The Landscape of Painting

From the pencils of Ingres and Sargent to mine, and a snarky word or two about David Hockney

I’ve always felt that the zenith of fine art is the precise capture of the human figure by drawing and painting. Life drawing in particular is incredibly hard to do well, and to get any good at all can take years. Some people start out as geniuses but still they practice for years. For me figure drawing doesn’t get better than the work of Ingres and John Singer Sargent. What I find mesmerizing in their work is the combination of precision and looseness, albeit looseness guided by muscle memory, experience and genius.

Consider these drawings:

Portrait of Alfred-Emilien by Ingres

Portrait of Nijinsky by Sargent

What I love is the fact that both drawings are exact and squiggly at the same time. There is a beautiful tension between the two forces. Enough for the moment about those geniuses, let’s talk about me.

Many years ago I spent several months doing a self-portrait every evening, trying to build my drawing skills. I would sit in mental preparation at my drawing table and study the books that I had on Ingres’ and Sargent’s drawings and try to memorize them, to channel them, to try to get some teeny bit of their staggering ability to somehow flow through me, just for a measly couple of hours. Unfortunately, for me, and now you, only one of my attempted self-portraits survives, and it would have to be one of the ones for which I held strange expressions:I’m including this drawing is simply to show that although for years I’ve worked and worked at drawing, and will continue to work and work, I will be forever light years from the talent of my heroes, Ingres and Sargent.

Which naturally brings us to the cameras obscura and lucida. Say wha? you say. Around the time I was practicing my drawing skills, I worked part-time, after my day of teaching school was over, at a graphic design studio. They had a device called a camera lucida which basically projected whatever its prism was focused on onto your drawing paper so that you could essentially trace the image. It is a great cheating tool for illustrators. I had wanted one the whole time I worked as an illustrator, but they cost hundreds of dollars. My cheapo version was to tape a photograph to a window, then put tracing paper on top and trace the image backlit by the sun. Nowhere near as good as the camera lucida (or “lucy”, in the jargon), the first reason being that it was obviously no good at night, and especially because, unlike with the camera lucida, with the window method you can’t change the image size.

Related to the camera lucida is the camera obscura, which is basically a dark room that has a tiny hole in a wall through which the world outside is projected, sort of like you’re inside the human eye. They’re pretty cool, these camera obscuras, and are worth a visit if you happen by one. I’ve been to the one in Santa Monica, California (home of the homeless, as Harry Shearer reminds us), but there are a bunch of them around the country . A subcategory of the camera lucida is the pinhole camera, essentially a miniature camera obscura: it’s a box that has a pinhole on one side and photo paper on the opposite on which the image from outside is captured and then developed.

I’ll happily take a moment to mention here my friend Nancy Breslin who is a major talent and proponent of this kind of photography. Be sure to visit her Square Meals site too, where she has used her pinhole camera to capture many meals.

But I’m getting off track here. The point I was getting to was that while I have had the experience of using a camera lucida and would have happily used it to try to convince people I’m the new Ingres or Sargent, it would never have occurred to me that Ingres would not be able to draw as well as he did without using such a device. But English artist David Hockney wrote a whole book about that topic, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, essentially accusing Ingres and other extraordinarily gifted (but hey, what do I know?) artists of cheating. I think David Hockney is an artist unaffected by possessing marginal skill (but hey, what do I know?), and is a more a personality than a talent. I suggest you find the time, if you’re interested in reading more, to go to this article by Brian K. Yoder, Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously Obviously I take Mr. Yoder’s side in this argument.

So I’ve come full circle to say that I think, and I’m no art historian, that some artists are born geniuses who still have to work really hard, and some become geniuses by working really, really hard. Ingres and Sargent are for me in the former category, and I still have to work really, really hard to approach pretty good.

Tags: artists who matter, drawing

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Influential artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.