Sadie Valeri - The Resurgence of Realism - AWA Symposium 2018

I can't remember how many years ago it was now that I saw this picture in a magazine of what I thought was a piece of wax paper in a shell and I went that is the most exquisite still-life painting I have ever seen Dutch Golden Age be damned and I found out it was this woman Sadie Volare and she tells me she went to RISD I went to RISD for a little while she actually graduated from RISD I didn't and she has some interesting things to say about her education there compared to the education or as she probably would refer to it the real education she got by working with contemporary masters so that's one of the things she'll be talking about it she speaks with us today so without any further ado Sadie were so delighted to have you here thank you very much for coming I'm so happy to be able to do this it's been it's been just such an amazing opportunity to be invited to do to create a painting for an idea I was already starting to think about before I was invited to this show and was really a natural extension of some of my ideas and to be invited to talk about the things that I'm most excited about I couldn't think of an organization and a museum that dovetails so well with all the ideas that I'm super excited about so I'm so happy to talk to you guys today so as she said I went to RISD and I graduated back in 93 and it looks like several of you are my age or older and then a few of you are my age or younger those of you who are my age are older will probably have a feeling of resonance when I describe the 70s and 80s and 90s in our education as sort of a dark age and there I'll go much more into that when I when I actually start my talk but the contrast between what is available today you all found out about today maybe through a paste postcard but much more likely through an online connection through some way of receiving the information I find it continually amazing that the way that this resurgence of real and realism is happening is because we're all connected by the most advanced technology that human beings have ever made for communication so I find that just amazing you can find your teachers and you can find your students your students can find you and that has made our education realist our education I believe truly available to women for literally the first time in history the last time that it was standard for all artists who wanted to be realistic painters to work from the nude model not just be like a quick Foundation studies in a degree program the last time that this was really made part of your standard education the way it has become was right about the time that it stopped being valued so as we heard earlier they let women into the occult Abo's arts in 9 1897 how soon after that did we see that realism realistic training and realism realism went out of fashion 10 years 20 years maybe 30 I have a tiny little theory if I was going to go back and get a degree and write a dissertation my dissertation would be on was it the association of women getting real realist training for the first time in history that turned the tide away from realism as we tend to associate women with a certain art form ceramics crafts anything related to fibers anything related to pottery the value of that it goes down is it possible that just the fact that they finally opened the doors to the women that have been banging on them since before the French Revolution is it possible with that the association of letting all these ladies into the art schools compounded with a little bit of all the other factors the Industrial Revolution the invention of the handheld consumer affordable camera and the the world wars and everything that changed everything about art was that one factor so that's a whole nother talk that's just a little idea when I was fourteen years old maybe fifteen I was really really lucky to have to go to school with a very very strict French headmistress and the French believe that you are not an educated person if you don't know who Michelangelo is and if you don't know a basic understanding of art history so I had a wonderful introduction to art history at 14 15 16 years old by this headmistress of this very small school I graduated with 13 people in my graduating class and it was very academically rigorous but they believed and a lot of Europeans still believe that that a good education includes theatre chorus my sisters here we went to the same school we both had to sing in the chorus we both had to act in plays we both had to paint and draw in my class of 13 graduating students I was not the only artist I think a lot of us in high school or in middle school or maybe the one artist out of a hundred students there are three out of the 13 that we were the class artists because this education was standard you didn't just it wasn't an elective to take art you had to take art so this really fundamentally Renaissance idea that to be an educated well-rounded person you not only had to study history and science and math but you had to study art and have a basic conversant ability to about art and draw a little bit I mean people who did not consider themselves artists were sitting there doing drawing all four years so it was really unique education so I was lucky to have access to an art library and I picked up this book of Michelangelo drawings when I was about 14 or 15 years old and I was just filled with one thought and that was I want to be able to draw like that that's that became my vision that became my standard even though I learned a lot about more about art history and learned it was introduced to a lot more artists there's kind of your artists that are your first loves right you just go back to as your touchstone over and over and for that for my for me its Michelangelo and seeing these drawings really made a huge difference to me seeing in the reproduction does anybody we're in a room full of artists I probably could just put up the name Sam but does anybody know the names of these you can just shout it out if you know anything van Gogh Monet I actually gave a similar talk with this slide to a tech audience because a year ago I made a commitment any time anybody asked me to speak in public I was gonna say yes because I actually enjoy hot I did this to a group of tech artists the tech tech designers young entrepreneurs in San Francisco they had they wanted to have a an artistic talk so I did a little 15-minute talk for them and that whole room could name those as well I mean they're just really part of our culture now in this room I expect many of you if not most of you can name these two artists can you just shout out the names of Solomon J Solomon anybody guess that one and Boozer ho yeah it's Bouguereau boo girl I'll post a save which will hold your booze row I don't know my French headmistress would be horrified in 1980 and I know she didn't introduce me to Bouguereau nobody talked about move Bouguereau and 88-89 right so even my French headmistress was like oh he's on the you know if you go to the musee d'orsay there's the right side of the tracks and then all the good stuff is on the left side of the tracks he was over on the right side of the tracks the musee d'orsay used to be more formally organized against the salons stuff and then displaying the genius of the people who were beveled against the salon so even my very well educated well rounded headmistress definitely had a bias against the girl as well so these two artists I went to four years of art school I focused all of my art history classes on fantasy tech late 19th century painting I never heard of either of these artists I graduated in 1993 never heard of either of these artists maybe somebody show me that painting on the right certainly didn't make me write his name down and was like oh this is what we don't do right the pupu of that so I was taught oh it's saccharin it's fake it's all these bad things about this awesome honestly also there's problem at problems with Hamada and I see this painting right this is not a progressive painting right and so that's part of one of the reasons that we've really turned away from it is that this art really was about a very very narrow view of women and comparing at some of the artists that we saw in a slide lecture earlier today Effie had lovely amazing paintings of women in action not loud language so that's a legitimate reason to rebel against the salon I have a feeling though it wasn't early feminists who changed the course of our history I have a feeling they're affected by it but so this painting by Solomon J Solomon this artist grew up in London and in London he would have seen Van Dyck painting VanDyke painting was his old master the VanDyke painting is what is that 250 years earlier I can't do math but you can check my math you can see that Solomon J Solomon is looking at Van Dyck because that was the way our education happened we also heard some great thoughts earlier today of if you're a male artist in art school and looking at the history of art education and looking back at paintings well here's a guy looking at a guy right we have a lot of guys looking at guys so that's a whole other thing to go into but that was really the basis of our education is that you knew your art history and your viewers in New York history when this was exhibited in the salon even the general population would know that this painting would know the story that this painting was referencing and would also know the painting that this painting was referencing Solomon J Solomon the younger artist here is trying to be better than Van Dyck he's not saying I can be just as good as Van Dyck he's saying I can be better than Van Dyck so that's a lot of confidence right that's pretty much the definition of confidence what's that I know and if he had done a not very good job he might have shunned him for it more but he did a pretty amazing job this is the typical non genius art student of the late 19th century if you went to art school in the late 19th century or from 1650 to 1910 you were considered a debt if you could do this you are considered talented but not a genius among your peers this was a normal drawing to be able to do of a figure after after completing cast drawing working from cast plaster casts of ancient sculptures and moving into working from the live model this is an advance this is somebody who's probably just starting to paint there's a little bit of a feeling of narrative you almost feel like he's receiving a revelation or mourning somebody so this is a painter starting to think about how can I think about the life model in a way that would work in a painting how can I use the stairs to really be able to model room to make a narrative I can look at the name of this artist it's nobody any of us have ever heard of and not because he's written out of the history books just because he was a standard artist of the time he wasn't he wasn't considered to some amazing genius if I had done that at RISD I would have been considered an amazing genius you can see that he's looking at Michelangelo too you can feel this connection with 500 years of history and who's Michelangelo looking at does anybody know what this is called or where this is you can just shout what's that it's the Belvedere torso it's in the Vatican Museum I took this picture see how there's no tourists in there I found the greatest trick I'm gonna tell all of you I was told by somebody who lived in and in Rome go the last time thought of a day get off the beaten path because everybody's shuffled through in the same order and try to see everything backwards I was the guards whistle when they're trying to herd you out of museum they go and from far away you can hear them whistling acres away as they're hurting everybody out I could hear them whistling I was in the room with this all by my with my husband and just me for for a good 15 minutes it was one of my a really life-changing experience for me to be in the room with a piece of sculpture that I have studied and that many of the artists that I have studied have found inspiration here this Michelangelo was actually asked by the Pope to restore this and he refused saying that his abilities would never match the ability of the original sculptor the original sculptor made this in about year 200 it they recently figured out I think within the last 10 years they figured out it's a copy of another sculpture that was a hundred years older so everybody's looking at everybody right this was dug out of the ground about 75 years before Michelangelo would have seen it but in fairly recent history and put on display as part of the dawn of the Renaissance when we started saying well you know that rock with that really nice serratus we should probably dig it up right this we could probably learn something from it so this does anybody know what this is by the style of the drawing or do you have you studied this drawing you know do you know it's barb not Brack not barb could be a are gue is a plate attack a plate of book of plates that were designed in the late 19th century that are drawings of casts of ancient sculptures to teach beginning drawing students how to draw and there were different sets of these plates that were used to teach young artists how to draw this set became the standard for French art schools and therefore the world and it was commissioned by Joe Jerome was hired to make these plates because he was Jerome who we have a painting of in the other room was asked by the state to make this these set of standard plates as a teaching tool for everybody he had a student named Bargh which is very hard word VAR g ue not qu ue but the ue on en makes you think it's bark VAR g ue who was his student but obviously was a very good student could draw extremely well his student was Ashley a 35 year old trained lithographer when he started studying painting with Jerome and in that era he was about 10 years too late but he's very very good at drawing because he'd already been a little goofer so this is a drawing in the late nineteen nineteenth century of a first century BC sculptor sculpture probably done as a cast because you can see the lighting is very controlled and usually in a gallery space the lighting is not controlled enough to be able do it so probably lit as a cast classic guys does anybody know this artist give people if you know just automatically don't say it but if give people a second to think about it this is probably if not the most famous 20th century artist one of the most famous 20th century artists his student work not Dali Picasso isn't that amazing they said these are his student works look he did the Belvedere torso down there he he probably did these and he's about 1415 years old and when he was very young student and you just wouldn't guess I mean if you didn't know I didn't know I was told you just wouldn't guess so even our most forward-thinking artist Picasso many people believe is one of the most pivotal artists of the 20th century with was still coming from a place where you knew art history he understood the tradition he was working in and he gleaned as much as he possibly could and it was so standard for him to work this way that at 14 15 year old oh you want to be an artist or you're gonna start with this is where you start and then he did this only a few decades in between okay as any didn't somebody here you just said you went to risk see I didn't know that you went to RISD 1979 I think I had the same education as you and I think they're offering the same thing that if you google RISD Rhode Island school design is shortened to RISD RISD if you google RISD figure drawing this is what comes up and this looks exactly I was surprised when I did it I did this a couple years ago I was surprised that this these drawings look exactly like the drawings that I was doing when I was at RISD this is this is really coming out of the mid-century New York City Abstract Expressionists a little bit of figuration work this is not coming from an academic tradition because a few hours way at Yale they were literally rolling Michelangelo casts down the stairs the iconoclasm was complete there was no studying from history you can kind of see the guy in the lower left that's sort of an academic pose that sort of a traditional pose this is what an art school student is doing now versus what an art school stimulous doing in the late 1800s when I was in high school I thought the late 1800s was ancient history it seems so long ago right we're talking about our grandmother's grandmother's it's not that long ago in fact many of us have grandparents who got a little bit of training in Philadelphia maybe maybe they took some classes in Paris who did beautiful drawings of their grandchildren somebody pulled out something that their grandparents had done they live in a house in California for a few decades and they're cleaning out the attic and I looked at it and I was like this is amazing and it's oh she lived in Philadelphia in her youth well she's beautiful drawings of these people who are now grandparents now when they were children were by somebody who was classically trained who was trained in this tradition it's not that long ago it's really not that that the standard of the ability to draw wasn't considered to be this Thunderbolt this strike of genius one alum of billions but just that everybody should learn how to draw right so that's what you get when you google RISD figure drawing because this is what RISD figure drawing is aiming for you to do right so I have had phases in my artistic development when each of these people were my biggest hero of the year I do not shun these people these are amazing amazing artists it's just I've gone in a little bit different direction but these were the heroes of my art school especially Basquiat because he was only a little bit older than us and he made it the the way to make it as an artist was to be discovered right be given a free art studio to paint and draw and for paid for by the gallery which is what happened to Basquiat and then have a huge show in New York City and get sold out and become a millionaire and that was all of our dream there was no other path I know that other people were getting a different education we're done school design not everybody was getting that education but at RISD we we were not told about the palette and chisel we were not told about Richard Schmid we were not told about the the lineage of American Impressionism that was still alive that was all very shunned you went to RISD that was all very shunned and so there were things happening but unless you you know we weren't even encouraged to read art magazines because they were they were you know seaside shelach or something I don't know it the the culture was against this to be a real artist you had to be not only doing something like this but doing something note so knew none of these artists had seen it yet you know by the time you're about 20 so I just keep coming back to Michelangelo I'm in art school and I really I was like okay I just finished my sophomore year is it junior year we learned to draw like Michelangelo is it senior year we learned to draw like Michelangelo what what year does that start and so I'm wondering this is a drawing that I did a year after I graduated from art school I was good in art school I got very good grades I got invited to the invitational shows for the junior year in the senior year I felt like a successful artist I felt very talented I felt very rewarded I felt very successful and like a lot of artists and art school I felt like I was going to graduate and be like okay world I can draw what do you want me to do now pay me [Laughter] and the career messages I got were sort of like well arts hard yeah I know okay that's why I can do hard you know there wasn't you know there never is a career path I don't know what they said were supposed to tell us but my clearest idea of how you became an artist was to be Basquiat right like like live in a loft in New York City that's already way too expensive that Wall Street bankers are already taking over and hope someone sees what I'm doing that was the plan right so I was actually living in Boston I joined a figure drawing group I remember this is when I did this drawing somebody else from the figure drawing group came up to me and said oh you went to RISD they teach Anatomy there right I had taken anatomy at Brown with a biology professor at Brown they really weren't teaching Anatomy at RISD so I did this drawing in 1980 and 94 when I was 23 years old age 35 12 years later as graphic designer in the meantime I was still doing drop in figure drawing groups did this in 2006 at age 35 you can see you can see that I'm trying to be both Michelangelo but like new and expressive right you can see the young art student at compassion for this art student trying as hard as they can to get as much information as I can but also be original right at 2007 I had the amazing luck to decide I wanted to take an art class cuz once you go to RISD then you go to you're supposed to get your masters which I didn't do you know supposed to take art classes who takes art classes I have a decree from RISD why are we taking our class I had started painting and drawing a little bit on my own broke through a very deep dark cold artists block I hadn't painted for ten years I decided that I wasn't an artist I decided I wasn't a real artist I stopped from about 23 to 33 completely and I am still really angry I feel like I lost a crucial decade of development I went to a week-long workshop and the week-long workshop was with Julia Aris CDs and Julia Aris CDs is one of the very few top master figure-drawing teachers teaching in a traditional academic tradition and the first day I was like what are we doing and the second day I was like this is weird we're gonna spend the whole week on one pose I'd only ever done a 40-minute Drive we're gonna do a 40-hour drawing at the end of the week I just my mind was blown I said I just learned more in five days than I learned in four years of full-time art school and everything since a couple years I kept practicing I kept doing workshops a couple years later not too long later I did this drawing on the right in a non instructed model session that I was hosting in my own studio and this is a couple years of classical mostly phone on a painting mostly focused on figure drawing two years of studying with Ted SEF Jacobs Michael Grimaldi Julia Aris CDs Dan Thompson anybody that I could identify was really doing the kind of drawing that I recognize as being in the tradition I've been searching for this since I was 14 where I had this bin I knew what I was looking for I suddenly felt like you know I went to Paris I judged at romesco a semester abroad in Paris thinking well it's not here I did it senior year you know how damaging that is to your social life to go away for most of your senior year I did a senior year instead of junior year because I was getting desperate when did they start teaching us how to draw like Michelangelo well maybe they're doing it in Paris and I went to Parsons School of Design but even if I had gone to a French school in Paris they weren't teaching that not then I don't know if they are now so I just wasn't finding it so about the second or third day I was working with Julie Aris CDs I literally felt like a ladder had fallen down from the place I've been trying to reach for since I was 14 and I was 34 I was born in 1971 I was 35 36 I was born in 1971 guess what your Juliet was born in 1971 did her and I was like you are 15 years ahead of me and I'm gonna catch up I just suddenly saw what I had been looking for for so long and I suddenly started realizing this is my path this is my path to what I've always wanted to do this is a drawing I did about a year and a half ago two years ago there is a method there are steps there are things that you can teach and they have been purposely not taught to us many of us were lucky we stumbled across an amazing artist that we hung on to their ankle and gleaned as much information as we could from some of them were in the art school there were great teachers and art schools that had gleaned the knowledge that they had and they're passing it along a lot of people have been doing a lot of good work through the dark ages of our education but nothing has happened the way it is now that we can all see and this might not be your cup of tea you might not want to draw the same style the same method but you can find who you're interested in you can finally find it I wasn't consciously thinking about Belvedere torso when I did this drawing I just liked the aesthetic so but I did put the slideshow together I was like oh looks like I'm really trying hard there so we have this whole lineage going from 19th century back to Michelangelo back to the first century this is just what survives right these are all works done by my students this information is learn about and trainable I blog the entire thing you can see everything from my less than adept little still life experiments starting in 2006 I blogged almost every single day for about four or five years I belong to the entire process you can still probably you can find it if you can't find an email me I'll send it to you but I don't go look my people started asking me if I would teach because I was describing everything I was learning I was recording every single day which i think is the best way to learn whether you do it in your own journals or whether you do it publicly on I had been in the world of web design so I was comfortable with making a blog and so I was just blogging everything from my mom who's sitting right there you know my immediate family to see what I was doing and then I started getting more and more followers and people started saying do you teach and I was like what do you mean I just learned this last year I'm just like so ready for it so I started accepting I I got a little studio and I started accepting students private students into my studio to teach figure drawing eventually I built up a cast collection started teaching cast drawing the school has grown and grown and grown there is such a thirst for knowledge people who didn't know that they couldn't get it people younger than me who are like oh if you want to study art you look on the internet for art teachers that's just normal to them and then people my age and older who are like oh where has this been someone's actually gonna tell me the steps to make a drawing and I'm gonna see myself get better not in six weeks I'm gonna see myself get better in six months and two years and I'm gonna have the knowledge that I need to get better every single year for the rest of my life you can get a vision that exists now the school is now it's not just classical training it's a range of artists teaching all sorts of different contemporary and classical realistic art training we have about six teachers one of my teachers is here today Daniel Carvel who's does beautiful work we have about six teachers we have about 150 students a week and we are in a 3,000 square foot space and we just keep growing and growing and growing the the thirst and the desire it's a human innate desire to want to draw pictures and want to paint pictures there's something that drives us over and over and over to keep looking I did this painting is one of my first few paintings you doing crumpled wax paper what I did is I had a tiny little shed I converted my art studio I could touch both walls with my fingertips and I couldn't hire a model I didn't have enough room so I set up still lifes and I decided well I want to sell it the most complicated still find and drapery is really complicated organic non man-made forms and I felt like well I can apply my figure drawing practice to drapery studies so I started crumbling up wax paper and making little compositions because it wouldn't move in a wooden decay it wasn't fruit it wasn't plants just wouldn't decay and I could spend a hundred hours on the painting if I wanted to and I was like nobody's gonna these this is this is a weird subject nobody's gonna really get it but I just want to do it and for my own personal development it was really the first time in my life where I was like nobody's gonna get this I've never seen anybody do this it's kind of a weird subject but I like it so I'm just gonna do it and for whatever reason I did not have that self confidence when I was 22 23 years old I didn't have that self confidence until I was about 34 35 to not to take what I learned and then just go with my own ideas my mom really liked this one my mom likes everything I do [Laughter] [Music] but people started liking them and they start showing them and I started selling them this side done just two years before that 2006 does this back up to the top one there we go 2009 2006 that was that same era I'm not studying painting at this time I'm studying figure drawing long pose 40-hour figure drawing that's what's getting me to slow down and be able to really see and absorb what I'm seeing this is a great exercise by the way set up two white objects just do not put that much reflected light in that egg i I oh my god it kills me I tell my students every single day don't do that and then I I was looking back through my old slides like oh god these are two of the most recent paintings I've recently done taking this wax paper idea to - as far as I can go I've started suspending the wax paper crumpling it up I wrap it around other objects to get the sort of spiral shapes that I want on the one on the left everything's suspended by strings from from occur and that I have hung a dark curtain that's hung in my in my studio I work only from life that's one of the reasons that I don't paint a lot of perishable objects unless I'm doing single session Alla Prima studies of them if I'm gonna do a long term indirect painting I usually do non perishable objects and and the wax paper makes just a really nice way to make it a compelling interesting conversation I love the aspect of reflection and transparency that you get it's got these really really nice beautiful highlights but it's also very transparent in areas I really spend quite a long time sculpting it before I start painting it to arrange the composition so on a day that I'm setting up still life usually spend a couple days setting it up I'll be wading through a foot deep sea of discarded wax paper by the time I've done and I get more picky the more I do it so those are a couple now this painting that I did in the museum was a real departure and not a departure but a pretty significant evolution 1:55 how do I have to - okay good you know get into him um what was it about a year ago I can't quite remember when they contacted me about this show they said choose a painting from the collection and I knew that they had blue grows and and actually my first thought was I'm not gonna pick the Bouguereau it's just so classical and so what I do and I mean I don't do Booga Rosa but it's so in the tradition of what I do and it's it's sort of predictable and I was and then I looked and looked and looked and I was like I just want to do the blue guru so what I what's amazing about this painting this Bouguereau painting you can see it right through there it's kind of amazing to do a slide show and how the original in my line of sight you guys can't see it maybe this painting encapsulates so much for me in terms of there's there's it's great that we can see in person there's nobody alive who is handling gradations of value and color temperature the way that he is hand the technical expertise is absolutely stunning and as an artist you can see it from across the room be like oh yeah those Bouguereau ladies you get up close to it and you're just like how did he do that I mean it just makes you cry but then there's also really big problems with this painting this painting was not bought by the French French did not like Bouguereau at this point the Americans are buying vous grows at this point American men were buying bluegrass assistance what he was buu girl was really making his living making a French idea of a painting so naked ladies in France sound great to American businessmen so there's problems you know how many French nudes hairless French nudes can I pile into a painting you know I mean there's just so many things wrong with it I mean there's many reasons that we are told don't look at Bouguereau for the last several decades there's many good reasons for that but as a painter as an artist if you look at how he handles the shift of the light from compared to the top of the thigh to the but the to the the way the the shadow looks from the knee down the values are so close and it's just a color temperature shift that makes that shadow and you just look at it and you go really we're gonna throw all this away we're just gonna ignore the training here so somehow I don't really get it I need time to write a dissertation to figure it out somehow contemporary art has made this huge stance for feminism but it's not like they're letting us in the gallery so I don't the campus you know there's some there's some sort of way that it's passe and wrong and bad for so many reasons to like French academic art in the contemporary art world but at the same time it's not actually a really progressive community so I don't really know how that's working these are several of my students these students did that work that you saw on the slide we came we came to the museum when we took this picture I was still saying though I'm not doing the Bouguereau but let's stop stand over another blue girl so this drawing over here on the left I had I'm gonna take you I think probably many of you have seen a blog post that I did that was shared with artists on art of all the steps of how I made the painting so I'm gonna kind of fly through this you can you can read through more of the detailed steps but I brought a few of these sketches and cuz I thought it might be nice and fun to see see them in person see some of the sketches that I did so the drawing on the left yeah the left I actually did before they even invited me to participate in this show I just had this idea of some way of moving in a figurative direction with the wax paper idea but I didn't really want to make a woman look like she was wrapped or dressed or sort of partially dressed you know I'm not my plan is not to put women in lingerie that's not my intention but somehow have the figure kind of emerge abstractly from the idea of the wax paper so I had done that me some me whistling that my feedback or something so I'd done this quick little sketch this sketch is actually from another book world painting but he actually uses the same model in in this one but just a real quick little pencil sketch and I just had it hung up propped up on my on my shelf for a while so when they asked me to do this I was like well I've already had this idea of somehow trying to use the wax paper in a more figurative direction combining different things combining figure drawing combining art history combining the way I use wax paper to make my compositions and try and do something a little bit and a little bit different and larger I really was wanting to work larger so this really kind of dovetailed but I had to kind of take some steps to get there so I first started just doing these sketches these Alla Prima single session painting sketches maybe two days on a couple of them just sort of hang up the wax paper and just look at the abstract elements and and just start to get some ideas flowing because I really didn't know how he's gonna do this then I made this painting which is actually and brought in colors are so different in person I brought this one in and this is a very literal description of the wax paper that I hang on if I sculpted the wax paper how I wanted it I didn't try to turn the wax paper into anything else I just wanted to explore the idea of how realistic can I get it but with a little bit looser method and style and then I did actually have this one oh here it is then I did this one incorporating one of the Bouguereau figures in a more in a looser way and I didn't do any under drawing for this one and I really felt like I was paying the price for it I was having to figure out that figure over and over and over again so that kind of made me realize well if I'm gonna do this big I can't be figuring out the figures halfway through so I need to do a real detailed study first so I started doing these little sketches on mylar which is it's a nice way to work if you haven't worked on my large so nice to do a sketch on it because it makes you not worried about using up a twenty dollar Raymar panel or something it makes you kind of loosen up a little bit and I did I did this one first just a basic value study and I did this one where I just kind of blurred everything a little bit and then I did several that were sort of like these two of just seeing how much can I make the image look more like the wax paper or more like something else and less like the figures and where is that balance between losing the figures completely and not being able to see them at all versus see versus more literally having them in there and I decided that I liked this composition so I went with that one and then this was sort of the hardest part is is doing a very detailed line drawing of what had been a pretty loose sketch and I really wanted to get the booboo Rose figures in very precisely to reference that painting so I I don't measure so my grids are never grids because I'm black I'm likely to do the math wrong so I just do grids with diagonal lines and the diagonal lines tell you where to do your cross-sections so I have sort of this latticework way of doing grids and once I had my drawing done I transferred it to the panel this is actually not the drawing for the for the painting this is a drawing for one of the smaller studies just to practice the cut the process but you can see I used umber paint and flipped it over to transfer the drawing before I had ever done this before I thought it would just make a mess like the umber paint would go all over the panel but it really works quite well it really just traces the just a line that you press over when you transfer the drawing and the nice thing about that is that your underdrawing is made of the same paint that you're then going to use on top so you're not fighting between two different media and then I set everything up and I could I set up my studio so that all my sketches were in view so I could kind of reference everything as I worked you can see I have a whole tangle of wax paper tied up and pinned up on my curtain there and my mother taught me how to thread a needle and I still use that skill to this day and started doing an under painting and started conceiving the drawing and because I had done all these sketches and all this work I don't know about you guys but nothing sucks the life out of a painting then more than racing to finish it in time to let it dry and varnish it and ship it to a show and the best part of the painting is the last 6 percent that you're working on it right like the real fun part like you've done all the structure you've done you've made all your major decisions and you finally get to noodle which is what we want to do in the beginning anyway right so you finally get to noodle and you get to do all the fun stuff and then you're like oh gosh it's got a dry for at least two weeks before I varnish it you know when you're really cramming a deadline so I just didn't want to go through this on this painting and so I had set this schedule I'm not naturally organized I'm actually very disorganized as my immediately family will tell you but most people tell people tell me all the time how organized I am because I've worked really hard against it but I had a whole schedule set up this this month for sketches this month for some more detailed studies this couple weeks to really work out the drawing extremely well and then a couple weeks to finish the painting and and but a nice slow pace because as soon as you're rushing it all falls apart right I see so many heads nodding that's the most head nodding up we all relate to that and you can see my palette down there I've got a red-green palette I started playing around with that for my monochromes and I'll do a little quick demonstration of that as well so I'm mixing red and green which are complementary colors to make a dead gray neutral it's kind of a mate I'm amazed every time I'll show it to you I'm amazed every time I happen it's like how do you go from this green to this red and they go dead solid neutral gray in the middle when you mix them together and then using white to make a grayscale out of those so some layer you can see the top part has more development of paint the bottom part is still the under painting now the whole surface is covered but there's not a lot of detail on there so there's about three layers of paint at that point this is probably four and five and six layers I don't know if you've also noticed this but if you do work that has many many layers in the early stages every day you take a picture it looks so different in the last stage is like okay well there was another huge amount of work in there but the two pictures don't look very different so that's that's either the final are very close it's not signed so it's not totally final but it's very close to the final and that's the final painting which you guys have all seen seen upstairs so I kind of went all the way that's like my whole life [Laughter] 14200 what am i 47 and I'm gonna do a little bit of demo of some drawing and some painting for you but just you may have any comments or questions for anything I don't have time to make a painting or make a drawing like I said I'm pretty slow so I'm going to demonstrate a couple different concepts to you I'm gonna do first I'm gonna do I think I'm gonna stand awkwardly to the side and some of you in the back might actually want to stand up and come a little closer if you wanted so I just think the red green thing is really fun whose works like this whose does anybody mix the red and green and seeing what they do or work like that often yeah I think it's it's really fascinating so I always smear my white like this I should have some paper towels they are there so I always smear my white down the side like that and I think it's a really cool trick I'm just gonna tell you about it right now just super quickly because how many times have you taken your brush around to the backside of your nugget of paint a few hours into the painting day to try and find the clean white paint on the back so if you make a nice long smear of it all day long you can dip into this and have a nice clear patch so I have all my all my students to do that and then sometimes I do it with my black this is actually a dark brown as well it's oh that's actually a raw umber today sometimes I do like that with a little teeny tiny travel palette like this you don't have much room so you're kind of sacrificing some of your space but I like being able to access clean color all the time so this is quinacridone read by Williamsburg and it is powerful so a little goes a long way I really like the quinacridone Reds I started moving away from alizarin because it can be fugitive which means that it could fade over time so your Reds can disappear so I love alizarin don't we all have a love affair alizarin as Luzerne is just like the best tube ever i've weaned myself off of it I like this quinacridone red it's not as translucent as alizarin but if the the way that it mixes as a cool red with other paints is excellent I've tried almost every cool red of 10 brands and the Williamsburg Kwai not I feel is the most versatile you can get a great orange and you can get a great purple and that's sort of the definition of a primary color that you can on both sides of the primary color get really really good mixtures this one is a new one I've just started working with this chromium green oxide it's also by a Williamsburg and I love it it's a really neat color because even though even though it's very it's very opaque actually it's not a jewel tone at all it's very opaque but it surprisingly mixes into darks very well it doesn't make them go ashy I'm gonna try and do big patches so even though it's a very opaque color sometimes an opaque color would make the blacks go sort of bluish ashy I don't know about you but like avoiding the bluish or purple ash color is the number one thing I try and do when I paint I feel like every painting just wants to be washed out ashy blue purple so I'm always trying to avoid those to get a rich value range so I really like this chromium green oxide and so if I take some of this I've never mixed from this direction before this is fascinating and we need to one of those cooking shows where they have like a camera here and it's displayed up on the screen so I'm just taking a little bit of red but like a time I took a very small amount of red and it's still too much I'm gonna mix it here and I'm gonna mix a little white in so you can see what's happening light in here a yellow as well which makes it a little a little hard to see even for me this close and you want to ask yourself over and over and over or does it look green or does it look red and if you can name one add the other one so to me that still looks a tiny bit green so I'm gonna add a little tiny more red and I'm gonna add red until it doesn't look green anymore and they're complementary colors meaning they're opposite on the color wheel so they cancel each other out and now I'm gonna add a little bit of white for this so that you can see it I'll make a nice big spread of it so you might be able to see it let's do that you see that so all that is is green and red and white and you get that dead neutral straight gray it might actually be going a little bit red but because of these lights I don't I might actually put a little more green in but I just wanted you guys to see that so when I have when I've made a chromatic gray a gray made out of cromoz like this when I add color to it I can get more chroma in the color because a dead neutral gray that right out of the tube or a gray made out of black plus white if you add any color to it it really drains the color out gray will just desaturate any other color whereas if I add a little bit of color to this I can make it shift it a little more blue or a little more yellow and the the chroma still stays so chroma is just the intensity of the color so we have value high value is light low values dark we have hue red orange yellow green blue or purple which is like a hula hoop around the middle and then we have saturated or D saturated so saturated is out on the edges D saturated is right towards that middle core of black gray and white which is zero color so zero chroma I use chroma and saturation interchangeably it's not scientifically accurate but I use all the words that I can for low chroma because it's a really key concept for for teaching color theory so this is almost zero chroma dead gray coming from two very high chroma colors and that's because they're across each other on the color wheel and if you mix two things that are directly across they meet in the middle and the dead center middle is neutral color theory is always imperfect you kind of have to find one that kind of makes sense to you and go with it I think because it also interacts with light color theory of the way you're perceiving the color and then the variables get very scientific from complicated so you have to find what works for you but I found this really works for me and then I'll make a value scale so I'll make lighter and lighter versions of it this is as dark as it will get because if I add more green it'll turn green if I had more it'll turn red so I can't get that any darker but what I can do is I can add a little raw umber to it and I can make a darker version of it so I can make and it stays fairly neutral you could also add black and black is one of the the not using black is probably the only rule that I've retained from RISD I had a great color theory teacher and I just don't feel the need for it I don't have a rule against it for my students necessarily I just find that it can tend to contaminate your whole entire palette and get mixed into things accidentally and lower chroma and I was fighting to get chroma back even though I do very neutral paintings it kills me to take a photo of them because they look black and white but there's they're all made with color so I'm sure you all have the same experience you take a picture and especially these phones they amplify the magentas and the yellows to give everybody a healthy Kodak glow right well then they make your paintings turn like orange in magenta yep does anybody have any questions or comments about that I haven't although it's a little too stiff to paint with right now what I'm using for Linea medium is just linseed oil I would say my the main thing that I think is most important to know about mediums is not use varnish in your medium so if you can mix lots of different things but don't put varnish in your medium if you plan to varnish your painting because varnish is made to be removed and so if you go to clean or remove or you damage the varnish or a client a collector damages the varnish and you need to remove it if you remove the varnish if you've used varnish in your layers it can take up paint pretty easily so there's there's these traditional mixtures hi nice to see you know there are these traditional mixtures that include varnish I was taught I've been taught by a lot of painters cheese varnish but especially because I paint in so many layers my more detailed paintings will have 10-15 layers I don't want to take off the top five if I need to change the change too and you can make a great medium without using any varnish at all so that's my spiel about bunch I get like militant about certain things I'm a scary teacher I sound nice now but were they I don't know I just I find that if something works go with it if something doesn't work don't do it like like don't keep following a rule just to follow an arbitrary rule if black works for you use it but also know what you're getting into know exactly what's in your medium I'm I've taken the materials workshop henna many of you took that materials workshop I've hosted it twice at my studio it's an amazing workshop it's so much math I take like the highlights and I follow the highlights but it's so much math and science that I kind of just have to do what makes sense to me and so I know I'm pretty safe with linseed so I use linseed and sometimes I mixed and oil which is just thickened linseed and that way I just know what's in my paint and if I'm using brands that have real simple ingredients lists just like not eating processed food if you just know what you're eating or know what's in your paint you're more likely to not have disasters okay um what's the time oh I'm actually like a little bit ahead of schedule what I really want to show you is a quick demonstration of straight line block in and and how I personally teach straight line block in because the nature does anybody know what straight line blockin is all right I will talk about what that is so straight line walkin for me was a revelation in terms of a method for drawing and this is really based on a 19th century method for drawing and instead of copying curves that you see you simplify everything into straight lines so maybe you already knew what it was I just called straight line blocking it's a classical way of teaching and the reason is that it's much easier for us to judge the tilt of a line than it is for us to judge how something undulates and the reason is that as human beings we tend our eyes tend to be attracted to anything that draws attention so if there's a gentle curve but it has a bump on it we will stare at that bump and anytime we stare at something we enlarge it so that's why exaggerations to happen in our drawings anything that we're interested in anything that consciously or unconsciously draws our attention we tend to enlarge it because if we are either shooting an animal with a bow and arrow or picking berries out of the bush in both of those cases we really need to be ignoring all the extraneous information and enlarging the one piece of information that's really important and so for survival reasons our brains are really really good at doing that right they're really really good at doing that Sam's are taking classes she took cause of me years ago I'm saying the same thing that I said to hire a very long time ago so it's really our brains are really really good at it and whether you're picking something up off a table or whether you're looking at somebody in the face and trying to decide if they're gonna be your friend or not or if you relate to them or not your brain is doing all sorts of things where it's changing the size of everything you look at you're sort of zooming in on important parts that's why we always draw figures with very large heads because the head is very important to us it's also the reason that every child draws a figure as a head with two long lines because we're all legs with a very important head on the top to a small child right and so and then they'll add they're like oh well now I need arms so they stick arms out of the sides of the legs and then they go oh I need fingers and they add fingers it's it's actually a a verbal way of seeing it's actually when a child does that they are practicing the verbal part of their brain every child goes through various distinct Universal stages of drawing a human figure starting with a circle with two dots and expanding to there but it's really not drawing we call it drawing but it's more symbol drawing it's more related to verbal brain and so things that are important just like in pre Renaissance painting things that are important like God are big and things that are less important like the patrons or the sheep or small and you know in the Renaissance is when we started saying well we want our paintings to look like when we see a manger with sheep and the sheep don't look too small right and the baby looks well they did babies weird for a long time you know so um wanting to actually draw and paint in the way that you see and allow the viewer to focus their eyes on the head and the eyes of your subject you don't have to make the head in the eyes of your subject large so straight line blocking helps you ignore that bump for the meantime while you're trying to get the big proportions and one way that I've because of the nature of my studio even though I'm in Atelier and I teach classical drawing and painting unlike a lot of ateliers I don't because of San Francisco and it's expensive and everybody is sort of camping out while they're studying living with a relative or working several different hourly wage jobs it's very very hard to attend school five days a week so most of my students are part-time one two or three days a week and so because of that I have a lot of students and it could it used to be that I used to teach every single student personally and so I got up to about 46 and then I had to start getting assistants to help me because there's only so many times I can say things but what it did was it helped me develop ways of teaching drawing that were designed in such a way that somebody coming one day a week as long as they are practicing between please do your homework it somebody's coming this video one day a week that they can start to pick up some of these drawing ideas in a very efficient way and I can help them diagnose when they are going off course and so what I does this way of doing it in steps so I'm going to show you a two-step we also do a three step in a four step and I call this the four step block in method because what we do is we do the same drawing over and over and each drawing we develop to a further degree and that way if you draw for 25 minutes and I get around to your easel I can say oh look back there in step 2 it's always step 2 alright so when you're doing a figure drawing and you finish the whole drawing and you're like oh I made the pelvis too low and the legs are too short and the head is big it's one thing if you spent 40 minutes on the drawing it's another thing if you spent 12 20 or 50 hours on the drawing you don't want to do a 12 hour drawing and then find out that you didn't put the pelvis high enough and the legs are too short who's ever put the pelvis too low and made the legs too short everybody in figure drawing is always done so you want to be identifying the big stuff early so I have set up a little teeny-tiny cast and a little teeny tiny shadow box to sort of emulate this and so what we always I'm going to do it one step in a two step drawing if we're well I can do a four step it'll be too small you know if what I have is I have some smaller simpler casts we don't usually start out with the Venus de Milo we start out with Bert's little white plaster cast of bird sculptures and we'll do four in a page and I have videos that explain all of this if you're if you're interested but just because it's like the most successful miraculous thing that I discovered in my own drawing and in teaching I like to it's what I want to show you guys today so this pencil is too hard these are my new favorite pencils get ready to write this down these are awesome these are fabric Estelle's pitt pastel pencils so they're pastels in a pencil and they're not with the colored pencils so you'll hunt in hunt in hunt and not find them there with the charcoal so you have to turn around to the other side of the aisle will go around the aisle to the charcoal section they used to be with the pastels and blick there now with the charcoal so every time I send a student to the store to get these they're like they don't have them anymore like they do have them they just move them they don't know where to put them because their pencils in a pet shop what I like about them is that you can make a very very light line which you guys can't even see and it can get darker and darker and darker and you can go all the way to this so it's very very pressure sensitive I really really like the range of value you can get all right so we always do a mark for the top mark for the bottom I'm working backwards here I like to have my subject here but we are conformed to this space just a little teeny tiny bit first thing is just the envelope so longest lines first and I'm gonna work a little darker than I would um this is me being loose loose does not come naturally to me I had to train myself to be loose the way I like to draw is like this right don't we all like to draw like that but what I have found from my own drawing is that making several lines instead of one helps my eyes find the solution within a nest of lines our eyes actually are very very good at telling when something is out of proportion we have extremely well-defined instincts for proportion because that is exactly why if you've been working for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour and you step back from your painting or your drawing and you're like no it's usually a proportion problem and you can't believe you didn't see it but you did see it you're really good at seeing it you're really good at seeing how wrong it is how bad it is right so we want to do is we want to harness that intelligence that intuitive intelligence is very smart and very refined I teach my students with very little measuring very no sight size no reliance on external devices the learning curve is about this deep because what I want to help people develop is their intuition so is a human being shaped like this or is a human being shaped like this we know usually our drawings are somewhere between those two but we know a person standing up is gonna be a little bit more like this every single time we ever draw a person standing up we draw it too wide every time we ever draw a banana or a person or a stick lying down we draw too tall there's a way that we want things to fit into a more comfortable space and we don't like the width for some reason we all make it too wide so when I block in something like this I actually purposely make it more narrow than I think I actually think she's more like this but I know cuz I've made this mistake over and over that I'll purposely make it more narrow so the two things I say all day long every day are make your lights lighter and make your block in narrower in fact I don't have to teach at all if I just people just read the posters on the wall I could just leave the room and 90% of the teaching would be done make your lights light and don't make your figures too white and now I've messed up my board oh I actually have a little tiny piece don't we all have it as stuck somewhere a little tiny piece of dirty kneaded eraser from the bottom of the bag I shouldn't have drawn that they're a little worried about that painting so this is step one that's all it is so there's no indentations it's like building a cop building a coffin around someone and whether you're doing on an arrangement of fruit whether you're doing a tree whether you're doing a landscape the original the the the basic shape is just really really simple and basic as simple as you can possibly make it and then for step two we just want to start thinking about how we would divide that up so what I used to do is how people continue with this drawing what I do now is I have them start again redraw their envelope because what it does is it makes you rethink I'm not copying my drawing I'm looking again at the original and trying to make the same decisions over again often I find that I've misjudged something I'm going to tilt that line first I had it like this I'm tilting it out just a little bit more so when we repeat the steps with every single time we are reinforcing this one's longer too we're reinforcing going back to that envelope shape when in doubt do an envelope because what an envelope does is it stops you from doing the bow and arrow trying to hit the deer or mastodon or whatever and it stops you from picking fruit off the berries off the bush both of those things are very necessary for survival but both of those things are terrible for art so art is not necessarily a survival mechanism it must have dovetails with one because we still like to do it but doesn't actually really sitting your drawing isn't helping me eat tonight ever all right so what the envelope does is it gets your eyes scanning and making your eye do this works for proportion it works for value and it works for color because what it does is it stops you from isolating what you're looking at and it gets you to compare everything all at once so if you are trying to figure out two values that are right next to each other something a little lighter and something a little bit darker if you stare right at them you're gonna make them different but if you're keeping the entire picture in mind you're gonna realize they're more similar to each other than you think that they are at first if you just stare at them so the same way that our eyes exaggerate sighs when we stare at something that we're interested in our eyes are so exaggerated difference when we stare at something so we want to break the habit of staring now we stare all the time we zoom in our eyes all the time we do it anytime I pick up something off table we do it constantly the only time we don't do it is when we're looking for our keys we kind of do can I do this so I've noticed something I don't know if any of you have our notices how many people here listen to audio books or NPR or whatever while you're painting our drawing I like to have something narrative going on in my brain because I'm a talky person and it kind of keeps the talky part of my mind entertained what I have noticed is that sometimes if I've lost something the other day a loss to paint turned out was in the trash in a paper towel but so it doesn't always happen and so it was actually one of the key paints I want to show you today so what I have found is that I'm drawing and/or painting and listening to my mp are oh if I lose something and I start searching around the room for it I have to turn off the NPR have you noticed that or the or the book on tape there's something about searching for something that it doesn't work with having a narrative going on at the same time I think that's amazing I think the brain is just absolutely amazing so I don't know how that relates it's just a little thing all right so I'm gonna look at ways I can cut into her I'm it's really dark and messy super beautiful subject but I'm gonna look for ways I can cut right in all the way across the forum just start to get a feel for I'm looking down at her a little more so I'm seeing more of that pedestal than you will start to get a feel for what she looks like and normally I would do this for step two and then I would probably go into she's got a tiny head have you ever drawn her anybody ever drawn her before she's got the tiniest head ever she's got like a little pinhead what I want to do is start getting a feel for the gesture and when I want you notice see how this line relates to this line the only reason I noticed that is because my eyes are scanning like this what we often do is we go oh the waist tucks in right there and then the hip juts out and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and this happens completely forgetting what's going on over there the nice thing about straight line blocking is it makes a network or a web that keeps all the parts related to the whole and that's what the nature of drawing is when you see a beautiful drawing it's really out of whack if the knees are too low like you're like oh that's a great drawing too bad the knees are too low like we just notice these things they're just wrong so we have the ability to see them but the ability to draw them something out when we draw our eyes start to focus on that pencil point and we stop looking at the whole thing so all sorts of exercises to to exercise that shape scene so what I do with my students sometimes is so we have these little birds and I actually think they're done from Audubon plates they're actually pretty nice I just bought them on them this is the thing to search for ready to paint have your art of these there are little white figurines and their stupid most of them are like Mickey Mouse and and Frosty the Snowman or something they're just little unglazed white figurines that people can paint so you can Google ready to paint on eBay or on Etsy or whatever and you find all these little white unfinished plaster figurines and if you search through you can find these little gems so I have these little birds don't they look like Audubon drawings I mean the I don't know they're there they're much nicer quality they're not I don't know they're not cartoony but they'll be like at an angle so it's got a little bird doing something like this right this is my little bird imitation alright but what we tend to do is we tend to straighten it up right we always tend to straighten it up so to really really get that angle requires standing back and doing this with your arm so a lot of times I go okay so let's stand back and do this with your arm so I don't even let my students hold up a pencil and close one eye because they're not feeling the gesture when they do it and then they do this they they like carry it over to the misplace board and they just trust oh that must be right because I copied it well if you feel it here you can feel it here and you're gonna get it dead right so we need to learn to trust our intuition and our feelings as much as we trust the analytical measuring side of our brain and since we do analyzing and measuring all day long every day and we're all pretty good at it I try and have us in the studio focus on the intuitive feeling pose so what I'll say I'll do this with all with you right now I'm gonna point my whole entire arm straight in one direction and as fast as you can you're gonna match it without hitting your neighbour right so one two three yeah a mirror image that's a perfect mirror image whether you did mirror image or not you're all pointing you didn't have to eat did you look along one edge of my arm to figure it out and then look at the bottom edges same with the bottom edge is a little different than the top edge how do I know which one you didn't do all that analyzing right you're just like oh she's pointing there I can point there alright and so that is your intuition working because we're actually pretty good at feeling we can stand up straight so we know what plumb is and when someone's talking to us like this we're a little uncomfortable we can feel it right so we're actually really good at tails and angles and plumb we're really innately good at if you can stand up straight without falling over you can feel plumb plumb is just straight line and so we're actually extremely sensitive to the angle of a tilt we can really really copy it very very accurately without measuring when we rely too much on measuring what happens is little tiny errors in our measurements make it over onto our drawing in our painting and because we've never felt it we look at it and we're like oh it must be right because I measured it and when you do that for two hours or three hours or 50 hours that's when you you switch into a different mode when you back up you back up and you look at it and go oh no it's really wrong well there's something in you that knows wrong and that means there's something in you that knows right and so being able to tap into that over and over and over and being able to exercise that's a different neural pathway so if I put my arm up like this and you're like okay it goes a little up here and a little down there and a little up here and a little down there using more analytical part of your brain but if I put my hand up like this and you just match it without thinking about it too much that's more the intuitive part of your brain that's a different neural pathway there's one right answer you can get to the correct answer with different modes of problem-solving one is analytical one is intuitive but we spend so much time on the analytical side of our brain why not spend a lot of time practicing the intuitive part of our brain and so it's almost like we [Music] if this whiff matches this height then I know that I can get that over my paper we get really attached to those things when we're over here going well how does it feel I don't know like it's way scary right it's much more kind of like we're on open seas it feels a little uncomfortable so the only way to make it comfortable is just to do it over and over and over again and build a new neural pathway now neural pathways anybody take piano and he's my husband since studying piano as an adult for the first time in his life starting about five years ago what he finds is that after four or five days of practicing the same scale suddenly it gets a little bit easier and maybe you've discovered this with other mechanical things you tried there's something about four or five days that can build some new neural pathways now if he then don't do it for a week or a month or a year it's gonna degrade it's gonna go away but you can build these neural pathways and so what's happening when you're learning something new is that your neurons are reaching out to each other struggling to connect and we can feel that pain you know that pain like I'm really trying to make this drawing look like what I see and I'm so frustrated and the teachers telling me to do something and I don't understand why I can't and it just hurts like something in your brain hurts well we don't gotta just get a little comfortable like in yoga they say like it's sensation not pain I'm like yeah hey and I tell you it's pain we want to do is get like comfortable with that sensation of okay my brain is actually physically changing there are neural networks in my brain that are struggling to reach each other and it's gonna hurt a little bit but then when they meet there's a day where you're like oh my god I get it I see it and we live for those days as artists we live those brief moments of time where we feel like we understand everything for one split second of one day and then we wait six more months so when you start to feel these connections start to happen you can start to ask yourself does this feel like her instead of do all the measurements line up and then what we can happen is we can run into problems and we're like mmm something doesn't feel right or something doesn't match right or something's in the wrong place and then what's the answer the answers always go back to the envelope all the problems are always in the envelope every the success or failure of your drawing happens in the first two minutes so if you have willing to go back and reassess to your envelope that means you're willing to go back and change the entire architecture of everything else if necessary and that kind of fluidity intuition and ability to make changes and and not be so committed to the little detail that you thought was super interesting is the difference between getting better every year as a drafts person as a painter and versus reaching a certain acceptable point where you can show in some galleries and sell some work and feel pretty good about yourself but stay the same as artists none of us want to say the same we always are we're looking at our all the time and our heart is aching that we can't do something and instead of taking that as despair what we want to do is arm ourselves with the tools that we can get closer and closer and closer to what we want to do and hopefully we'll never reach it because then we'd have no reason for living thank you [Applause]

Channel: americanwomenartists

Views: 4,532

Rating: 4.9402986 out of 5

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Id: FcH3bUCKmSY

Length: 81min 39sec (4899 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 26 2018