after a life drawing class

I like it when students attend an observational class but decide to develop it in to something else.

Here the life models' situation is enhanced by imagined surroundings:(the same scenario as seen by other students)

Later the same style was applied to exterior situations. Here there is more emphasis on observation:

....enhanced by label information

David Hockney: Secret Knowledge

Is tracing an image 'cheating'? I think not. A traced drawing is merely another way to construct an image.

David Hockney's Secret Knowledge examines the use of both camera obscura and camera lucida technology - tracing mechanisms. His book and the supporting BBC film contextualise the sophisticated use of this often dismissed drawing approach.
  





It's also worth watching this interview with Hockney (1st of 3)

Modern equivalents of the camera lucida: NeoLucida
and SimmTrace - one I find harder to trace (no pun intended)....

Kayleigh Wallace: skeleton works

....drawn, printed and embroidered works on paper doilies, utilising collage, and the human skeleton as subject matter

spine and spine

Freehand cover design

My drawing book Freehand seems to have different covers on different continents. Which one's best I wonder. 

UK edition

US edition

Freehand - Helen Birch

21 pages from my new book......

Jorge Pineda: an exhibition (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno)

The modern art gallery in Valencia (Spain) - Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno has recently exhibited the work of Jorge Pineda (translation), an artist from the Dominican Republic.

The exhibition: After all, tomorrow is another day is presented in various formats, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Drawing seemed to pervade, to assert its presence in and among these other formats, to such an extent that I saw it as primarily a drawing based show.

The artist  invited the audience to be part of the artwork. Here a table is laid out with a golden coated chalk skeleton. We are invited to draw on the walls with the bones, thus disturbing them, displacing them, creating something new: life from death?

photo: HB

corrugated cardboard structure

Jorge Pineda's work features in the contemporary Caribbean art blog Uprising news too.

biro drawing

A video of the show (it's better with the sound turned off!)

Outsider Art

The English high school system requires its 14/15yr old pupils to experience a 'work placement' for one week. 

It's difficult to place some individuals - there just aren't enough 'jobs' out there for them to do - or, their challenging behaviour / lack of maturity means that schools don't want to risk placing them outside of a school's domain.

Some schools seem to have developed a way around the problem - to use open days or taster sessions in art colleges to place these students. By doing so they meet their set of criteria.

My colleague and I had no idea that the sessions we were going to provide for the day were for individuals who had absolutely no interest in applying for art college, and pretty much dismissed much of what we tried to win them around with.

A really, really tough art school day was had!

A fortnight later, and with a little time to reflect, I've decided to upload some of their drawings.

What strikes me about them is how naive, or outsider art like they seem. 

They reminded me of an exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 2010: 'Intuition' - works from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection.

All of these portraits were drawn as if observed directly in front of our model Frank - not so; the work placement students were working on easels in a semi-circle around the subject. 

In another exercise we added our 2nd model Lesley. 

For a short time, the group's concentrated attempts captured this much more complex scenario.
  

Excellent further reading: Raw Creation - Outsider Art and Beyond by John Maizels.