Intense training

[William Whitaker]

In February, as my studio was completing, Emily came to study with me. She graduated with a BFA a few years ago and is working as a professional designer and illustrator in Salt Lake City. She is with me to study fine art and portraiture.

There is a new generation of young talent, all over the world, who are willing to tackle real old time art training, the kind that was perfected 200 years ago, and then later dropped and almost lost.

Emily started with the most basic of basic training, copying visual training drawings prepared in the 19th century by Charles Bargue. Each drawing must be perfect and the purpose of the exercise is to teach one to see with supreme accuracy.

[William Whitaker]

She works on her drawings three days a week in my studio. She spent a month on this first one, in pencil.

[William Whitaker]

Emily is very talented, but the work she is doing now is forcing her to exceed her native abilities. This very basic work is nevertheless incredibly difficult

[William Whitaker]

I moved her on to a Fechin copy so she could get inside his technique and absorb his sensitivity. No sense merely being accurate, one needs style and grace and understanding of line and search for magic.

Her patience and grit is amazing. She even replicated the paper quality of the original with her charcoal line. She also was able to finish this one faster than the first two.

[William Whitaker]

She then tackled a second Fechin. I suggested graphite pencil, but she decided to use charcoal pencil again. This time I wanted her to incorporate some of Fechin

[William Whitaker]

On May 2nd Stacy joined us. She is working on her first Bargue drawing. As of Thursday, her line drawing was just about complete when I took this photo. Friday she worked another five hours adjusting some contours to perfection before beginning to lay in tone toward the end of the day. She was still working in the studio at 7:00 p.m.

She is a lefty, so the easels are set up facing each other.

[Steven Sweeney]

Originally Posted by William Whitaker

Emily is very talented, but . . .

She has wonderful patience . . .

Her visual perception became very keen indeed.

These are all incisive clues to what is going on here, over and above the mere accounting for time spent on any given drawing. Even a very talented individual still needed to further train her eye and internalize that skill so that it became second nature, so that with each new start, the likelihood diminishes that significant errors in perception will be made. It's hard work. Some days it's exhausting.

It's the difference between just beating the odds at an archery range, waiting for the official score to see how you did, and knowing even before you release the arrow that it will hit center, a result that you can already "see" and that you have trained yourself to ensure through a correct attitude.

I was not untalented -- and perhaps that was itself an impediment, because I wasn't used to not "getting" something pretty quickly, and impatience and boredom and ego were serious threats -- but I was just playing the odds for nearly 1-1/2 years into this kind of training. A lot of drawings were good, some weren't, so what. It wasn't terribly satisfying, though -- often discouraging or humiliating, as my studio mates drew and painted their way toward remarkable images -- and during those 1-1/2 years when no real progress seemed to be made, I often despaired of ever "getting" this. And then "suddenly" -- that is, dozens of drawings and hundreds of hours later -- I began to see and to transcribe accurately what it was I saw. Progress was being made after all.

And not a moment too soon, because I was thinking a lot about getting into marine biology or interstellar physics or . . . anything that was easier than drawing well.

In some circles the advice is given: "Don't leave before the miracle happens!" The miracle in this work is the transformation of perception, and it will come in its own time, while we're working. For me, it took its own sweet time, thank you, but it was worth the wait.

You have to turn off the TV, though (a metaphor for all manner of distractions), if you want this.

[William Whitaker]

Steven,

You are right. It is exhausting. Yet I know of nothing else that allows an artist to progress faster. Those who haven

[Sharon Knettell]

These young ones are going to clean our clock!

The very creme de la creme are going to the top with this kind of training. Lest you think that this is the purview of the Academic Realists, need I remind you that Degas and Klimt went through this kind of training. They had the confidence and wings to be able raise their work to extraordinary and imaginative heights.

I am sorry I did not have this training and how much time I have spent reinventing the wheel.

Anybody who is a figurative artist, who doesn't want to work this hard and learn their 'craft' from photographs, should consider pottery instead.