Foundation Drawing, 7 February 2013
Image versus Object: Drawing Hair
Today we discussed image making versus object making. Image making refers to the story, however simple or incomplete, that we see on
the finished canvas. Object making acknowledges that we’re using paint and applying it to a canvas with some sort of plan or intention; it
acknowledges that our “image” is only paint or charcoal or pastel or whatever medium on some surface, that it’s not real. The image
doesn’t concern itself with this fact. The image is about accepting the verisimilitude of the art object and then thinking about the image
itself and analyzing it that way. Our professor said that “with Vermeer you are captivated by the beautiful nature of the object as well as
the image,” whereas with Cezanne he purposefully drew more attention to the object. Minimalists artists like Ellsworth Kelly went even
further with this focus on the object.
Our professor, for our next assignment, wanted us to focus on the fact that we’re making an object rather than making an image, even
though artists are always doing both to a certain degree. This next assignment is to draw in any medium of our choosing (except paint
since we’re not dealing with color yet) someone’s hair. We’re to make four sort of sketchy studies, with one final drawing on the nicer
paper that is part of our art materials that we bought at the beginning of the semester (as opposed to the newsprint paper that we’ve been
using exclusively thus far).
During the class, we got to practice drawing hair before we began our personal assignments. The professor paired us up and each partner
in each pair got to draw the other person’s hair for 15-20 minutes. After each period of 15-20 minutes, the class shared their sketches
and our professor talked about them.
Two things that he emphasized were:
1. He wanted us to consider the background in our hair drawings and how the background affects the depiction of the hair.
2. He wanted us to approach the drawing with the mindset of object making rather than image making, which he hadn’t pointed out
before. Although he didn’t say this explicitly, I think that he wanted us to do this in order to help us draw the hair. We would do this by
not trying to draw every single strand of hair, a method that might seem the most honest to reality but would paradoxically end up
looking unrealistic, but rather by first trying to draw the big, abstract shapes that make up the air and fill in the details after that. I was
pleasantly surprised with how well this way of thinking about drawing the hair worked for me, and I made a drawing that for the first time
in the class made me really proud:
These are drawings that my partner did of my hair.