Book Introduction and Text

Finish My Figure Drawings

insert COVER

Credits

"There is no such thing as a mistake, just a bad follow-up"

Author -- Krrrl, the Art Agitator

Designer  -- John Tollett


This book is dedicated to all the models. Even the guys.


The online Paintschainer program was used to color the image on the back cover, with artificial intelligence

paintschainer.preferred.tech/index_en.html

2017 --All drawings bequeathed to the public domain

THE CHALLENGE

Tanya always complains that I outsource my art to get third parties to finish it, so why not go all the way and invite the whole world to improve my drawings?  All the sketches in this book are available online in high resolution, for download at:

tinyurl.com/finishmyfiguredrawings

(krrrl.blogspot.com/2017/11/finish-my-drawings.html)

If you are game, you can post any alterations on Instagram with the #Krrrlfinish hashtag.

THE DRAWINGS

This is my second book of figure drawings.  The first book I published on Lulu.com -- "Drawings that Don't Get Much Attention"--  during my first years of "exile" from Albuquerque.  I was living in Juarez then, and walking into El Paso to go to figure drawings sessions.  Crossing the border daily, going back and forth through immigration, I carried all my art materials in a side satchel, which barely accommodated the smallest newprint pad.  Those 9 x 12 inch pages however, fit perfectly on the Canon scanner, which not only allowed me to manipulate and improve the drawings digitally, but also to later post them on my blog.  From that routine, it was a small step to upload and self-publish these books online.

These drawings were made during the last 7 years of my decade of "exile" (2007 - 2017), when I was bouncing between El Paso, Tucson and Albuquerque.

The first 180 drawings in this book are mostly done with a dull pencil (in a leadholder) on 9 x 12 inch newsprint paper.  After scanning the faint originals, I digitally pumped up the contrast and cropped the figures in Xnview, then posted the altered sketches on my blog -- krrrl.blogspot.com.

Half of the remaining 22 figure studies are drawn from longer poses, many on larger high quality paper, done in Albuquerque in 2017.  The last drawings is a multiple-session figure study, which is more naturalistic, drawn with a "sharpened pencil" during Anthony Ryder's workshop in Santa Fe that summer.

MY APPROACH

The body is a machine, fighting gravity through space.  For me then, it's more important to draw a hand that feels like it can move, than it is to render the likeness of of palm and five fingers.  The same goes for the legs, torso, and the rest of the body. If the figure can't move, I can't hear the music.  Conversely, a well rendered body is strangled by contour and shading, frozen in a lonely, isolated moment in time.  Even simple contours can make me claustrophobic, when I desire to keep the space more open ended. Of course, I can change my attitude in a heartbeat, if that helps me get a better drawing.

I really resonated with the sculpture the "Development of a Bottle in Space," done by Umberto Boccioni in 1913, when I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  The bottle is implied by vigorously spinning forms in space  -- but that makes it more real for me.  I often imagine my drawn cylinders and shapes spinning in space, when I construct my figures.

"Development of a Bottle in Space"

by Umberto Boccioni

I like the paintings of the surrealist Roberto Matta, which deliver more space than clutter; the infinite space of the drawings of Mœbius, inside the Heavy Metal magazines; the figures of Alphonse Mucha which move fluidly through Art Nouveau space; and the warping of that space by the psychedelic San Francisco artist Victor Moscoso.  Conversely, I'm partial to the rounded Mayan forms, though they exist in a more shallow space, in part because I can feel their weight. It could be said that my drawing style is influenced by the 5 M's above, with a little Roger Dean mixed in.

Sometimes I emulate that fragmented, broken space implied in Brian Eno's tune "No One Receiving"; and I really admire the ambiguous and infinite space in his other musical compositions. I enjoy Magic Realism literature for it's unpredictable twists, such as the open ended stories in Italio Calvino's "If on a Winter Night's Traveler;" and unexpected turns in Hayao Miyazaki's movie "Spirited Away." And I like the architecture of the San Francisco Art Institute, where around each corner is a completely different space, and you can walk around the complex twice without passing the same point, like on a Möbius strip. It is that surrealistic space, with infinite options, that I strive to create with my figures.

Did I forget to mention Pontormo, Piranesi, Hendrick Goltzius , Hans Belmer, De Chirico, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Ernest Martin Hennings?

Not to forget the new guys either: @mac_arte, @smitheone, @liqen, @rauluriasart

Indecipherable Artist Statement

I'm exploring the intersection between tangible, infinite space and dark matter, to which we must look somewhat transparent, in order to discover new portals of entry into different zones of the multiverse, where unexpected alternative realities are revealed.  To save the planet. Needs work...to become more convoluted and dense... which should get me into higher level art exhibitions.

  insert 225 DRAWINGS

COLLABORATIONS

These are examples of other people finishing my artwork, all derived from drawings (except the sculpture collaboration with Eric Koenig):

1) Dennis Liberty and Gonzalo Espinosa

2011 --Relief sculpture collaboration

2) Daniel Hornung and Metalphysic

2017 --Digital sculpture based on one of my drawings. Created in Zbrush at Metalphysic foundry in Tucson.

3) James Stewart

2012-- Digital model based on one of my drawings. Created in Tucson.

4) John Paul Gutierrez

Early 2000s --John Paul drew on top of my original drawing.

5) Skinpop (Raul Urias and Mustafa)

2016 -- Based on two of my drawings. Serigraph done in Mexico City.

6) Rex Barron

2007 -- Drawn on top of one of my original drawings. Created in Albuquerque, shown in El Paso.

7) Alison Aragon

2012 -- Base on one of my drawings. Created in Albuquerque, shown at the 2012 Tucson Sculpture Festival.

8) Jorge Gonzalez
2011 --Sculpture based on one of my drawings, created at the Sculpture Resource Center in Tucson.

9) Eric Koenig

Early 2000s -- Eric took over from one of my sculptures.

10) Ken Romig

2017 -- There "are no good drawings of people without  context" -- Ken Romig

Tables turned. I drew over one of Ken's figure drawings, and did not contribute much.

EVOLUTION OF MY STYLE

 Vectors

I began by drawing the figure in vectors.  I started sketching with straight lines that fade into the background.  Each of my lines had to have 3 dimensions, I was thinking in Cartesian coordinates.  The idea was to create an imaginary armature, to lay the figure over afterwards.  However instead, the lines would pile up, and the sketch collapsed into a dense muddle of pick-up sticks, more 2D than 3D.  My better drawings would often be compared to those of Giacometti, which I found flattering.

Bean Drawings

Eventually I conceded that the figure needed some bulk, and hung bean shapes over the vector scaffolding, like ornaments over a Christmas tree. I started with small circles, as place-holders for the knees, elbows, wrists, head, and other parts of the body. However as circles are rigidly static, they drained the life from the the figure. So I warped the circles into bean shapes, giving them double duty.  The beans still mapped out the landmarks of the body on the scaffolding, but with a directional bias, they also behaved like vectors.  The subsequent play between the beans and the vector lines resuscitated the figure. Soon people were comparing my drawings to those of HR Giger.

The Intersection of Vectors and Beans

Vectors can pierce a bean, like a toothpick goes through an olive.  When a straight line passes entirely through the axis of the bean (through the thinnest cross section of the bean), I imagine that shape spinning; and the longer the line, the faster the spin.  Many of those beans ultimately morph into imaginary spinning cylinders, when I need to visualize more motion.

More often, I spear the broadest cross section of the bean (that which most resists spinning), to thicken up the space around the shape.  I could not draw a reclining pose until I discovered this device -- of thrusting a vector like a sword, into the horizontal "bean plane" of the figure.  That extended "normal" helped me see and develop the mass inside the reclining figure, by defining the space outside.

Rather than piercing, a vector can also rest on the edge of a bean tangentially, pivoting in any direction to create shallow or deeper space.  Or it can graze the open area of the bean tangentially, say at the point of the terminator shadow.

The play between primitive bean shapes and vector lines develops into a 3 dimensional space, which I lost in my "pick-up-sticks" phase.  My drawings then reminded viewers of Saint Sebastian full of arrows, for all the vectors piercing the figure.

Moreover, bean shapes are very malleable.  Their roles can change throughout the progress of a drawing.  They can be sculpted with cross contour lines, adding weight to the beans -- or cut into thin planes with parallel lines. They can be carved, as if in the 3rd dimension, by drawing cross contour and/or parallel lines about the shape.

Overlapping Beans

Overlapping beans can further promote the illusion of space. Closely overlapping beans create sliver crescents, suggesting shallow relief. More out-of-phase overlapping beans can be interpreted as intersecting planes. Drawing through the bean shapes like that, creates a transparent depth, appealing to my sense of the ephemeral.  Moreover,  I like being able to reach through, and imagine myself walking behind, the transparent figure.   Drawing through overlapping shapes even helps me draw in hyperbole.  I often draw an excessively large bean, or rectangle shape, in the vicinity of a hand, foot, or other body part and establish a plane first -- and then disrupt it with smaller overlapping  shapes, to define the wrists and fingers around that plane.  Overlapping shapes can be a powerful drawing tool.

Drawing Devices

While later some beans morphed into spinning cylinders, others morphed into wedges, I am always trying to create new devices to build a more robust scaffolding.  Overlapping beans, for instance, can create space.  Closely overlapping beans create sliver crescents, suggesting shallow relief.   More out-of-phase overlapping beans can be interpreted as intersecting planes.

The beans do not have to stay inside the body; sometimes they hoover closely over a section of the torso or forehead, to emphasize a plane below. Other times I draw large bean orbits around the chest or hips, or bean halos around the head. Often I draw even bigger beans, just to fill the empty background space. Then I continually sprinkle small beans outside the figure, to direct motion into the figure, and tweak the gravity inductively.  If I continue to invent evasive drawing devices, I can keep the space open and schematic, and postpone shading indefinitely.

Bean Space

Ultimately, the whole surface of the drawing gets covered with bean debris. The bean shapes can direct eye traffic as well, acting like speed bumps in the overall composition -- slowing the eye when it tries to race a vector across the surface of the paper, but not grinding the eye into a dead halt, like when it hits a circle (think pot hole).  Ultimately I would like to conjure the figure, just by regulating the speed of the eye as it rakes across the surface of the paper.

Nevertheless, I still can't draw, and am now too old to learn. So from here on, my goal will be to make the model look like one of my drawings.

THE SWITCH

Martin Campos made a casual statement on a recent visit to Albuquerque, about the figure blending with the background.  That comment did not sink in at first, but then I conceded that some elements of my figures trade pieces with the background, and vice versa.  The ultimate would be if those elements were so ambiguous, that they could be read as either part of the figure foreground, or part of the background.   That would be the basic building block to make ambiguous drawings, the kind which deliver two images at the same time, like in the works of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali.  This is my elusive goal.

I dream of "the switch," where the last line I add, changes the perception of the drawing entirely, so that it becomes something completely different.  And if the viewer could toggle that "switch" in his mind, to see both mutually exclusive images in succession, that would be my most successful drawing. It would be like when I lived in two countries at the same time, Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.

Beans are malleable, but they also might be versatile. Keeping a drawing more schematic, avoiding shading, mghit ctaer to this amibgtuiy. Perhpas a bean colud be seen as btoh a flul rondued form, or as a crsos-scteion palne.

CV

I spent five months drawing at the Art Student's League in 85/86, and finally graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Art in 87.  Later I earned my Maestria de Artes Plasticas degree in 1991, from the University of Old Mexico (UNAM -- ex-Academia de San Carlos).

Subsequently, I was behind 4 Tucson Sculpture festivals, and pushed prints with the YayBig Gallery of Tucson, culminating with the Desert Triangle Print Carpeta project.

tucsonsculpturefestival2013.blogspot.com/p/main.html

yaybigsouthwest.blogspot.com

yaybigprintexchange.blogspot.com

deserttriangle.blogspot.com

THANKS

A  special thank you to the people who helped form my drawing approach, and also to those who supported it:  Mr. John Lisanick,  Howard Smagula, Peter Golfinopoulos, Gustav Rehberger, Antonio Salazar Bañuelos, Bruce Teatrowe, Matt Frederick, Elizabeth Johnson, Peter Synek, Martin Campos, Eric Koenig, Deborah Cool-Flowers, Alison Aragon, Bryan Waldrip, Russell Riekman, Manuel Guerra, Chris Bevins, Rebecca Olson, Tanya Rich, Eric Thomson, Stephanie Anne Landers, "Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts" in San Francisco, "3rd Street Arts" in Albuquerque, the "Glasbox" in El Paso, "The Drawing Studio" in Tucson, "Taller sin Miedo", "Argos Studio/Gallery" in Santa Fe, and Jordan Éric Maillet

 BACK COVER

Endorsements

"With regard to the issue of content, the disjunctive perturbation of the spatial relationships brings within the realm of discourse the distinctive formal juxtapositions."

-- Instant Art Critique Generator

www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html

"The disillusion of production completes pleasure."

-- Twitter Art Critic Bot

mobile.twitter.com/art_critic_bot/status/935044493664976897?p



"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

--Charlie Parker


"Do we have a model tonight?  Or is it a guy?"
-- Prefers to remain anonymous