My first time taking art classes dates back
to elementary school, and my teacher was (and still is) a faithful believer in
free will. Every Sunday we used to go to his house and casually set around
chairs and easels, carrying different art tools from his porch and waiting for
that call, “Go pick what you like and start your work today”.
I was always going for the tubes and
brushes. For me colors added to the excitement of the creation of something
unknown. I tried painting on woodblocks, canvases, paper and even ceramic tile.
“Tell me when you want to try something
new,” some days he would whip a bunch of pencils with different labels from one
of his huge boxes and put them down in front of me, “maybe.” I kept smiling
back at him and heard the voice inside me saying “well no thanks”, just because
as a lazy little kid I had watched people drawing still life and the shading
just seemed to be taking forever. For similar reasons I almost only took out
pencils and erasers when he brought the sculptures out of his study: to me they
looked serious, but cool.
I kept building my fantasies about life in
the palette-dominated Neverland until it vanished at the beginning of this
semester. I had to step out of my circle to learn to deal with only black,
white and various shades of gray. As time wore on I became more comfortable
working with those colors and gained more thoughts on drawing.
I gradually became one of those people who
would sit with a drawing pad and pencils for several hours without even
standing up, and I came to know where this captivating power is coming from. While
painting uses the juxtaposition of different colors to describe the shapes of
individual objects and the relationship in between them, drawing, uses lines as
the major means of expression and shows light and shadow through the
differentiated values given to the objects. One particular technique I
developed through the drawing class this semester is the use of charcoal and eraser;
I have learned to darken the site, use the erasers to bring out the sense of
light and go back to add more details. Over time I picked up the tolerance for
the charcoal powder smeared on my elbow, arm, wrist and fingers from time to
time.
Although I spend a lot of time with black
and white, I never quit using colors when I am out of class, and I now understand
the interrelationship between drawing and painting. Drawing is not only a vital
step in the creation of a successful piece of work with paints, but it also
stands out as a unique art form itself. On one hand, for paintings, drawings exist
as the preview in some sense in that they provide information about the
composition and the relationship between light and shades. On the other hand,
in a pure drawing the lines, despite their differences in directions and
textures, reach a unification to capture the momentum and dynamic of the scene
and achieve a consistency as a whole.
Practice does not necessarily make perfect,
but skills do build up during the process and could be applied to other aspects.
These days when I was working on a mini-portfolio
of watercolor I found myself working at a much faster pace when doing the line
sketch. The lines give me a more concrete idea about the positions and relative
sizes of the objects; I gain certain confidence from the drawings before I start
laying the paints on, because I know where I am going from there.
If I could travel back in time to eight
years ago I would probably still choose to fill my work with colors, but if my
teacher offered again… I should be mostly prepared to grab those pencils and start
the lines :)
Happy December,
Judy
No comments:
Post a Comment