Some Figure Art from 2002

2000 found me looking for things to draw, for inspirations, for Masters to copy. I knew that copying the “Masters” has long been a method of art study, so I toured the Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah. I tired a sketch or two from some Greek fragments. Perhaps because they were my first, they didn’t please me. I could have been that being just pieces of people they didn’t click with me. I was excited about a small border detail on a painting by no less a master than Poussin. It was a comic head of Socrates. Here are a pair of sketches of it.

The world was still terrorized by 9/11 when I went to the LDS Conference Center to sketch from the Moroni Young's bronzes. They were willing to let me but assigned an elderly volunteer to sit with me. I did my best, althought I felt I was imposing on him. I took his name, and sent a copy of my sketch.

That winter I took a class in Figure Painting in Watercolor. I drove to an gallery and studio down South State in Salt Lake. Those were long, cold, and dark journeys, but I had a skilled teacher and made some progress. Thus began a long string of watercolors from models. I have a great stack of them made over the subsequent years. As I was mainly learning technique I didn’t mind that progress wasn’t overwhelming.

This is an effort from a photo. One does not always have a model, but I have plenty of photo albums.

In the fall of 2002, Kamille Cory opened her studio on 4th South, down town Salt Lake. She started holding figure drawing sessions once a week. I would attend them for several years. Here are some sketches from that first season.

There was a girl in the drawing sessions who was drawing a “comic” strip. She inspired me to try and develop a series of figures to tell stories with. It was my plan to create and master several figures. I copied Da Vichy’s man for a base line sketch, and worked on a head. The more I worked the more I realized I didn’t know enough about anatomy and drawing in general to pull off my dream. I do think the sketches show some promise.