I think I found my school here in Philadelphia.
The style of drawing and painting to which I keep returning as a source of inspiration is realism or the classical style. As much as I love Impressionism and Contemporary art, it’s the work of artists like Manet, Rubens, Renoir, and Rodin that truly motivate me and give me a tangible goal to which I can aspire. Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia teaches using the Atelier Method, an intense course of study that focuses on realism, using a precisely defined set of skills first made popular during the Renaissance period. The total course of study takes about 4-8 years to complete. Studio Incamminati offers a full time program for students, as well as Continuing Education courses and workshops at night.
As much as I would love to enroll in the full time program, I’m hoping to at least take some of the Continuing Ed. courses in the near future. The also host an open studio on Sundays, which is what I attended today. I watched the other artists around me work with charcoal in the Atelier method, and I did my best to copy them. They worked from a prepared paper – they would coat the entire surface with charcoal, basically making it a toned paper. Then draw the figure on top of that, pulling out highlights and shadows, or different values, by erasing or taking off some of the charcoal. The drawings seemed to take shape by what they took away from the paper, rather than from what they added to it.
I didn’t prepare the paper, but I tried to add the shadows and toning afterward. I’m still seeing heavy, thick outlines around my subject. I need to keep working on creating the form through blocking in shadows and highlights. Proportions are all over the place with this drawing as well – the head is too big for the body, the left arm is shorter than the right, etc. I am liking the fact that I’m getting better with indicating musculature and refining the form shadows on the body. Anatomy is another course or something that I should study in greater depth soon.
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