Praeterita

I suppose it's to be expected that when I am going to be in Florence for three weeks, my drawing in art museums and galleries is going to look completely different from how I have come to draw in the last ten years or so. That is, like this: This chap was a marble relief sculpture on a tomb in the floor right beside me, where we were having our introductory meetings yesterday (in a 12th century chapel, of course). As I said, I don't draw like this much any more, and when I teach drawing I don't, either (my emphasis is much more on making marks, any marks, as expressively as possible, and as soon as possible from the start of the first class). And while some people may look at the drawing above and think it's not bad (which it isn't), there are many artists better than this kind of life drawing than me who will see the same fault in it than I do. Shorter version: drawing like this is hard! It got me thinking about what kinds of other drawing there are, and w...

Decay of Sound, 2013, 22 x 24 inches, Oil, Canvas, Wood This painting by artist Ravenna Taylor is currently part of an online exhibition of her work, which you can see here . In an exchange of comments via Facebook, Ravenna mentioned that a lot of people liked her older work better, so I decided to do an experiment: I went to the online gallery, looked through the images on show without looking at any dates or titles, and chose the first few that caught me eye. It turned out that in each case, I was drawn to the new work. There are many things I like about this painting. I like the way it plays with geometric abstraction, but loosely -- nothing is drawn with a ruler, nothing is rigid or too straight, all is marked out by the patient movement of a hand and a brush, putting down mark after mark. It's possible that the idea or the selection of shapes starts out planned, but it doesn't look that way in the execution. It all looks like the artist was alive to how putting one ...