A Short Post On a Recent Master Copy

Hey Everyone!

So recently I’ve been thinking about how much I am missing life room (it’s a place in an atelier setting where you draw and paint the figure from observation), and when I find myself doing that I’m always trying to find ways to keep my skills sharp. Granted yes in times like these it remains to be difficult to have continual access to a live model to work from, so I usually decide to do the next best thing. I’ll draw anywhere and everything AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE! When I catch myself through the many proverbial rabbit holes of writing and painting, nine times out of ten I come to the conclusion that I can never draw enough. It truly is the skeletal system of art. It’s critical thinking at its finest if you boil it down and think about it.

In many ways, I enjoy it a hell of a lot more than compared to painting. I have often amused myself in a sort of romanticized contemplation in that drawing is superior to painting in that its chasm of potential being relative to its required elements is by far fewer than compared to the required variables needed for painting to be a success. Simply put, with drawing you can achieve a massive amount of success with fewer tools as compared to painting.

So in the spirit of maintaining the artist’s path and keeping the core skills ever present, I decided to share a recently finished master copy drawing of a figure from a Bouguereau painting.

What I've always enjoyed about life room is its perpetual challenges. In working constantly from observation, one's senses become highly attuned due to the passing of time. One is essentially running on all cylinders in a perpetual state of problem solving, having to constantly juggle the factors of gesture, planes, anatomy, form, light, color and so forth. I find it extremely exhilarating. While yes it is true that working on master copies and Bargue plates are highly beneficial and that should continue to remain as a dedicated practice throughout a painter's life, as many other great painters before us did the same, unfortunately do not provide us with the greatest challenges that are fleeting and needed to be overcome in order to achieve great work. To put it bluntly...master copies DON'T MOVE! And photographs tend to be elusive. Not only can the model shift, but the light to some degree as well. Some say that if you can draw and paint the figure from life then you can draw and paint anything...I would tend to agree. The only other exception that comes to mind would be plein air painting, but that's a whole other can of worms I'll leave for a future discussion. In a sort of grand perspective, all truth and needs to be sought after is right there before you! Reality has no need to lie.

Please feel free to let me know what you think? And stay tuned as in the near future I'll be posting about some recently finished work I'll be elaborating upon.

Thanks for reading Everyone!

-James Hansen
https://jameszenartist.weebly.com/