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Julie just caught the flight back to Portland… I’m sure she’ll be posting about her experiences in the big city within the next few days. In the meantime, these are a few pictures of things that I had been working on before the visit. (Not much got done in the way of school work this past week, not that I’m complaining. It was so nice to be able to spend time with Julie.) Anyway, here are a few images…

This is one from Martha Erlebacher’s History of Painting Techniques class… sorry, it’s not the best picture, I was having trouble shooting this one. Basically it is a ink drawing on gessoed panel. Then a thin glaze of oil paint is applied directly over the ink drawing. We’re going to go back in and darken the darks, but that’s basically the technique. Very interesting—I’m thinking about trying it again for some other projects, seems very Northern European.

This is the continuing ecorche. I know it doesn’t look like I’ve done much since the last posting, but I’ve had to totally rework the ribcage. This is such a good excercise: it really forces you to give up the faulty conceptions that you didn’t even know were plaguing your work. It really is a seminal class at the Academy. These should all start to look really good in a few weeks once a few of the major muscle groups are attached.

This is another painting for the History of Painting Techniques. You may recognize it from the earlier drawing that I did in preparation for this painting. I’ve worked in a background (full marks is you were able to correctly identify it as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). I was curious to see how a volumetric figure in the foreground would work against a semi-abstract background. Also, I think of these women as the gorgons of the modernists, so it fits well with the Don Quixote theme. I’ve got to find some time this week to get on to the figure now.

This is an ala prima painting that I’ve been working on in Steven Assael’s class. It’s so very different from everything else we do at the Academy.

Back to the grindstone… only six weeks left in the semester. So much left to do, and so little time to do it.

Most of you probably know that I’ve been looking forward to taking the Ecorche class as long as I’ve know it was part of the curriculum at NYAA. I spent both days this weekend working on it and I still haven’t finished the axial skeleton. It is a lot of work.

At this point it looks an awful lot like sculpting the international symbol for death. There is something weird and wrong about creating death in a light-green plastic-like substance. Or perhaps it is all too appropriate, I’m not sure which.

Anyhow, as you can see, I’m pretty far along with the skull, ribcage and pelvis but the bones of the legs are just sketched in. Once the skeletal structure is finished, however, the muscles should go on pretty smoothly (at least that’s my hope).

I just wish he’d stop grinning at me…

– Jeremy

Here’s the finished drawing I did for my History of Painting Techniques self portrait. Martha actually dug it. She gave me a few suggestions, though. She thought the body was so dynamic that it would be stronger if the head wasn’t so frontal, that it would read better if the palette wasn’t cropped at the top, and that the head was a little small. So hopefully now I can take this and make an even better painting.

(click for larger version)

The last three days have been spent working on a large figure drawing with a guest instructor, Will Cotton. Some of you may recall that I actually wrote a paper about Will’s work first semester last year, so it was fun to have a chance to meet and talk with him a bit. The concept was to draw the figure and then splice an element from a photograph into the composition. Obviously the perspectival situations in the two images are going to be different, so you need to be able to conver the information from the photograph and merge it with what you have before you in the live model. Generally this process is referred to as synthetic composition; if you’ve ever seen Will’s work, you understand why he was teaching the class. It was also nice to be able to work on a multi-day drawing. This one was pretty large—it’s about 40″ across.

(click for larger version)

Back to the grind tomorrow. I’m glad to have had the three days of drawing and I learned quite a lot. However, it meant missing a day of Ecorche, which I’ll have to make up, and now there’s no time to take a day off. Oh well, par for the course.

– Jeremy

Seeing how it is October now, I guess it is a good time to show you all what I have been working on for the past month.

You may remember Jeremy’s post about the Halloween party at his school last year. Well, since I am going to be visiting Jeremy in New York during the last week of October, I decided to make us some really nice costumes that would be appropriate for an art school party.

Here’s the concept:

This is, of course, the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck. I don’t know that we are going to be able to recreate all the accoutrements of the portrait, but I just finished (with an incredible amount of help from my co-worker Alice and her daughter Amy–thanks soooo much, guys!) making Mrs. Arnolfini’s green houppelande, and have started work on Giovanni Arnolfini’s plum houp. Here are some pics of the former:

Sorry the pictures are cut off above the knee; it is a very tall dress, and we were in a small room. Just imagine a fur-lined bottom hem that trails the ground, rather more in back than in front (though not as much as the one in the painting, for practical reasons).

The blue shirt and black belt I am wearing are just placeholders, but should give the right idea. I’ll post better pics of the sleeves, and hopefully the entire dress, when the batteries in my camera are recharged.

In case you are curious, this pattern is based on one I tracked down in Period Costume for Stage & Screen: Patterns for Women’s Dress, Medieval-1500, by Jean Hunnisett. Considering that the entire dress pattern fit onto a single 8.5×11″ sheet of paper in the book, we think it turned out rather well.

These are the two things that I have been spending the bulk of my time on the past few days. The first is the start of my Ecorche. At this point, I just have a mass-conception for the ribcage and pelvis in place, but things should start to progress rapidly from here. Next is supposed to be the head, and then finish off the axial skeleton. Once that’s done, I imagine we’ll start putting on muscles before proceeding to the arms, but that’s just a guess.

This is another concept for my self-portrait in Martha’s painting techniques class. Sometimes I feel that my brain must have been addled by Renaissance painting the way that Don Quixote’s was by medival romances. Sort of a silly image, but I identify with it. I doubt Martha will like it as it isn’t particularly ennobling to the human form, which is what she believes Art is about. It’s still not done, but it’s getting there…

I should post a picture of the work I’m doing in the Alyssa Monks class as well. Should have that up on Wednesday or Thursday.

– Jeremy