Trying to Draw Like Al Hirschfeld

CD cover for my friend Lisa, designed by Dawn Yema, drawings by me. I'd been sketching Lisa while she performed for a few years, and turned a decent likeness into a caricature under the influendce of Al Hirschfeld. The drawings of the other artists are mostly from photos. The exception is Linda Tennyson, the bassist behind Lisa's elbow.

Hirschfeld, born in 1903, was the NY Times Drama Caricaturist. He died, still drawing, five months shy of his hundredth birthday. Of course the fellow with the white whiskers and the eyebrows is the artist in self portrait. The sketchier stuff is Hirschfeld, studying Tom Courtenay. Hirschfeld would attend opening night, sit on the aisle, and take notes or draw in a personal shorthand in his pocket. I've seen a video of the ninety-nine year old Hirschfeld working on a finished drawing of Paul Newman as the Narrator/Stage Manager in Our Town. The Tom Courtenay studies are instructive, but I'd give a lot to see some of the pocket drawings.

Betty Edwards

The left hemisphere has no patience with this detailed perception, and says, in effect, "It's a chair, I tell you. That's enough to know. In fact, don't bother to look at it, because I've got a ready-made symbol for you. Here it is; add a few details if you want, but don't bother me with this looking business."


                                                                          Betty Edwards

Art educator, Betty Edwards was born in 1926, roughly contemporary with Pop artists like Andy Warhol, not to mention cartoonist and Mad Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman. She graduated from UCLA in 1947, and would have crossed paths there with the first vets returning to college from Europe and the Pacific on the GI Bill.

Edwards is the author of the standard drawing instruction book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Drawing's thesis is that, while language and analysis are functions of our brains' left hemispheres, good drawing is done by the right hemisphere. Our untrained impulse is to use symbols -- circles for eyes, upside-down sevens for noses -- to represent things, but to represent them well, we need to draw what we see, not what we "know" is there. Edwards provides exercises to train us to do just that.

All very interesting, and useful if drawing's your thing, but of no wider consequence. Except...in our moment of history we're encountering entirely novel challenges, with stakes never higher. And we're digging in to meet them, believing we already know all the answers. We get to make mistakes (I drew Edward's mouth more widely open than it is in the photograph, and with a fuller lower lip), but we have to try to draw what we see, not what we know is there.

Drawing Method

I'm trying, with intermittent success, to make a concentrated effort with my drawing. I'm working on a series of forty or so portraits of people who have been sources for the ideas that make up my worldview, the "Faces of Wisdom Series" ten or so of which I've already published.

Above: three scans to demonstrate my method, a photograph of geologist M. King Hubbert, a pencil copy of the photo, and the beginning lines of the ink rendering. Besides the chance to personify ideas I wish were more common in society, what I get from this series is practice at catching proportions, a skill I need to work on, and practice making clean and meaningful lines with a fairly shaky hand. And, I'm learning a lot about the relief of the human face by making the lines I shade with wrap around the forms.

The real surprise is that drawing from photos is harder for me than drawing from life. I never make pencil under-drawings when I draw from life. I've used snapshots of subjects for my newspaper profiles, to spare my subjects the tiresome chore of sitting still for half an hour or more, but it takes a lot longer for me to get things right. Hubbert's head, for instance, started out about the length of his hair longer, and it still looks a little tall.

Monday Night Drawing And James Lovelock

My live drawing has been in a slump. It's been hard for me to keep my proportions straight, and it's mystified me. I thought I knew how to do this. When this drawing started coming together Monday, it was like the spell had broken.

Thinking about James Lovelock, after drawing his portrait a few days ago, I kept remembering his notion that we're experiencing a Gaian immune response, and before too long those of us still on the scene will be too busy surviving to do much else -- like draw pictures or blog about them. Lovelock thinks that climate change due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and positive feedbacks like methane released from thawed permafrost have gone too far for civilization to continue as we know it.

I'd misplaced my copy of Lovelock's 1979 Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, so I refreshed my memory by noodling around on line. Among other things, I found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Vip-PbuZQ

Lovelock's 90, so I cross my fingers and hope that his pessimism is an instance of the world's seeming old to an old man.

Permaculture Comic Book (1987)

Drawings Of The Bergstrom Kids

I expected these drawings to take about eight hours. These are the Bergstrom kids, grand niece and nephews of a friend from one of my drawing groups, Gillian, Ike, Gary, and Mikey. Instead it surprised me that I couldn't get the proportions right. Working from snapshots seems like a separate skill from drawing live models, and I unknowingly seem to have come to rely on the proportions and landmarks of adult faces. And I just couldn't catch the perspective of Mikey's far eye. The stakes were higher than usual, because I was drawing pictures of a stranger's beloved children. Freaked me out, and took half a year.

These are great kids, bright and polite. I especially enjoyed meeting Gillian, who is a fearless and outgoing baby. I am enormously pleased to get them off my easel!