Yes, I can draw. I can't remember a time when I didn't draw. It took me until I was in my twenties to understand that some people didn't see the way I do. When people would ask me how I did it, I would reply, "just look at it"Then, as I got older, artists who either didn't choose to draw or thought they couldn't, would condescendingly look at my work and say, "She draws - it looks just like the model" - as if that were a really bad thing.
I really believe that anyone who wants to draw well, can learn. I used to teach drawing - even to children. Drawing is seeing. It is hand and eye coordination. It teaches one to see space in and around an object or a person. Through drawing, negative space can be understood. When I was in my first year of art school, the classical drawing training I had, helped me to creative my first abstract still life. At 18 years old I suddenly realized what the talk about space relationships was all about.
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| casein on illustration board, 1953 |
In the first semester we learned to draw every bone in the body. The second semester it was studying the muscles of the human body; what they did and then draw them without a model for the final exam.
I still sense condemnation about my figurative paintings from some artists. A gallery director told me scornfully, that he didn't like anything figurative. He is an artist who can't draw. My answer was,"Well, I can do both - paint abstractly and non-objectively as well as figuratively"
I spent a month in Italy with a group of artists several years back and received the same scorn. Most of these artists were from New York and anything that wasn't non-objective and black was not respected.
I still practice drawing. Here are some recent sketches:
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| 60 second sketch |
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| Being able to draw, doesn't diminish my ability to make non-objective paintings. It only helps. |
