Ingres Portrait Drawings, and the 'Giraffe-neck' women of Kayan Lahwi tribe

Seeing any similarities? Know where I'm going with this post?

This is one of the most absurd examples of Ingres' distortion of the human frame, but it brings up an interesting point. Without doubt one of the all-time greatest draftsmen, Ingres nonetheless took incredible liberties with human anatomy.

I visited the Morgan Library's incredible exhibition of Old Master drawings from The Louvre recently, and was blown away by his work, of course, but also by a hand-written letter which was to my mind one of the most telling insights into the man's psyche. The writing was cramped and claustrophobic on the page, and almost illegibly small. It was easy to picture this miserable wreck hunched over the writing desk, his nose - Scrooge like - one inch from the paper. It occurred to me that that's how he must have approached his portraits too.

The guy was quite obviously a madman. By many accounts he was a miserably unhappy human being, who (for the most part) detested the "dull" subjects of his portraits, and yet he could not help becoming obsessed with the finest detail when called to draw or paint them. I wonder how much of the distortion is due to some sort of Mannerist fixation with Style, or whether it was simply because he was so focused on the tiniest and most subtle of details that the overall effect escaped him. I find it hard to believe that his twisting and stretching of the human body wasn't a conscious choice, so that begs the question; why would he want to do that?

I did a drawing of my daughter Sadie the other day (from a photo of her a couple of years back in her Snow Princess Halloween costume) and decided to compare it to one of Ingres' for a laugh. I mean, why not right? May as well aim high as not at all. Anyway, here it is...

I took the drawing I did and compared it in terms of anatomy to Ingres' drawing of Madame Thiers (below). The Thiers drawing is not even a particularly distorted one by Ingres' standards, but I was still surprised by just how 'off' the drawing was from Reality.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)
Portrait of Madame Thiers, 1834

It became immediately apparent that if I was to conform my daughter to the proportions of the Ingres drawing, I was going to have to chop off her head and lift it up about four inches. I ran to the kitchen to grab a knife, but then got side-tracked wondering if maybe Ingres was actually on to something. The real-world precedent of the Burmese women of the Kayan Lahwi tribe popped in my head, and I started flicking through books until I came across this image from Mary Evans.

This 1930s postcard depicts an unusual practice that continues to this day. The neck ring ornaments are single brass coils that are applied to young girls (who apparently line up for this treat) when they are around five.

It turns out that my assumption about this bizarre ritual was all wrong: I had always assumed that the metal coils served to elongate the neck.This is not true. As the child grows, the first coil is replaced with longer and weightier coils that push the collar bone down and compress the rib cage. Contrary to popular belief, then, the neck is not actually lengthened; the illusion of a stretched neck is created by the deformation of the clavicle.

A quick comparison to Madame Thiers, and it's evident that it's not the neck that Ingres stretched, but (like the Kayan Lahwi) it is the shoulders that he dropped. The waist line remains more or less correctly positioned anatomically, as does the position of the head. It's the clavicle that drops down to create the 'Ingres look.'

"Okay," I thought, "perhaps Ingres adheres to the same aesthetic criteria that drive this ancient practice." I didn't actually say it like that, because that's not how I speak. Probably more like "holy shit."

I tested the results on my daughter by showing her these two versions of the drawing (below). On the left, my daughter's natural shoulder line and on the right, the Ingres proportions. I was shocked that she chose the un-natural Ingres version over Reality!

The lesson for me was clear: As long as the distance between head and waist remains more-or-less true to life, you can drop the shoulders as much as you want and still have a drawing that appears correct. Dropping the shoulders may even make your portrait look more correct than the real thing.

In fact, you can draw anything at all under the sun and it doesn't even have to look correct, just as long as it's drawn really really well. Now I just have to revise the 'Draw what you see, not what you Know' dictum of the old life drawing studios, and keep practicing. 

Some more Ingres portrait sketches to finish off the post...

Mrs. Hunchback sitting atop Notre Dame

This drawing is another great example of distortion by Ingres. Look how long his fiancé's arm is, and how short her legs are! He drew her looking more like an ape than a human.

It's a loving family scene on the one hand, with old what's-her-name staring straight out at Ingres, tinkling away on the pianola (or whatever that thing is). On the other; he can't have cared for her too much since he broke off the engagement soon after this drawing, claiming that he was too distraught to return to Paris from Rome [His paintings had just received terrible reviews from the critics].

His melancholy was so troubling since his bid for Salon recognition went tits up, that he decided to hang out in Rome as a single man and leave his fiancé at the piano. What an excuse! It's the old "it's not you, it's me" eye-roller, but in this case, it's even more laughable; "it's not you, it's Paris."

Maybe he did mean to draw her like an orangutan after all.

Perspective Drawings, Jan Vredeman De Vries, 1604

Bit of a lazy post on my part, I'm afraid. I'm working on a post about drawing wheels in Perspective as an add-on to a previous post about drawing arches in perspective, and I came across these great drawings so decided just to post them quickly.

It's amazing to me how many volumes were published regarding Perspective through the centuries, right up to the present. At first I thought that the topic was exhausted, but realized quickly that there are tons of different theories about representing objects in space.

The likes of Leonardo was probably aware of ninety of them, but like most artists, appears to have employed only two or three.

These images are from a four volume set of books by De Vries, published in 1604-1605

Digital Painting demo, with Whit Brachna

Concept artist and Matte painter Whit Brachna is an incredible draughtsman and artist, who is equally adept at traditional and digital media. His pencil sketches have a confident line and a solid understanding of value.

That's why I made the plunge and purchased his full length Photoshop painting tutorial (available for purchase here). He also generously includes a set of Photoshop brushes he developed. This short video clip gives you a sample of his technique and style:



I love watching the slow transition from nebulous pixels into something tangible and 'real'. I especially like his use of Google Sketchup as an initial 3D thumbnail step when dealing with interiors and built environments. He quickly renders his design in Sketchup, a super simple 3D drawing program, in order to rapidly work out perspective issues, and then uses them as background templates upon which to layer his painting.

I'm all for taking advantage of automated processes to speed the painting along, and this was an approach I hadn't seen before checking out some of his other drawing tutorials.

In the full video, Brachna runs through of the process he used to develop this landscape (below), while dealing with some of the foundations of creating a painting including the use of value, shape, texture, color and other design principles. Although in this case he's dealing with a Photoshop painting, his principles are sound and can be applied to any medium.

Preferring to start work from a darker canvas [Brachna feels that starting from white tends to push us towards lighter values overall] he quickly lays in blocks of color with the digital equivalent of a house-painting brush.

It's super easy to create your own Photoshop brushes, and they can be a vast improvement on the standard presets available. Brachna's approach to developing brushes is to actually create the brush tip by painting it, as opposed to what I've done where I create a mark with a traditional brush and ink set-up, then scan it in and use that.

You can tell that he's really sensitive to subtle hues present in nature, where 'grey' doesn't really exist, and establishes blocks of color early-on in order to ensure that his finished work doesn't appear flat and dead. Though he works very roughly at first, there is also an awareness of the interplay between hard and soft edges in a landscapes and how they create depth.

I've posted before about how painters such as Carravaggio are masters of suggestion. They reserve tight detail for a relatively small area of the canvas, preferring to let the rest of the canvas sit like a painterly puff of smoke. You know something's there without having to see it delineated expressly. Especially in areas of dark value, there is no more than a suggestion of form. This reliance on suggestion is what separates painting from photography.

Nevertheless, it can be easy to think of shadows as an after-thought; to save your concentration for the highlight and/or focal point. Close study of great painting reveals that although shadows can be vague with regard to detail, they are not vague regarding form (or color for that matter). Objects in low light appear distilled to an essence of form, but are still very clearly there. Don't neglect those shadows!

I have mentioned before on this blog not to pick up the small brush until you're done with the big one. Usually, even when you think you're done with the big brush, you're not. Brachna echoes something of this sentiment when he evidently resists the urge to zoom in to his painting until absolutely necessary, knowing that the temptation would be too great to resist fussing around with tiny brushes, and then losing the big picture.

Anyway; I gotta go!

Check out his work.

Liu Bolin

Trompe l'oeil has traditionally been concerned with creating the painted illusion that something exists in three dimensions. But what do we call it's opposite; painting on top of a three dimensional object so that it appears invisible?

Artist Liu Bolin has been disappearing, ghost-like, into the background since 2005, as he systematically paints himself out of reality. His series, Hiding in the City, recently came to Soho in New York where he performed a disappearing act in the Eli Klein gallery that was described as "mesmerizing".

Bolin began this series as a political commentary on the tensions between the Chinese government and their people. Speaking in an interview with Yatzer, Bolin expanded on his motivation:

"After graduating from school, for a long time I had no family, no job and no love in my life. During those four years without love and income, I felt I had been dumped by this society and that I had no position within it.  I was meaningless in this environment. This is the emotional reason for starting the series. The fuse of the work was ignited on the November the 16th in 2005 at Suojia Village, which was the biggest living area for artists in Asia and it was forced to demolition by the government. I was there at that time, so I started the series i opposition to the government’s atrocity. I wanted to use my work to show that artists’ state in society and their living places had not been protected"

As a painter, I am of course interested in his process. You can get some sense of it in this video from his NY trip. Using student quality acrylics, and what appears to be a handful of assistants gathered locally, you see right away that it's not just the process that interests Bolin; it would all be meaningless without that final photograph.

Along similar lines, I always felt that the meditative aspect of Andy Goldsworthy's work, where he spends countless hours alone in the wild, is somehow undermined by the insistent intrusion of the camera. (There are some striking similarities between their work, specifically in the case of the Shadow pieces, below). Although I am a huge fan of both artists, I have the hollow feeling sometimes that the work is created solely for the camera lens. In a way, it's less about the performance process than it is about creating a gallery-worthy commodity.

I admit to holding onto a ridiculous Romantic notion of the Artist as some sort of Aesthete laboring alone in a garret, compelled by an inner fire, with no egoism, conscious thought or hopes of praise or reward. Boy is my face red.

Liu Bolin, Left, and Andy Goldsworthy, Right

Questions of authorship [who actually is the artist here? the photographer who clicks the shutter, the assistants who do the painting, or the man himself who stands still for hours? Does it matter?] can be neatly side-stepped in his political thesis: this is a comment on the nature of the individual in Chinese Culture, after all.



According to The Wall Street Journal, Bolin "was the fourth most searched among contemporary and modern artists on the site Artnet, beating Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. (The American photographer Sally Mann came in first.)"

His rise in popularity is reflected in the cost of his work. "The photos are sold in limited editions for $6,000 to $12,000—about 30% higher than a few years ago, according to gallery owner Eli Klein."

Liu Bolin will be exhibiting at Eli Klein Fine Art  in New York from June 29 - September 28, 2011

Liu Bolin created this piece for a UNICEF campaign in China

l'Art Arabe, by Prisse d’Avennes

You know, I've held this post as a draft for ages now. I was hoping to be able to add something to the text copy, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to show you the images and let you see for yourself their jaw-dropping beauty and technicality.

I had an opportunity to study this set of immaculate original lithographs from 1877, entitled L’Art Arabe d’apres les monuments du Kaire, by Emile Prisse d'Avennes. It's hard to describe the effect of handling original prints that are centuries old. The artist's hand feel so intimately close that they feel as if they are alive.

These gorgeous prints are from the hand of "an artist of consummate skill" according to Mary Norton, writing for Aramco (which is incidentally the Saudi-Arabian Oil Company who's website is an incredible resource of excellent writing),  Emile Prisse d’Avennes. He was also "a writer, scientist, scholar, engineer and linguist, a genius who spent much of his life among the illiterate." I like this guy!

Ms. Norton goes on: "Of the hundreds of 19th-century Orientalists – those Western artists, scholars and writers who gravitated to the Islamic world following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 – few possessed so prodigious an intellect, such a trove of talents, so insatiable a curiosity or so passionate a commitment to record the historical and artistic patrimony of ancient Egypt and medieval Islam."

Taschen has recently re-published l'Art Arabe, as this new article in World of Interiors explains.

The World of Interiors magazine, June 2011

These next few are small fragments of the full page lithos, but they give you an excellent sense of the detail and artistry. Stencil designs, anyone?