I am reading Martin Gayford’s wonderful biography of Michelangelo, “His Epic Life” in it he talks about the importance of paper as a catalyst in the birth of the Renaissance. An earlier biographer had also referred to this artist’s life as a “Life lived on Paper”, as he was consuming and reusing this then precious commodity continuously over his entire life.
Drawing is of such fundamental importance that I still feel it should be part of every artist’s vocabulary. I have always drawn and often struggled to achieve results worthy of the great tradition but to me there is no substitute for this hand and eye combination on paper, to find your expressive visual style.
The nude figure is a defining subject for drawing that I constantly return to, as it was for Michelangelo. It is always a challenge and an eternal source of inspiration.
In all this I owe a great debt to my early teachers who passed on their love and wisdom of this most basic of artistic disciplines, both at school and college. It is a truly liberating art that echoes down the centuries. As they used to tell me, if you can master the figure then everything else will follow.
This week I returned to a more classical style of drawing, with a studio session accompanied by the ghost of the greatest artist who ever lived: Michelangelo Buonarroti.
This is one of the results. My Drawing du Jour:
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