GO BIG!

Lessons on composition in drawing, Georgia O'Keefe, and not playing it safe.

Helllloooo my GUT friends!

First off, did you see the hundreds and hundreds (like 700+) HILARIOUS imaginary books drawn by GUT members this week?? This might be my favorite GUT chat yet. Or should I say, GUT library. Y’all had so much fun with this that a bunch of you drew your own personal stack!

If you want to laugh your butt off, feel all too seen, and add your own to the library, become a member and join the GUT community chat. As always, some super fun ones are featured in the GUT GALLERY section after the assignment.

I am finally emerging from whatever sick struck me down on day 31 of our 30 Days of Drawing. I’ve been flat out on the sofa for ten days, people. Ten. Days. Please all my beloved GUTs, get lots of rest, wash your hands, and drink alllll the vitamin C this flu season. I do NOT recommend this bug.¹

Needless to say, we are going to do one more retro-week before we move forward into the great drawing unknown together.

Last year, I went to New Mexico for a little solo drawing retreat. (I love the wide open southwest landscape more than just about anything.) I brought my regular supplies: a small sketchbook, pen, pencil and watercolor paints. But with the skies so big and blue out there, things took a turn….

So this week - in the midst of Winter in the northern hemisphere - we revisit the desert and get inspired by the big skies. We’re going to learn about the basic elements of composition, learn a bit about the genius that is Georgia O’Keefe, and draw, experiment and learn how to.

GO BIG!

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Hello from here.

There are worse places to be. (Thank you generous hosts.)² One of the many blessings of the sweet little house I’m staying in is that it has no Wi-Fi. That means I’m stitching this week’s dispatch together using a phone and an iPad and sending it from a computer at another friend’s house. I hope this FrankenGUT makes it to you in one piece.

Took a day trip to Georgia O’Keefe’s beloved land. It did not disappoint.

I planned this solo drawing retreat as a rest, a reset and a chance to get back into my drawing body. For a little while now I’ve been talking about drawing more actually drawing. And when those scales tip, things get iffy for me. So as hard as it is to step out of the spin, I made a big effort to do it. And here I am. And holy smokes… Access to quiet, dark skies and wide open spaces should be a human right. 

So this week I’m sharing a little mini-lesson on what I’ve been playing around with while I’m here, a look into what I’ve been drawing and what I’ve learned, and an invitation to try it yourself. No desert retreat required. 

Ready?

Let’s do this. 

Compose yourself.

A little lesson on visual composition

Before I get started with the drawing adventure, let’s talk composition. Composition seems to be one of those things everyone has heard of, and we can sense when it’s working or not working. But most of us can’t really say how it works. Like everything in art, there’s no one way to do anything. No rules in art! But it is always helpful to understand the language and guidelines around composition so you can decide to use it, or toss it out the window. So let’s review the basics.

Arthur Wesley Dow, “Composition: A Series of Exercises Seceted from a new system of art education”, 1914 (Dow was a big influence on painter Georgia O’Keefe who I am going to talk about later in this dispatch. 🤗)

What is composition?

Composition is how we arrange elements in a picture to achieve a desired impact. 

Simple enough. But that begs a couple questions:

1. What is your desired impact? (AKA what are you trying to say with your drawing?)

2. And how can arranging elements help achieve that?

There are two very good questions! While I can’t help you answer the first question - that’s what makes your drawing yours - I can offer you some considerations for the second.

A few basic elements of composition to consider:

1. Focal point. Where do you want the viewer looking first? Second? 

2. Balance. Do you want to create a feeling of balance and harmony? Or nah? Consider symmetry vs. asymmetry. Think about scale: bigger things are heavier. Smaller things are lighter. How do you balance them out? Or not!

3. Movement. Does your eye move around the page? Do the lines in the drawing pull you in a direction(s)? Or is it static? 

4. Interestingness. The three things above will help determine if the overall drawing is, well, interesting. Generally speaking, we like interesting.

There are also classical composition rules like the “rule of thirds”, “odd numbers” and “triangles” that we may come back to in future dispatches. But for right now, let’s just absorb those four things above. That’s PLENTY. 

Did you absorb them?? Great. Now you can forget about them. Let’s move on. 

Wendy draws a flower.

Most of the art supplies I brought to New Mexico fit in a ziplock bag: Pencils, pens, watercolors. Some loose leaf 9x12 multimedia paper.

In my experience, less art supplies = less fussing = more art making. (As Orson Welles said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”)

When I first arrived in Santa Fe I went for a walk. I looked at the view, at the sky, and at all the trees and plants. All so different from the Bay Area. So arid. So much cactus. Pine. A few tiny purple wildflowers scattered about. I plucked a stem of purple flowers and their companion greens from the ground, brought then back to the house, and stuck it in glass of water, and sat it on the table.

For the rest of the week this little flower quickly became my companion, model and muse. Thus little flower and it’s green leaves are only the only things I’ve drawn all week. 

In fact, I’ve made more than 20 drawings of it.

Why?!

Here’s what happened.

To see takes time. - Georgia O’Keefe. 

I started drawing on the 9x12 paper. It’s the same size as my sketchbooks back home. Maybe because I’m away from the city I  wanted to draw with a natural material, so I selected a 2B pencil. (Fancy folks call it “graphite.”) 2B is pretty soft. A nice dark line.

Here’s the first drawing I made:

It’s pretty straight forward: little plant in the middle of a big piece of paper. Like a botanical drawing. One and done. 

It’s fine. And it’s… boring. I thought, if all I’m going to do is replicate the plant on paper, I might as well have left it in the ground.

INSTRUCTIVE MOMENT: Stop for a minute. Look at that little drawing. Think about those four elements of composition, Now look back at the drawing. What is going on? What’s working and not working? Okay, carry on.

Then I tried drawing it bigger. I wanted to push the flower to the edges, so that made me be more deliberate about the composition, and also look more closely at the flower itself. When we draw something BIG, we are forced to pay more attention to the details of its form.

Okay, better. But still felt a little stiff. Not too interesting. So I did a third.

Pencil for scale.

I added some motion by curving across the page, then added the leafy bit to balance the weight of the flower. And painted it. Better. Again, it was fine. But it still felt a little…. boring. It looks like everything I’ve ever drawn. Not very INTERESTING.

It looks rotten. I’m going to start all over again tomorrow. - Georgia O’Keefe

My 9x12 paper is so small.

The sky here is so big. 

I felt myself wanting to draw BIG. Push the flower outside the limits of the page.

The next morning I drove to the local art store and bought a 18x24 pad of drawing paper. I came back, sat on the floor and forced myself to draw that little flower BIG. And it was HARD.

Pencil again for scale. Waayyy bigger paper.

This drawing is FOUR TIMES the size of the previous drawings. It felt good to make. It pushed me to look even closer at the flower, find even more detail, and consider how i was going to arrange it on the paper. I had to consider negative space. Balance. I painted it, which on drawing paper is a thing, but it was fine. 

And still. It just felt… fine. It still felt boring to me. Why?

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at- not copy it.

- Georgia O’Keefe

Because this was just an accounting. I’d picked the flower, looked at the flower, drawn the flower. It was lying dead, huge and dead, on the page. Why wasn’t the excitement of the flower coming through??

This goes back to that first question about composition: “What is your desired impact? (AKA what are you trying to say with your drawing?)”

So I did what I tell you to do, my GUT friends: I put on my Art Eyes. I made my mind into a finder and “looked at the flower one piece at a time.” I zoomed way in on this part, then on that part. I looked at the negative space. I looked at it all anew. And what did i see? Fluid organic shapes, little purple mouths, very much alive, exploding out from a pale green spine. I zoomed in closer. And closer… and closer…

And then I drew what i saw. 

Well that’s different. pencil still for scale.

Whew. So different, right? More unexpected. To me, it looks and feels alive. The composition is more… interesting.

INSTRUCTIVE MOMENT: Take a look at this drawing and consider the four elements of compositions. FOCAL POINT, BALANCE, MOVEMENT, INTERESTINGNESS. What is working and not working? How does your eye move and where does it land? Okay, move on.

Since I’m used to drawing in a 9x12 sketchbook, drawing BIG for the first time in many years felt like drawing with my left hand or trying to speak a foreign language. My brain fought me. It was disorienting. Confusing. Even a little scary. Suddenly, I was afraid to make a “bad drawing.” But instead of running away, I gave myself permission to make a “bad drawing”. In fact, push it so far that it will almost certainly be “bad”! After all, I can just throw it away and nobody will ever see it!³ So that’s what I did.

I put on my art eyes and trusted my hands to see. I embraced the abstract forms emerging on the paper and no matter how awkward or “bad” it felt, I kept drawing and drawing until the drawing was done. 

And it turned out AWESOME.

Huge tiny flowers exploding of the page. Pencil for scale again. :)

And I was hooked.

I drew more and more big flowers. I deliberately aimed to feel awkward and push beyond my comfort zone. And it was a JOY.

Compare that first little drawing i did to this last large one.

We've come a long way, baby.

I see two HUGE differences: 1. Composition, and 2. Feeling.

FOCAL POINT, BALANCE, MOVEMENT, INTERESTINGNESS.

To make the big drawings I had to draw with my whole body. I needed to “Draw from the shoulder!” as my old art teachers used to say. I had sit on the floor and lean across the paper. In order for the flower to take up space, I HAD TO TAKE UP SPACE. I had to think less, and draw more.

The small drawing? Now, to me, it looks like someone was hiding in their head and playing it safe.

In life as in art.

I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. - Georgia O’Keefe

Georgia O’Keefe

You probably noticed I sprinkled a bunch of O’Keefe quotes throughout this dispatch. 

I was a few days into drawing these big flowers when it dawned on me that I was on the land of the original big flower painter herself. Face palm. Ghosts work in mysterious ways.

While most people know her for her giant, close up flowers, my favorite of O’Keefe’s work are her drawings and watercolors. (Shocker.) In every medium she pushed form and composition to create a surprising and emotional effect. Here are a few of my favorites² for general inspiration, and for use with this week's assignment:

Here’s an oil painting of a shell hanging in the O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe. See how she pushed to almost every edge? How does this composition impact the effect of the piece?

Her shell collection. :)

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. - Georgia O’Keefe

Which brings us to this week’s drawing prompt. AKA our….

Assignment!