Friends! Happy day 12.
And congrats! You made it through the first day of GUT Drawing Basics (TM)! You’re well on your way to a solo show at Met. Let’s keep it going.
Yesterday, like many artists before you, you drew a lot lines — but the healthy kind, thank goodness. You drew straight lines — both horizontal and vertical. You drew thick and thin lines. Diagonal? Sure! Earlier in our warm-up stretches, you created curved lines through spiraling, and sliced some straight ones with your constellations. Truth is, if you have drawn with me for the past eleven days, you have drawn every single type of line that exists on the earth. True. Story. Like I said, watch out, MoMA.
I tip my beret to you.
We’ll soon start using lines (and other things) to make representational drawings. But first, we got a new Drawing Basics session. Today, we dip our toes into an area of drawing known as shape.
Make space for Shape!
What is a shape?
If you want a silly primer, may I suggest watching the video below in which a goofball in a jump suit runs around SF making friends with shapes around the city? (Yup, that’s me, professor goofball at your service. I can’t wait to bring back the kids show someday. For now, episodes are available online, and as part of the DrawTogether Classrooms non-profit educational program.)
In slightly more grown-up terms, a shape is an enclosed, two-dimensional space. For example, a square is shape. A circle is a shape. A cube, on the other hand, is a form. We’ll get back to form later. Today we’re all about that shape.
Check out this drawing by Surrealist artist Jean Miró. Lines become shapes. One shape becomes two by being divided by a line. A whole dance of line, shape, and space, oh my!
Line → Shape
When I stand in front of a canvas, I never know what I’m going to do — and nobody is more surprised than I at what comes out. — Joan Miró
Today we are going to play with line becoming shape, much like Miró did in his drawing above (and much of his work.) And instead of trying to get it “right” or make a “good drawing“ we are going to practice letting go of any expectations. To do that, we’ll employ a technique Joan Miró and his fellow artists in the Surrealist movement called “automatic drawing.”
The Surrealists rose out of World War I, in the mid-1920s. They were interested in the human subconscious, dreams, and the melding of accepted “reality” and other states of being through writing and art-making, resulting in a Super-Reality, or “Sur-reality” (Get it? Surrealism!) A few Surrealists developed drawing exercises intended to quiet their analytical minds and develop their creative instincts. It also made for some pretty interesting drawings.
And it can do the same for us, too.
Miró said of his process:
“Rather than setting out to paint something I began painting, and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush.… The first stage is free, unconscious...”
Today, we are going to draw in the Surrealists’ and Miró’s footsteps by accessing our subconscious shape-making sensibilities, while we work on letting go of expectations around making “a good drawing.”
Today’s drawing is really about freedom and mindfulness — and being okay with whatever ends up happening. Letting fate take over and letting less be more.
And learning to see shapes. :)
