Quote:
Talk about beautiful smudging.... Have you seen the article by Peggy Baumgaertner about "Sauce" in International Artist's Magazine?
Wow.
Administrator's Note: Some of Peggy's sauce works can be see here: http://www.baumportraits.com/charcoal2.htm
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Karin,
Cynthia put a link to my charcoal and sauce "drawings" on your earlier post. (see quote). I am posting a sauce "drawing" by the great Russian portrait artist, Ivan Kramskoi, of his son Marc.
Sauce is a charcoal-like material which become rich and inky when mixed with water, and can be used as an ink wash. It is manipulated by applying to paper with a pounce pad or brush, worked (smudged) with a tortillion, or stump, and reduced with a kneaded eraser. I manipulate my charcoal "drawings" (I think of them as paintings...) in the same way.
Of key consideration in this entire thread is to define the word "drawing" as a way of thinking and manipulation as opposed to the material being used.
If one is thinking primarily in line, one is drawing. If one is thinking in mass and value, one is painting. When I work in graphite, charcoal, or sauce, I am painting with these media, because I am thinking and manipulating the material like a painter. I know many "painters" who are actually drawing with oil paint.
I am a natural "drawer." I think most of us are. Our first implement was a crayon or pencil. We learned to work with line, and fill in the surfaces. A notable few think as painters or sculptors as children. I knew I wanted to be a painter, so I tossed out my linear media, and studied with sculptors and volume/mass oriented teachers. I taught myself to see and think in a different way, as a painter.
Neither method is superior to the other, but a redefinition of the terms can clarify a discussion of this sorts. There have been other examples on this forum of the difference between the line oriented discipline and the mass oriented discipline, the difference between drawing and painting, and I think it would not be a bad idea to embrace these differences as a personal selection, akin to the division between the alla prima painters and the grisaille painters.
Peggy