Painting by Arshile Gorky
The Artist’s Mother, 1926 or 1936
Charcoal on ivory laid paper
630 x 485 mm

Class notes from Advanced drawing studio with Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991

Look at Gorky’s portrait of his mother in our collection.

Focus on theme, medium or image of our work – substantial # of drawings – qualitative development of idea through many works.  Sketchbook, also.

Work must grow.

Make a collection of whatever subject or form for our project.

Look at Mona Lisa, other Renaissance portraits.

Class notes from Advanced drawing studio with Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991

Poem – Wallace Stevens: 13 ways of looking at a blackbird.

There are at least 80 ways of painting an ice cream cone.

Bring examples of artist who have used masks as part of their imagery.

Sketch by Marilyn Fenn
Sulka Mask, Melanesia, 1900-1910
Fiber structure covered with pith, feathers and pieces of wood
Drawn at the Field Museum, Chicago
Pencil on paper
7″x5″
1991

Class notes, from Advanced Drawing with Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991

Basil, switzerland – Folk Museum – tradition of Carnival prior to Lent; also South Am., Mexico, New Orleans.

• Plant form growing out of nose
• Animal head-masks
• Pig-tail nose
• Skull-mask – design fashion

Masks of Mexico
1. collection of Donald Cordry shown at Smithsonian.
2. Mexican masks in Chicago Collections at SAIC (6-7 yrs. ago)

Types of masks:

• Heads w. spikes/thorns/claws/teeth: all in one form.
• Bird as nose, under eyes. Airplane as nose?
• Masks w/horns, then horns as abacus beads.
• Eyes as eyebrows. Post and lintel for eyebrow.
• Devil masks.
• Snake curled as nose or trunk or anteaters tongue or those things that you blow.
• Skeleton as eyebrows, nose, nostrils, mouth opening.
• Over bull-like face.
• Hair for tongue, cork for nose, antlers for ears (sense of arms).
• Pelvic bones of animal as face.
• Also looks like gas mask.
• Polished wood looks like plastic, like Darth Vader.
• Lizards as eyebrows.
• Crucified Christ as eyebrows, nose and mouth.
• Turtle back mask. Painted red face with real hair – second mask to snake nose area.
• Elephant suggested in huge bead form from Africa.

***
Prepare to do self-portrait substituting one or more features for an analagous form – develop 20-40 ideas, several visualizations for 1-2 final drawings.

Go to Field Museum to look at masks. Draw for analogies & what you respond to.

Portraits of Chicago artists at State of Illinois Center (43 portraits). Patty Carroll.

***

Self as house? Bugs, beetles as eyes?

Retablos – devotional pictures painted on tin. For people who have experienced a miracle cure – how they got healed (in churches after person has gotten healed – story of the cure). In show from Mexico – Fine Arts Center Museum catalog.

Early Ren. narratives.

Sketch by Marilyn Fenn
Copy after Chagall’s “Birth” at the Art Institute of Chicago,
Pencil on paper
7″x5″
1991

Class Notes from Advanced Studio Drawing, taught by Barbara Rossi, Fall 1991

Purpose of class: development of personal resources, more inventive with how you represent things; more significant to you.

Look at modes of representation, both Western & other.

It happens by doing it all the time – TOTAL COMMITMENT!

Start where you are. Move on from there. Maximize your good points, push them further.

*Sketchbook or journal – most important tool!

Collector and assessor of your own experience. Watch yourself watching the world.

Things occur as they occur.

Keep note of the visual experiences that strike you.

Keep a picture file. Xerox things from books that impress you; take photos.

You can’t will your experiences, but pay attention to them after they’ve happened.

Subjective-objective experience of the world.

Every day – several pages.

You should probably date when you took a picture or saw an image.

Everything you hear that really strikes you.

****

Slides:

at Hirschhorn:

Balthus – Golden Days; mirror as dagger? Dress as shape of chair, fire; vaginal forms.
Like Piero della Francesca – face, hair. Contrast between sensuous life and intellectual life — sensuous form larger, more illuminated. Drapery like armor, face in the cloth. Woman as vessel. Even negative shapes become references.
Nude woman as Christ figure; intellectual figure as Mary Magdalene?

at Met:

Master of Barberini panels; architecture as backdrop for sculptural figure with loads of drapery-fabric as stone.

National Gallery:

Death of a woman. St. Claire – very weird. Great weird spidery hands.

Grunewald: Christ on cross & St. John

Do 20 minute sketches in museum for 2 hours.

9/18/91

Make composition with original object – use analogies, incorporate into a composition. – any kind of space – highlight original form.

Make composition with original form and identify best analogy or pun, drawing original form while suggesting second form. Visual metaphor in one form.

Take detail of painting from museum – look at it for analogical form underneath the structure — rework into large drawing. Can be abstract – make other form more strongly present.

Look for masks where features of form are transformed into analogical objects — xerox or draw them (look at books or in museum) where one form is substituted for another – like full figure is substituted for nose, eyebrows, etc. & put in sketchbook.

Sketch by Marilyn Fenn
Anthropomorphized landscape form
pencil, 1991

Some random class notes from Advanced Drawing with Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991

“The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature—translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive.”

- Hans Hoffman

Think about forms of nature that excite you: creatures, clouds, rocks, wood, trees, bones, water, fog.

Make lots of drawings of abstracted form merging with landscape.

Hoffman’s “Search for the Real.”

The sound of machines; music.

Thorax (horse drowning in a sea of sadness).

Class note from Advanced Drawing by Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991.

Check out the book, “James and the Giant Peach,” by Dahl – children’s book with lots of cloud-people.  This is related to a series of paintings and drawings I was doing at the time that involved cloud people.