Head studies

Essay on Warhol

Some time ago when browsing Warhol on Pinterest an unusual painting caught my attention. It was strange and intriguing and it was nothing like Warhol. That was how I discovered Warhol’s Rorschach series.

In 1978, more than a decade after announcing his retirement from printmaking, Warhol returned to painting. The idea for the Rorschach paintings came from Jay Shriver, Warhol’s studio assistant who suggested Rorschach blots.

Jay Shriver remembered it:  Interview moved from 860 Broadway to a new building on 33rd Street in 1984. By then 860 was basically just an empty 14,000-square-foot loft, left for Andy to paint in. That’s when the paintings get really huge.… And nobody was there to bother him. That’s what enabled the Rorschachs.

Andy said, “We need a new idea.” And, by that time, it had been made very clear to me that abstraction was an important element that he wanted to pursue and abstractions weren’t being commissioned. So I thought of the Rorschachs because it was primitive printmaking.   
We had these huge canvases that we had to fold over and press together so that the paint was evenly distributed on both halves of the canvas. We took some of the huge dowels, on which canvas was shipped, and Andy, Augusto [Bugarin], Benjamin [Liu], and myself would get on our hands and knees, rolling the dowels and patting the canvas to get an even pressure across the entire surface.  (*)

Warhol remains consistent with his early works: the Rorschachs were made with no human touch, without human interference or brushwork. The other feature that refers the series to his print making period of the 1960s is that the “Rorschach” series were mass produced.

With an estimated 38 paintings total in the “Rorschach” series were not all produced only with the dark black paint. Warhol experimented with a variety of colors. Many of the famous paintings were bright red, gold and pink; he even created a beautiful mixture of the colors, mixing purple, red and violet, and in another blue, purple and pink .

Although Warhol used the same technique of pouring paint on canvas as Jackson Pollock , the two could not be more different. Jackson Pollock  believed that an act of paiting was an act of self_realization. His paintings express his inner feelings. Andy Warhol always wanted to detach himself from his work. In his words:

"The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”

Some critics say that Warhol was particularly fond of genital imagery, but others argue that the “Rorschach” paintings contained images of the devil and even death itself.

Warhol himself claimed that the inkblot paintings said nothing about him because he actually had no inner life. “I was going to hire somebody to read into them, to pretend it was me, so that they’d be a little more ... interesting,” he said. “Because all I would see would be a dog’s face or something like a tree or a bird or a flower. Somebody else could see a lot more.” (**)

Critics claim that “serious” painting for Warhol meant abstraction,… Warhol’s parody of Pollock and Color Field painting is obvious…(Joseph D. Ketner II).

I would disagree that the “Rorschach” is a parody of Pollock. We have a perfect response to his critics in his own words: “Nothing can always be the subject of something. I mean, what’s nice about those paintings is you could do them every five years ... anytime you wanted to, when you had the time ... because there’s nothing to read into them ... Because even if the paints stayed the same, everything else — and everyone else — would have changed.”

* Eli Diner, AHA

** Ariella Budick, Andy Warhol’s mature abstract works

Andy Warhol: assignment # 1

Our first assignment for assessment is to create our own work related to the subject of appropriation and repetition. When working on this piece I was thinking about pop stars and how they all feel like coming from some kind of moving assembly line.
To emphasize their template-like story I decided to produce a digital work by simply cutting and pasting faces into the same dress as if it was manufactured by a robot.
I called my work Pop Star Production.

Andy Warhol studies: blotted line technique

Andy Warhol used 'blotted line' technique during his commercial work in 1950s which became his signature style:

As I tried the technique, I quickly learned that it is not as easy as it looks. Very tricky! Too much ink and you end up with a big blot.

 Once you are done with line let it completely dry before coloring...

Andy Warhol studies: rorschach paintings

  

 My inspiration: Rorschach

From MOMA site: "This painting belongs to a series modeled on the famous "inkblot" test invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. Whereas the actual test provides ten standardized blots for a patient to decipher, Warhol invented his own, achieved by painting one side of a canvas and then folding it vertically to imprint the other half. Ironically, Warhol originally misinterpreted the clinical process, believing that patients created the inkblots and doctors interpreted them: “I thought that when you went to places like hospitals, they tell you to draw and make the Rorschach Tests. I wish I’d known there was a set.” Because of this misunderstanding, Warhol’s Rorschach series is one of the few in which the artist does not rely on preexisting images."

 Working on my own Rorschach :-)

Andy Warhol course

 

Started online course 'Warhol' delivered on Coursera by University of Edinburgh. Very engaging, lots of information, friendly crowd from all over the world!

Female figure studies

Gottfried Bammes suggests to do studies using charcoal powder and ...your finger. It's actually a great way to do quick sketches. Never heard of this method before, but I liked it.

Male proportions

Exercise on proportions from Bammes book.

Simple Value Plan

Continue assignments from Peggi Kroll-Roberts DVDs. Merged a lot of small shapes to simplify the information.
For value studies I am now using acrylic paint: Titanium white and Raw Umber. There is no particular reason for Raw Umber. I just happen to have only those two colors in acrylic.

The benefits:
- no need to prime canvas
- you can paint on paper
- easy to clean brushes
- no chemicals in the air

Eyes. Part 1.

Asaro explains the structure of the eye in his book "Planes of the head":


My analysis on real faces with 3 types of lids (not slanting, slanting up, slanting down):

Asaro: interlocking contour lines and planes. Part 2

Asaro: interlocking contour lines and planes. Part 1

P.S. in the lower drawing the chin is off the center. Did not see it until now :-)

I saw similar approach in Nathan Fowkes drawings, take a look here.

Basic planes of the head

"..The planes of the head should be memorized, for through them we have a foundation for rendering the head in light and shadow..." (A.Loomis)

Working on these magazine photos I was surprised to see how smooth were faces. Almost no visible planes. Loomis actually writes about it:

"...If you have softened the edge so much as to have lost the plane, the drawing is bound to take a smooth, photographic look. For this reason, planes have to be established when you are drawing from a photograph, since they are not apparent..."

Human skull

Andrew Loomis suggests to study human skull to learn the bone structure.

Head construction with features

Now I am practicing putting face features on a "ball". If your ellipses are at the right places adding features is easy.

Head construction: problem solved!

If you studied head construction by Andrew Loomis you'll understand the issue I'm talking about in this post.

On page 21 of Drawing the Heads and the Hands Loomis describes his method of constructing a head using analogy with a ball and a nail. It looks very simple and easy to understand...until you actually start constructing a head yourself.

My problem was with the "ear" line. I could not figure it out.I gave up and moved on.

A few days ago, I was reading a ConceptArt forum and came across the post called "How to correctly establish ellipses using Loomis head construction?" Needless to say how happy I was to discover that someone had asked my question. But the real treasure was ahead. There was that JohnB who shared his method of establishing ellipses. It was answer to my prayers! Thank you, JohnB!!!

Here is a link to the entire post: click here

JohnB has his own blog, interesting and very informative.

And this is John's tutorial I recreated:


1. Draw a cicle and mark the center (A)
2. Think about position of the face: is it looking up or down? turned to the left or right? Add a point (B) to where a "brow" cross will be
3. Connect A and B
4. Draw a brow line as per step 2
5. Add a line running through the center that is parallel to brow line
6. Add tick marks perpendicular to the line in step 5
7. Draw ellipse that starts and ends at tick marks you did in step 6 and passes brow point (B)
8. Draw a middle line (face line) that is tangent to the ellipse you just drew. This line determines the tilt of the face plane. This line and line you drew in step 4 are what Loomis calls "the all-important cross on the ball".
9. Draw a line that is parallel to the middle line from step 8. This is what Loomis refers to as a nail in the ball
10. Add tick marks that are perpendicular to the "nail" line
11. Draw ellipse that connects tick marks and goes through the brow point. This is a brow line.
12. Add tick marks that are perpendicular to AB line
13. Draw ellipse that connects the tick marks. This is "ear" line.

Proportions of the Male Head

From "Drawing The Head & Hands" by Andrew Loomis.

Value Studies

From all objects flowers were hardest to paint: changes in values are very subtle. Besides, I have not learned how to simplify yet.

Value studies

One sunny week-end I asked my sister to take pictures of me for tonal value studies.I noticed that values on photos appear a bit darker than in real life.
It is easier to study values in still life setting because you can observe value scale in a direct way.

Value scale blocks

I painted these blocks to use them in simple still life set ups to study values and how they change under different light conditions. To create 9 value scale is challenge on its own. I am still not happy with the results, but for the time being they are good enough because I am planning to use no more than 5 values in one set up.