Third life drawing session this year and circumstances meant that there were to be no short poses, just one pose for the whole session (albeit with two models, which is very unusual). The first drawing is a bit frustrating in that it has good details - I think I captured her expression accurately, and although it might look like I arsed up the proportions, her breasts really were quite large - but it doesn't come together as a drawing. One of the very many wisdoms to be found in Walt Stanchfield's Drawn To Life Vol. 1 is the following from p.103:
I have seen some sketches start with details, which is like hanging a necklace in mid-air before the neck is drawn. Sounds silly but we all do it to a certain extent. Decide at the beginning what is the main course - saving the dessert for later.
The flaw of that first drawing is that I was uncertain in my initial drawings of the full figure and ended up focusing on details too soon as a form of procrastination, putting off solving the whole drawing, a cowardice of sorts that shows in the finished product. It's a shame - the torso looks good, the head looks good, but they don't seem to belong together.
The second drawing, the one above, is where it came together and I learned from my earlier mistakes. I switched to the second model, lying on her side, the perfect pose for a back study, but this time made sure I didn't get bogged down in particular areas until I was happy with the whole figure at early sketch stage. As a result the figure didn't end up getting larger as work progressed, so extremities remained on the page rather than getting edged off by revised sketching. Over-toning was a risk that I had to stay aware of - the use of tone absolutely makes the picture in terms of defining the woman's back and the shadows around the bottom and bent leg, but there's been many a time in the past when tone has been added and added and added until suddenly you're looking at a mess of grey, a figure that looks way more muscular than the model you're drawing or one part of the body is inconsistently shaded with the rest. But it's through making these mistakes that you learn to look out for them in the future, recognising when to step back and let it be - which, after 90 minutes, is just what I did, scampering home an hour early to prepare nosh for our evening guests, buzzing with that special feeling of a drawing well done.
Saturday's soundtrack: started off with the new album from These New Puritans, Hidden, which I'm having an absolute bugger of a time in describing, the best I can come up with being English classical music via Asian Dub Foundation, Burial and Thom Yorke, if such a thing can be fathomed. Remarkable stuff, though in retrospect a bit too intense for life drawing. The second drawing was drawn with The Field's Sound of Light EP, a sweeping electronica interpretation of staying at Stockholm's Nordic Light Hotel, following with Dirty Three's divine Ocean Songs, the kind of wordless music that makes the perfect soundtrack for any creative endeavour, music that swoops and soothes, bewitching without distracting.
As usual I had every intention of doing a best-bits-of-2009 list, and as usual I completely lost track of time and now 1/12th of 2010 is already over. Add onto that the question of whether my opinion is even worth a damn and I doubt if I'll get the music and book ones finished - the world isn't exactly short of unqualified opinion squawkers on such matters. Still, since I've already written most of the film ones I thought I'd stick them up here for what it's worth - rather than a Best Of list, I've just gone over most of the films I saw at the cinema, starting off with the following low-profile arthouse curio...
My expectations for this were pretty bloody low, especially after watching clips online - it looked no different from a video game cut-scene - and many Internet chatterers seemed convinced that James Cameron had gone mad and blown an insane amount of money on a cinematic folly. It was only the enthusiastic advance wibblings of Roger Ebert and Simon Pegg that had me forking out nine bleedin' quid for a ticket. And thank the stars I did because Avatar, for all its faults, delivered the kind of massive cinematic spectacle that perfectly demonstates why there's still a place for the cinema in this day & age. My main misgivings concerned the prospect of watching CG animated humanoid charcters, since the last decade has seen numerous examples of CG humanoids on screen, almost all lacking in real weight, convincing movement, believabilty - only Gollum, through the strength of the human performance behind it, really worked. However, the many years of work that have gone into Avatar (I remember chatting to an animator at Digital Domain about it in Annecy 1999) have clearly paid off. From skin texture to eyes to motion to performance, these completely digital characters were more convincing than I could ever have imagined. The story, while easily derided, did the job, with a grittier edge than expected, and the sheer creativity on show in the world-building matched that of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Seen on the small screen, I'm sure the flaws will become glaring, the story trite, the visuals impressive but not astounding. But at the cinema? It's the greatest spectacle since Return of the King.
Only just released in the UK, but we caught a preview screening of it in December. One of the most emotionally devastating films I've seen in ages, yet manages to be neither corny melodrama nor emotional-torture-porn (a la Von Trier) despite the sheer horrors that take place, due to the care you feel for the central charcter and the slivers of hope that appear over the course of the film. The acting is superb across the board but Mo'Nique's terrifying performance is a true standout and especially deserving of awards. A very hard-going film, to be sure, but one that ultimately lifts rather than crushes. If ever there was a positive depiction of the difference teaching can make, this is it.
Spookums! Very few films give me the fear, and not one has ever managed to give me the willies that BBCs Ghostwatch did back in the day - so much so that I still can't countenance the thought of watching it all over again (I tried a year ago and lasted all of 10 minutes). With that in mind, PA looked promising, albeit overhyped to an impossible extent (much like Blair Witch a decade earlier) and I went along to see it on the one night I had the flat to myself, Missus being down in That London for worky stuff. It was a fascinating film to watch, the use of the fixed-camera and fast-forwarding through to eventful moments generating a palpable and escalating sense of tension, also an excellent demonstration of the effectiveness of sound in horror films (see also Rec). The bedroom setting, the concept of things happening whilst you're asleep, unaware, vulnerable, worked a treat and left me just a little rattled later that night - it's a lot easier to imagine your bedroom door inexplicably creak open and slam shut than a chainsaw-wielding maniac bursting in. Unfortunately, the story ultimately fails to live up to the air of eerieness, though it's hard to imagine what could've lived up to all that occurs, and I found it difficult to believe that anyone with the footage already acquired midfilm wouldn't have gone to a TV channel, the police, anything beyond one person. Plus, to be honest, the male character is a bit of a cock. All that said, the first 3\4 of the film was very satisfying and genuinely spooky, and those images of nighttime shenanigans have the potential to stay with you long after the final frame.
Bloody brilliant, easily one of the finest films this year and certainly the most tense. Bomb defusing in Iraq + Kathryn Bigelow was always going to be a match made in heaven, the result a film taut with machismo, confusion, violence and a drug-like addiction to a life hanging by a thread (or wire) in the middle of an almighty clusterfuck. Not overtly political, it feels genuine and true, conveying both the terror and the appeal, if that is the right word, of such a living. Hugely recommended.
This was great, of course, but not one of Pixar's finest. Pourquoi? Well, the opening ten minutes (along with this scene from later in the film) are absolutely classic, a masterclass in storytelling and creating gut-wrenching emotion from the simplest ingredients, not to mention wonderful evocations of the gentle joy of marriage. But the film that follows, a light-hearted caper that ends up with the trademark Pixar action sequence, sits oddly against such subtle, powerful feelings. I was in tears, buckets of them, but still felt odd when the tone switched, like a mixtape going from Hurt to Move Your Feet. The story seemed wayward, creating a half-hearted baddie whose relative youth given his age is never explained. Of course, it looked divine and the whole thing is great fun to watch, but Up lacks the deep satisfction of Wall-e in combining fun and feeling seamlessly. Still, it's a bloody lovely way to spend a couple of hours, and made excellent mash-up fodder too...
Oh, what a treat this was! A debut bursting with energy, confidence and ideas, D9 echoed the mad enthusiasm and invention of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, filtered through the grimy future military of Cameron's Aliens, but ultimately stood apart from them all. An action film with brains, and even some heart, D9 starts with a fascinating concept (and how refreshing to see an alien ship hovering over somewhere other than USA) and runs with it, giving time for you to get to know & even care about the central character before everything goes all-out mental in the last half hour, a sci-fi action scene done absolutely proper, all splatter and artillery and pig-based weaponry missile. Complete with remarkably believable CGI effects courtesy of Weta, this was an extremely impressive film, delivering everything that Transformers utterly failed to do at a fraction of the cost. Between this and the Halo 3 shorts, Neill Blomkamp is definitely a man to watch. Now, how's about a full-lenght Halo feature?
Another debut, another piece of science-fiction, Moon is the polar opposite of D9 but equally good. Reminiscent of splendid 70s sci-fi, it's almost a one-man show, testament to the brilliant perfomance from that one man, Sam Rockwell. A film of words and feelings rather than aliens and weapons, I was surprised (and impressed) at the direction the film took, the story solid & confident all the way to the end. All that, and the best soundtrack of the year too.
A pleasing little film, publicised like a companion piece to Little Miss Sunshine (though not half as wacky or annoying). A small-scale drama, it's a gentle, slow look at an attempt to launch a crimescene cleaning business, though naturally this is just a scaffold for human drama to unfold on. Thankfully, the humans in question are interesting and believable enough to carry the film thanks to some great acting and a storyline that never becomes ridiculous, zany or twee. Life just happens and it's a pleasure to watch it do so.
A veritable curio this, ostensibly a documentary of life in a small Welsh village where not much happens. You'd think that this lack of eventfulness might scupper a feature length documentary, but this film seems concerned more with capturing a feeling for the place, the people, the peace. The closest comparison would be Etre Et Avoir, particularly in it's eye for the small, significant details of rural life. Minutes pass by as you watch lines of sheep move across a distant hill, yet this doesn't bore. In fact, it's oddly soothing, like going for a country walk and feeling your pace slow, adjusting to the gentler rhythms. The Aphex Twin soundtrack works nicely, as handy with a little piano melody as his more well-known electro/acid/wrongness. A lovely and subtly affectionate snapshot of a village life that seems to fade away with every year.
Absolutely drop dead bonkers barmy, just as I hoped it would be, it was such a treat to see Sam Raimi put Spiderman behind him and go back to the world of slapstick horror that he so gloriously conquered with Evil Dead 2. Ads proclaiming DMTH to be scary were way off the ball - this wasn't a film to scare, to disturb. Nooo, it's a film for going to the cinema and yelling "EW!" and "MANK!" and "oooh, NASTY!" with a great big smile, because this really is slapstick, albeit one with a serious oral fixation. While the performances are played straight, everything else goes flat out NUTSO, and I think I actually applauded at the scene with the goat. While ED2 still rules the roost, DMTH is a huge amount of manky fun, up to its elbows in mud & guts, and leagues better than the po-faced misery of the Saw sequels and their ilk.
Also awesome: Star Trek (FunfunfunfunfunfunWHEEEEEEE!), Coraline (brilliant, lived up to expectations, a truly remarkable piece of artwork), Låt den rätte komma in (that's Let The Right One In, certainly one of the best films of the year, a subtle blend of cold viciousness and genuine warmth), In the Loop (reviewed here), Gran Torino (Dirty Harry + Unforgiven), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (reviewed here), Slumdog Millionaire ('nuff already said) and Frost/Nixon (a real pleasure to watch the two lead performances in verbal battle, thrilling and tense no matter how inevitable the ending).
Here's the two best bits from last week's life drawing, sad to say I've been too busy to plonk them up here until now (all the drawings are here, good and bad). There won't be any drawn today - Missus & I are off gallivanting - but hopefully normal arty service will resume next Saturday.
We started with a bunch of 5 minute poses, my suggestion - the results for me were pretty bland, still making basic errors in proportions and weight, but I think the above drawings that followed, from 10 minute poses, benefited. There's still a blatant uncertainty in my drawing, too many lines, and that's only going to get walloped out of me by a) very short poses that leave no time for going over & over the same bits or b) restricting myself to completely linear drawings, tone-free, possibly going for a continuous line. The output would probably be shite, but its the drawing mentality within me that needs shifting and exercises like that (as demonstrated in books like Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and The Natural Way To Draw, not to mention previous life drawing classes at college) have worked before. Anyway, the drawing on the left actually has a bit of weight to it, especially the lower half, and I like the sense of twisting in the top picture, though the lines used to draw it are still waaaaaaaay too uncertain - look at the broken lines, the short marks, rather than the confident single lines that I have been capable of and should be again.
After a few more drawings that didn't work I ran for the comfort of tonal drawing, particularly the old standby of white on black paper - I think I needed a little reassurance that I could at least get that right. These couple of drawings were okay, if over-worked, but I felt much happier with the above. Blatant use of negative spaces in the first one, another throwback to the aforementioned books, took the pressure off the linework, though with an inconsistent backdrop to the model it wasn't possible to extend the light shading to the whole background. It's still too scrappy for a 25 minute drawing, but it's a step in the right direction, as is the other one. The body is too ill-defined and you can see where I realised a leg had gone too far and had to dial it back, but the torso, head & shoulders work nicely enough, and I think I'm starting find the visual shorthands for facial features and hair that stop you getting bogged down in detail mid-sketch.
The soundtrack for this session? Tertia by Caspian, Silent Shout by the Knife, a varied dollop of Echo & The Bunnymen and this absolute dreamboat of electronic loveliness from Yesterday And Today by The Field, one of the finest albums of last year and perfect for slipping into that drawing-trance state where time goes a bit funny and the world vanishes to nothing.
"I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses - that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things."
- Pablo Neruda, quoted in The Gift by Lewis Hyde
Back at the start of November 2008 I went for a life drawing session and, despite producing drawings like this and having paid for another 5 weeks worth, didn't go back afterwards. Why? Knackeredness, nothing more - I just felt too damn lazy. I think I justified it to myself by saying that I would spend Saturday afternoons doing other types of art instead, working on illustration or something like that, but when it came to it I did nothing of the sort and just let Saturday afternoons fade away in the general blur of the weekend, time spent online and in the kitchen. So it passed through the whole of 2009, a veritable desert of artwork for me, barely producing more than a few sketches for the entire year. Course, for the first half of the year I was pleasantly occupied with getting married, while for the second I got into the dark & dangerous world of preserves, but I think I also used these as excuses not to sit down and do a drawing, even just a 10 minute sketch, and the more time passed the bigger a deal it became to do a drawing, any drawing. Coupled with the lack of fulfilment I've been getting from my day job over the last few months, I was getting into quite a grump with myself, frustrated that I was letting the ability to draw and paint drift away from me but too chickenshit to actually do anything about it.
(Which begs the question - what was I afraid of? It sounds so stupid when I try to describe it, or look back in retrospect, but ultimately it's failure, a fear of sitting down & doing a drawing that's bad - in which case, why bother trying? - coupled with expectations you set for yourself. Yeah, self-expectations are a fucker, at least for meself, such as the way I only did a few drawings in Orkney the second time we visited because of the expectations I had for myself following the first time's sketchbook, setting the bar for myself so high it becomes intimidating to the point of inertia. Idiotic when you try to actually describe these feelings, realising how ridiculous they are, but they're there all the same. Whether other arty types get this, I've no idea. Gosh, isn't this self-indulgent/therapeutic?)
Anyway. Towards the end of last year I realised that I needed to get my creative juices flowing again lest I became some dried-up husk of a person who does nothing but go to work and feel miserable, unfulfilled and resentful, having met quite a few people fitting such a description. Although the finger-sketching on the touchy Spod was a good start, it was clear that I needed to be pretty much forced into drawing, free of distractions (oh internet, you wanton temptress you!) and the pre-paid four hours of Leith School of Art's untutored life drawing sessions offered the perfect opportunity. Once that £120 was handed over, I wasn't getting it back regardless of whether I turned up for the sessions or not, and being so fiscally careful these days I damn well intend to get my moneys worth.
Yesterday was the first of the sessions and it went pretty well, better than I'd expected (well, feared) after over a year away from the easel & model. I stuck to using an A2 drawing pad and monochrome materials since I figured it'd be hard enough getting the hang of realistically capturing the human form on paper without chucking colour into things. It felt good from the beginning despite that initial ARGH HOW THE HELL DO I DO THIS, the 10 minute time limit for the first drawing leaving no time for neurotic retrospection (unlike Sunday mornings...) and although the drawings produced over the following few hours weren't career bests they certainly didn't see me regressing back to pre-1998 standards. There was one absolute stinker that I wrestled with (not literally mind) but just couldn't get right, yet that didn't put me into the self-critical grump I thought it might, and was immediately followed by a drawing I could feel very happy with. By using both sides of the paper, I basically ruled out the prospect of selling any artwork, thereby sidestepping the SELLSELLSELL mindset the plagued the 2007/08 sessions - I need to accept that there doesn't need to be any further purpose to these drawings beyond the very act of producing them. If they look good and people like them on the internet, ace, but that shouldn't, mustn't become the raison d'etre of life drawing. Even now it's going to take time to fully accept that, I'm still too addicted to checking Flickr stats and Facebook comments on recently-posted artwork for my own good (and then getting the hump at a lack of response, plum that I am), but I think I can do it. I'll also make sure to post on this site after each session and my thoughts on how it went, because the only thing this website can offer that no other can is my own artwork. Without that, it's increasingly hard to see what the point of keeping Falling Sky going is, so I may as well make the most of it. And if there's the slightest chance that in doing so I could inspire someone else to do the same, to get back into a skill they've loved but allowed to slip away due to that ridiculous internal fear of failure (masked by a whole bunch of almost-convincing excuses, of course) and in doing so feeling as fulfilled and relieved as I did after yesterday, hell, it's got to be worth doing.
Spurred into action by this here post from the Missus on the last twelve months, here's my own summarised gibbering of the year that's just about to topple into history. It's been a barmy one, with far too much falling passed undocumented here, but here's what I did manage to catch:
JANUARY! Starts with a whole bunch of best-of-08 posts, then I go to The Kitchin and FEEEEEEED.
It's been a funny one, this year, not necessarily ha-ha. Artistically I ground to a halt in late 2008 and did very little all year, stuck with that stupid fear of the empty page/canvas/sketchbook - curious how it took the touchy Spod to get things going again, but having booked life drawing sessions for the first time since '08 in January I hope to get things rolling along again, since really that's the only unique thing I can bring to this blog - the awareness of that is one reason for the drying-up of posts this year, alongside being that much more knackered outside of work than before. I'm hoping to take action next year to try and balance out the whole work/life thing and I'd like to think this place (and my personality) will benefit as a result.
However, despite all that it's been a wonderful year simply because of the wedding and all the awesomeness that came with it. The kindness that so many friends & family showed to us, the sheer joy of seeing everything come together after months of planning and, most of all, becoming Mr Chatiry... that alone makes it the best year yet. Next year, well... we have plans. Quite what they may be, you'll just have to wait and see, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what my lady wife & I make of the next 12 months. Not another flipping wedding, that's for sure.
More finger-fun with the iPod Touch, following on from my initial doodling back in November, this time using an app called Brushes. While it's nowhere near as easy to sketch with a finger as it is with a pencil, the ability to produce full-colour images like the ones above from something so wee as the touchy Spod is quite a treat.
As this morning's photograph hopefully demonstrated, I didn't come to some sticky hapless end last week whilst on my tod despite well-founded fears. With the ability to access our flat through the new-fangled method of remembering my keys, a ghastly death from hypothermia or destitution was averted, instead spending a cosy couple of evenings with stir-fried beef, haggis & chilli pie, Orcadian beer and Nazi zombies ("Ein! Zwei! Die!"), not to mention a solitary sojourn to the cinema for 'Paranormal Activity'. Watching that on the one night in the year when I had the flat to myself overnight probably wasn't the smartest move on my part but, yet again and despite the best efforts of my overactive imagination at 3am, I survived. Progress! Still, I don't much like being without my wife (good thing too!), the flat felt too big, too quiet, just plain wrong. Thankfully she returned right on time and all is right with the world again.
Anyhoo, I would write more but am currently a third of the way through James Ellroy's new whopper, Blood's A Rover, and it's due back to the library, well, today. Given that there's 400+ pages still to go, that isn't going to happen, so it's a race against overdue fees to finish this intoxicating, violent behemoth of a book, after which I will attempt to return to normal blogging duties again. In the meantime, you can always catch my random feckless wittering on Twitter, which both the Missus & I have taken to over the last couple of weeks. See for yourself why comedy man-for-the-moment Armando Iannucci described my writing as "the funniest" (quote taken only slightly out of context)! Marvel as I struggle against my very nature to distil sentences into a mere 140 characters! Shriek with empathic horror at my ocular calamity this very morning! (Unless you already read my blitherings on Facebook, where this is all just repeated) Otherwise, I'll see you on the other side of page 638.
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