie Rand - Part 9 Drawing

Ingres was a master draftsman. Yet his work is devoid of soul. That is, human beings in his pictures are reduced to machines, shapes… where the body is subservient to the artist. He drew Adam and Eve so tranquil and nice. Massacio, on the other hand, one of Michelangelo’s main influences drew Adam and Eve full of anguish.

I used to write for the art magazine for my school. We had an excellent teacher, but she was senile, which was great. We would stick around till 11 PM at night and just do art. We ran competitions throughout high school. There was a guy who wore a leather jacket and could reproduce Raphael’s work like no other. One night, he went up to the chalkboard and proceeded to sketch out the entire School of Athens painting from memory. We laughed at him cause he kept mumbling to himself “you’re great, you can draw, just keep drawing these lines”. Today he paints pinstripes on the sides of cars.

The Yale School of Art is based on the principle of photo-realism. They project slides onto walls, and basically color them in (i.e., Chuck Close)... I went to art school with a Yale guy, he’s been reproducing pictures for the past 30 years. He hasn’t matured a fucking bit since….

I’ll teach something painters employ in their works. That is the concept of drawing through the contours to create a 3D space. Total saturation of space. Pay attention to the contours yet ignore them!

Chardin, a contemporary of Mozart is considered the best still life painter. Yet look at this picture and there’s something not drawn in perspective.

Everytown has 15 or so painters that congregate at the public library every afternoon at 4pm and bitch and whine that nobody understands their art. And for even smaller towns they do watercolors. The point is a lot of people know how to draw in perspective and can do it too.

Michelangelo’s David’s head is extremely large. That is M. thought the statue would be mainly be viewed 20 feet above the viewer’s perspective.

DeChirico drew in perspective, but he put a little in-you-face twist on it., ie., huge public open space and a nude. Picasso and Matisse rejected the notion of perspective.

The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci is a one point perspective emanating from Christ. It was a meditative and irrational experiment of Da Vinci’s.

Today we learned about perspective. Alberti is credited with the scientific breakdown of perspective. Where the lines should emanate from, and how an image changes as it is tilted, etc… is what he was concerned with. Duhrer on the other hand was more concerned with observation, not so much perspective lines. He used chicken wire and made a grid of squares. He would place the grid between him and his object and draw the objects in relation to each other and in relation to the grid. Everything on the page seems to scream out “measure me relatively to the adjacent object!” 

Rand and the TA showed us how to do a 1 and 2 point perspective. Then Rand showed us a 3 point perspective. He was getting a kick out of how fast we were learning how to do perspective. Apparently there is much theory that they teach in art schools which he decided to forgo without class. In 1 point perspective, all perspective lines go to the middle of the page. In 2 point, there are no horizontal lines, just vertical lines and all perspective lines leading to 2 points on the right and left horizon line.

Nobody see things as they are drawn in perspective. Drawings done under perspective systems don’t appear real. The real reason why the human eye is constantly moving and taking visual information in from many angles. That is, if we were shot up with morphine, closed one eye, and held it still, we would be looking in 1 or 2 or 3 pt perspective.

Marvel comics are based on 3 point perspective. It’s perfect for objects being hurled in the air. 

We spent class time drawing gas station architecture.