One problem I've had with my work in figure drawing is that although I love the drawing process itself, and find it so much more exciting than still lifes, the end result after a session with a model in class looks only like a successful exercise at best; there's nothing more in it to tell a story. I do think that figure drawing is a genre most appreciated by other artists...the naked body (even if nothing explicit is exposed) can make people uncomfortable. I mean even on my first day with a model, I had to take a deep breath; and I had a classmate who, even at the end of the semester, still refused to look at the body, working only on the head!
Our last project involved our drawing a dream or memory. The end result (not really done, in my mind, but see last post) finally had me finding a happy balance between figure + other, and between careful rendering + modern spirit. In my opinion. :]
Anyway, I wanted to mention Herakut because they've found this balance. In this article, they talk about how the guy does the super-rendered body forms, sometimes so photorealistic that I was convinced they were magazine blowups collaged on, while the girl does the more expressive painting. And then there are all these great pencil (?) drawings by Hera alone, which was great to see just at the time I was working on the mushroom project and had fallen back in love with graphite. I won't say too much more about these two because you can read about it for yourself, but here's another article with more pictures of their awesome work. Love!
via RomanyWG's flickr
