Daily Drawing # 64
Tagged: daily drawing, drawing
Category: Leslie's Doings
Charcoal on paper 8×11.
What a beautiful day today! A day to take a sketch book outside and see what happens. I’m continually smitten by this view of Mt. St. Helens from our deck- power lines and all. I will draw and paint it many times I’m sure.
I’ve been looking for a used copy of Cezanne’s Compositions ever since it was recommended reading by my friend and teacher Mark Andres. This really old copy showed up on e-Bay recently and the seller accepted my low bid. This is not light reading! but an interesting struggle to understand how Cezanne “arranged” landscapes by flattening the picture plane and showing spacial concepts with overlapping instead of traditional perspective.
With some ideas gleaned from my reading I looked at my landscape in a different way. It was all about the mountain and so I made it larger than life- that is, what I was seeing– and WAY bigger than a photo shows it. Likewise everything in front of the mountain became a series of overlapping shapes. They were out there as real trees, but I did not diminish them in size or value as they receded towards the horizon.
The effect is a sort of “in your face” view. What are your thoughts about this kind of spacial interpretation?
Leslie,
Yes, I’ve often felt torn in my “realistic” drawings/paintings between what I may see through the camera lens or know through studying perspective vs. how my eye favors certain forms and objects in the landscape. It makes more sense to me. It’s more honest to how we see/feel about the world around us and makes our art more interesting, less predictable.