Pistachios and a new class at the Durham Art Center

The other week I felt inspired to paint some pistachios. Not sure if I’m done with the painting yet, but it’s been a while, so I thought I would post my progress. If I work on them some more, I will probably post the revision. But I didn’t really intend this 5×7 to be a drawn out process. Pistachios have an amazing range of color and at the time, the sun was hitting them in an interesting way.

Also, I’ve been struggling lately about what the optimal surface to oil paint on is. So far my favorite is gessoed watercolor paper. But the prep time involved is somewhat undesired and I don’t like the flimsiness. I experimented with canvas paper for the pistachios and just hated the surface. I have ordered some oil primed linen panels to try out, and I have high hopes for them. So far the texture seems right on and I like the firmness of board and being able to use a regular frame. I don’t like stretched canvas for almost any reason these days…although I realize that at large sizes it might be the best choice.

Secondly, I registered for another class at the Durham Art Center. So far this is my second class there and I love them both. Last time I took Intermediate Painting and it was great. I plan to take it again but I can really only do one at a time. This session I decided I wanted to focus on drawing. Not regular drawing though, that’s too tame. This time I decided I needed to take figure drawing for a number of reasons:

1. I have no experience drawing the human figure whatsoever.
2. I feel that the skills used in learning to draw the human figure will translate into all my artwork.
3. I tend to get very involved in detail and spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing lines. Live models don’t really allow for that. The poses are very limited and the challenge of the allotted space will be good for me.
4. I don’t get charcoal. Paint makes sense to me with blending a shading. It just clicks. I can even get by fine with pencil. When I use charcoal however, the implementation of whatever I’m doing seems to have no grace whatsoever. So I just feel like I need to get a feeling for the medium because I like looking at charcoal drawings, I just have not developed any finesse with them myself.

Next are two of my very first figure drawings! They are all about 15 minute poses, possibly 20. Obviously the shading is pretty terrible, but the proportions are okay, especially on the second one. I would love to take both figure drawing and painting during the same session if I can manage to swing it.

After two sessions, my feeling about all figure drawing is: love the instructor, love the class, love the challenge. There are a lot of talented people taking the course with me, and I really enjoy seeing their interpretation of the work. Everybody has a different style. My work has no style yet, I’m just trying to sort out how to deal with getting out of my head for 15mns and sorting out this whole charcoal thing. The only success I have had with charcoal is eraser drawings, I can make those look good (where you wash the page with charcoal and erase out the picture) but I certainly will not lean on that crutch to get me through anything.

The human body and face has some of the most interesting shadows and curves to draw (and paint I’m sure). It’s way outside of my comfort zone to confine a drawing to a time limit and that’s great. Part of the purpose is to get you to stop thinking about what you’re drawing and just draw…that is very hard for me.

From class one:

From class two: