The Art of Ambiguous Lines

I eschew Contour Lines! 

Trigger Warning:  Art Babble and fumbling follows:

Contour lines are too rigid!  They make me feel claustrophobic; they suffocate the figure and arrest it's motion.

Rather than draw with contours "from the outside in," I imagine myself drawing "from the inside out." I believe this allows me to draw the motion and space of the figure, though at the expensive of achieving a likeness.  I prefer to draw a figure that threatens to move, rather than one that looks photographically realistic.  Maybe that is why Virgil used to refer to my figure paintings as "exploding figures."

My exploding figure painting?

However when I Google anything like "Figure Drawing" it seems that all the examples are drawings "from the outside in."  Once an outside contour is drawn, it is all but set in stone...and describes nothing else but a contour.

I would prefer the line to be ambiguous when I'm drawing the model.  A line defining an axis at first could later morph to define a plane, or even suggest a contour, by the time the drawing is finished.  Even better if that line acquires two or three roles in the final drawing.

 

The best "inside out" drawings I can find online are those by Alberto Giacometti.  It would be nice to find someone else with a similar approach online...perhaps Roberto Matta.

When I try to draw more realistically I resort to adding contours, and that always seems to stifle the figure.  I would probably do better to just draw the outside planes pushing into the figure, rather than draw a rigid contour line.

Perhaps I might even eventually draw a Venus with minimal strokes, provided you let me surround her with any lines of my choosing.

I am biting off of Delacroix here when he said: "I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will."  However I do suspect that I could also avoid the contour by drawing the space outside the figure, which can articulate a lot about the inside of the figure (like a fractal?).

September 28, 2021

With my recent relief prints

I do better by describing the space around the figure

rather than describing the details of the figure within

I am not completely a "contour denier."  I suspect that contours are critical to achieve a likeness, such as in portrait drawings.  I would just like to hold off with the contours as long as possible in the drawing process.

And the best drawing would be with lines so ambiguous that they describe two concrete spaces at once.  Perhaps the interpretations are so delicate that they hinge on how the viewer interprets a single line -- a line which I would call "the switch."  Ideally the viewer could change his interpretation of that small "switch" line, which would change his whole perception of the larger space of the artwork.  The drawing could then be of two images at once, albeit mutually exclusive images.

This discussion probably merits more "Mental Menudo" before getting too esoteric:

MENTAL MENUDO

at the Sculpture Resource Center

in 2014