Only my second completed still life in the couple of years I’ve been exploring the art of drawing, my final project for my third time through the Intro To Pencil Drawing class at Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia, taught by Katya Held, was a study not only in a multi-spherical subject, but a shiny, highly reflective one to boot. After completing the drawing of two pumpkins several weeks earlier, another student and I thought if would be much easier to draw an object with a smooth surface and only one color. We were both proved to be very wrong.
Although it was challenging, I enjoyed drawing these still-life pieces. I grew to appreciate the obvious meaning of a “still life” drawing or painting – unlike drawing a person, unless he or she is dead, drawing subjects like pumpkins and teapots affords you the opportunity to draw from a real 3-dimensional object without the need for the subject to take breaks, therefore never returning to the same pose as when they started. And to be honest, the human figure is not all that much different than most still life drawings – a mostly single-toned, complex collections of geometric shapes, primarily cylindrical and spherical in nature, which reflects light in a wide range of values based on it’s proximity to the light source.
I truly enjoyed the exploration this semester of both using charcoal and the subjects we drew. A good resolution for 2020 would be to force myself to set up similar displays using objects around my house and studio in order to practice more often and experiment more with light and subjects.
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