Sometimes we think we don´t have time or space, and we “spent” it on important thing, important matters of our daily life; then we look back, and think about the little things we enjoyed back then, the simplest things and how we threw it away.
Drawing… well, drawing is drawing. And the simple act of taking a pen and a piece of paper and start to move through it, representing the reality, our dreams, our emotions is a prove of character according to Rene-Jean Clot.
Today post in about drawing, focusing on Charles Bargue´s Method by the hand of the art historian Gerald Ackerman and the toughs of Rene-Jean Clot French painter and novelist.
Charles Bargue was a prolific artist of the XIX century whom saw the importance of the drawing as a necessity to looking what’s above all thing. The aesthetic of the early XIX century was based on classical platonic ideas about the beauty of love physical bodies to try to find “the truth” and some values of worthy searching.
Jean Clot said to us that: “Today, as well for the drawers of Altamira and Lascaux, the drawing is consider by the educators as an energy with an expression power that manifest the spiritual strength of the being". This, not only from a emotional and expressive point of view, but also from a technical one, asking us about: “How could´ve the student affirm his power over forms if he never learns to look at them, to confront them?”
These two sentences expose a truth that is always step aside in most contemporary art institutes or colleges, mainly because of the contemporary aesthetic of the world and art.
How to draw? Is a question that is ignored because it's almost a craft that has died and its respect and dignity has been crushed through the recent years.
Technique, measurements, nature, observation and representation are words that come out with my studies on Rene-Jean Clot perspective on drawing and Charles Bargue´s drawing course; words that have changed my mind and my motive to continue exploring the possibilities of drawing from nature.
Gerald Ackerman´s studies about Charles Bargue’s Method, gives us a simple definition about Drawing as: “the act of choosing critical elements from nature and recording them on paper while preserving their relationships”. Despite of the “rigid character of academic drawing” or the “coping act” as are known; this humble process gives us the opportunity to chose what we want. Something that I related to applied a color in an expressionist way, to let the painting drop in a chaotic and controlled way like an action-painting or even criticized and complains about the society or injustice like Jean-Michel Basquiat did it on his life time through the graffiti’s and his “bad paintings”
A drawing, the representation of a natural moment, a scene, a gesture has the power to meant something even in our times, when we look for the meaning of everything in the deepest oceans when sometimes lays in the smaller shorts.
For me, art is art in every sizes, colors and forms, it is questionable? Yes. But isn’t the world too?
Ackerman continue offering a few lines about what the drawing has to offer saying that: “there´s a hidden truth on the inside of the trivial a simplest objects. This truth is the drawer´s sensibility, or painter, when he tries to represent objects. Among all the esthetical virtues we appreciated above all the honesty, the drawer´s authenticity.
At this point, it’s necessary to mentioned some of the most important technical characteristics of the Charles bargue´s drawing course:
Characteristics that Ackerman talk about not only as a technical process, but an emotional too:
“Bargue´s abstraction of the figure involves more than the simplification of planes and outlines. Each of his figures has a singular rhythm that subordinates and subsumes the details or, rather, unites them: each element supports the overall effect of the pose and the direction of the gesture”
From this point the only thing to do is to give you some of my recent drawing, so… hope you liked and enjoy them.
As always...
