Rachel 10/11/10

This past weekend, i went again to the "Drawing in the Galleries" event at the Ackland Art Museum. Basically, once a month they have an open drawing session--you show up with paper and dry media, they give a talk about whatever the chosen subject is and how it fits into its larger exhibition, and then we all are given chairs and allowed to draw it for 2 hours. It's free, and a great way to just draw for the sake of drawing.

I've only been one other time (when i drew the Bishamonten statue i shared here), but i think i am going to make it a regular thing whenever the tech schedule at work permits--i love the opportunity to draw with others, to discuss afterward the challenges the subject permitted, to draw something akin to a live model, but yet so different, and the way that people visiting the museum otherwise react and interact. People come into the gallery we're in and look at our artwork, talk to us and ask questions, especially kids, which is always fun.

So, this week we were drawing "Leon," a life-size sculpture of an American Marine in the exhibit Counterlives, which is part of a trio of exhibits built around a recent acquisition of a bunch of Andy Warhol's Polaroid portrait photography. The sculpture was made by an artist named Oliver Herring, who is based in Brooklyn but has visited our campus before to do one of his performance art happenings called a TASK party.

Herring's sculptural work is carved in foam and collaged over its surfaces with photographs, so this life-size figure of a soldier reading a field triage manual weighs next to nothing and is covered in photographic prints to create its surface detail. Brandeis has a good closeup of the surface of the sculpture from when it was shown at the Rose.

I treat these drawing classes as an opportunity to practice costume design sketchwork, so rather than attempting to draw a perfect capture of the piece of art, i use the art as inspiration for how i might draw a costume rendering of a character for whom the artwork might serve as a research image. So, for Bishamonten, i chose colors for his articles of clothing even though the original was monochromatic; for Leon, i used it as an opportunity to address representation of pattern (the pixelized camo fabric of modern field uniforms) and draw a fairly straightforward costume in an interesting way--the foreshortened pose and the book as a prop.

In real life, i probably wouldn't take the time to do a rendering for someone who was playing a contemporary US Marine like this unless my contract stipulated that i had to draw every character look, regardless of whether a shop were making it to order or not. This costume would be completely purchased, and the look of it easily communicated to a director and design team with a research image rather than a rendering. So, it was cool to draw in this context as purely an exercise.

He's done with pencil, ink pen, and marker.

Oh, and in "small world" coincidences with respect to the art world, they had in this same gallery a photograph of Pieter Hugo's, an African photographer whose portraiture depicts Nigerian film stars in unusual iconic costumes juxtaposed against backgrounds of normal places in Nigeria (street scenes, forest/jungle locations, neighborhoods in cities, junkyards, etc).

In doing the research for Shipwrecked!, i'd been looking at his photography as a visual reference for ways in which we might imagine our cross-cast players looking when, say, we have a young black woman dressed up as an old white barrister. Since all the characters are played by only three people, the performers are going to frequently cross gender and cultural lines, and occasionally even species lines (one will play a dog for a while), and Hugo's work was my reference for how that could be done in an interesting and thought-provoking way. So, cool to see one of his photographs right there in the museum!