Tag Archives: drawing

‘Drawings Are the Great Teachers’

Posted on May 20, 2022 by JMN

… The mark-making basic to drawing is the starting point of so much else: the development of written language, numbers, musical scores. Drawings are the great teachers; they educate the eye and make us more conscious of seeing. They present … Continue reading →

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Drawing Arabic With Plethoric Splotchification

Posted on February 6, 2022 by JMN

This gallery contains 2 photos.

I’ve little practice handwriting Arabic. Even less am I schooled in the monastic rigors of calligraphy. I do confess to an effort to “draw” Arabic. My models are the characters as they appear in printed texts. I savor their swoops … Continue reading →

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Paula Rego Likes to Work

Posted on December 22, 2021 by JMN

Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK. Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.” Anna Russell writes that the urgency of … Continue reading →

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Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!

Posted on December 19, 2021 by JMN

A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading →

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Jenny Saville: ‘Humans Are Just Drawn to Eyes’

Posted on October 14, 2021 by JMN

Jenny Saville speaks in all the quotes here. Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo… I started to do direct studies … Continue reading →

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Trees

Posted on July 20, 2021 by JMN

Below are excerpts from Françoise Mouly’s interview with artist Christoph Niemann. I became obsessed with drawing trees when I was a teen-ager. I took the same approach as I did when learning to draw the human body—trying to understand the … Continue reading →

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On Edges and Errors

Posted on June 23, 2021 by JMN

Two descriptions in this article about Cézanne are helpful for me. One concerns Camille Pissarro’s treatment of edges: Pissarro was the subtlest of the leading Impressionists, devising ways of giving distinctive presence to each part of a painting, by, for … Continue reading →

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Shows and Prose

Posted on May 28, 2021 by JMN

Along comes more NYTimes torqued and taut art talk of the sort that sweeps me up. … Several gorgeous self-portraits made toward the end of his life. Their precision is astonishing… It’s clear that what most interested Ellis about ink … Continue reading →

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Wide Load

Posted on March 28, 2021 by JMN

Jason Farrago lavishes a container shipload of exegetical rumination on Julie Mehretu’s paintings. Lines accreted in an essentially radial configuration, with large arcs orbiting an absent central axis, and orthogonal spokes sprouting from the core. (The Mehretu black line is … Continue reading →

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‘Certitudes’

Posted on January 31, 2021 by JMN

This is the Cubist revolution: Here, for the first time in Western art since the Renaissance, the world as we see it no longer has primacy. The picture is no longer an act of perception. It’s an act of imagination, … Continue reading →

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