Put this in your calendars: Graydon Parrish is giving a talk at the New Britain Museum of American Art on September 11, 2011:

http://www.nbmaa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=81&Itemid=125#nbmaa

The inside word on this is that it will be the final talk Graydon will be giving on this monumental work.

K at sunset. 7½”x10″, charcoal and white chalk on gray paper.

The problem with the word “Art” is that it’s useless. And the inevitable “but is it Art?” question that people love to bicker about is just as useless. Here’s a clipping from last week’s local paper:

I’m sure this woman is a very nice lady, and we don’t know if she’s actually calling her lint collection “art” or whether it’s the person who wrote the article. But in the public perception, anything that anyone wants to call “art” pretty much can be.

So how useful is a term that has to be broad enough to encompass a lint collection (or an unmade bed, or a blank canvas, or a urinal, or a can of excrement), and this (White Roses by Graydon Parrish)?

If the idea of “art” has to cover everything between those extremes, then fine, everything is art, but that’s kind of like saying everything is made of molecules. How useful is it? If you ask me if something is art, I’ll say “it is if you want it to be.” Whether it’s good or important art is a much more interesting question to me, and the farther away from skilled the work is, the less likely I am to be charitable in my answers.

Busy. Busy busy busy, busy. Doing doing doing, very little time for blogging these days.

Not dead, however. Latest long-pose figure drawing, and a related head study.

Got about five more months of focused anatomy study on deck as of now: two more classes, my own ongoing independent study and a lot of figure drawing.

It’s easy to figure out what you need to work on: just try to draw a figure from your imagination and see where you get stuck. Shouldn’t take long. I’m doing reasonably OK with the basic muscle masses from front, side and back, but twist something or lift arms and I start to get fuzzy very quickly. Should I see the flexors or extensors from this angle? Is that the brachioradialis or the flexor carpi radialis? Where is the axis of the humeral epicondyles from here? And so forth.

I think it’s also time to start meditating on the koan of making even studies artistic and worth looking at for their own merits. That’s a new idea too.

I meant to spend tonight going through several of the forearm plates in Richer’s Anatomy book, and also drawing them mirror-image since I seem to get hung up on left-right issues when studying the limbs. Seemed like a good plan, but as I started on the first diagram I realized how poorly I understood the flexors, and so spent several hours just going over them, talking them through, trying to make sense of them. Forget the whole forearm. Just take one small bite out of it. The flexor group is plenty complicated for a night’s study.

Basically it boils down to this: there are six flexor muscles, five of which are visible or affect the surface; they all originate from a common tendon at the medial epicondyle of the humerus. ALL FLEXORS ORIGINATE FROM THIS POINT. Going from the thumb side of the inner wrist to the little finger, there are four: flexor carpi radialis on the thumb side, and flexor carpi ulnaris on the little finger side (which is actually very large and wraps around to the back as well). Next to the radialis is the palmeris longus (which apparently about 1 in 11 people lack, and a few people have two), and then the flexor digitorum superficialis, which inserts to all four fingers, but the visible tendon is the ring finger one; the others are below or under the palmeris longus. Although it’s the smallest of the four on the surface, it is massive underneath, and also accounts for the “in between” space of the other subcutaneous flexors. The fifth flexor is the pronator teres, up high by the inner elbow and crossing strongly over the flexor carpi radialis and disappearing under the brachioradialis, which is in the ridge group and we’ll get to it later.

The sixth flexor is the flexor digitorum profundus, which is the biggest muscle of the forearm and pretty much unseen, except for along the back of the ulna in some cases (though it’s still thinly covered by the flexor carpi ulnaris). It’s the main “gripping muscle”, and although it’s not seen directly, it’s under all of the others and so it affects the surface form in that way.

Six flexors. The flexor digitorum profundus is largely invisible; the pronator teres goes its own way up high by the elbow; the other four are, from thumb side to little finger side: flexor carpi radialis (the largest on the surface), palmeris longus, flexor digitorum superficialis, and flexor carpi ulnaris (which wraps around to the back as well).

That, just that, is plenty of study for one night. I will try to recall this through the workday tomorrow. Once I feel like I’ve got it, and can see them on people, THEN it’s time to move on to the extensors, and then to the ridge group. One small section at a time, learned thoroughly, rather than all 15 forearm muscles crammed on and memorized but poorly understood. Slow down. This shit is complicated.

Did… did he say “life drawing?”

Yup. Been a while with all the anatomy study, but in between the long-pose sessions I figure it’s good to get back in the trenches and work with short poses and fidgety student models again, trying to develop my powers of x-ray vision and see the anatomy through the form. It’s really difficult, but I do feel like the drawings are coming a bit easier now, and I feel a bit less frustrated at the end of the night.

Some two-minute poses, a 15 and a 30, and a couple of 40s. Hopefully it’s pretty obvious which is which :P

I am still not dead. Just very, very busy.

Work in progress: Nikolaevna, our current figure model. Head study in charcoal and pastel. Got a ways to go on this one, but I feel good about it so far. Next up is to refine the neck and shoulders a bit, even out the lights and make a background decision, then fine-tune the tiny details like the exact contour of the lips and the visible ear, and some of the hair (lightly).