Marie WheelerThis week’s inspiration on Love Art, Happy Life comes from the short-lived artist Egon Schiele. I love the way the guest instructor, Roxanne Coble, gives some context to Schiele and his work through both identifying his inspiration as a protegé of Gustav Klimt and, well, it seems he had some interesting sexual predilections. No judgement, good for him.
The thing that really comes across in a lot of Schiele’s work is the sexual, the grotesque and the disturbing. I guess if you are going to have some sexual dysfunction, you may as well let it make you famous.
This is where I get stuck. I like Schiele’s work. I find it as intriguing as I do disturbing. But…I am not comfortable drawing or photographing or doing anything much with nudes. Maybe it is a strong sense of modesty, a Roman Catholic upbringing, or just me being weird, but I had a really hard time finding something that I felt okay to study.
I did feel like I did need to find one of the figures to draw though, partly to get over being weird about it, but also because I will never learn to draw figures if I don’t draw figures.
A Study of Schiele
I picked, ‘Erwin Dominik Osen, Nude With Crossed Arms’ from 1910 to study for three reasons:
- It is nude without being too nude.
- I am drawn to the colors of the piece, the kind of gaunt sadness evoked by the use of color and shape.
- I felt that it would be a good representation of his work based on my research.
I started as I typically do by using a pencil to sketch out the major shapes
and then used the Micron pens to put in the darker lines. Part of me felt like I should have used charcoal as in the original, but I knew I would use watercolors and the charcoal tends to get pretty messy with water.
In retrospect, I should also have used a shorter bit of paper as the ratios are a little off due to using paper that is a little too long. It explains why I had such difficulty getting the lines right, though not why I didn’t see it until I put the two of them together in this post.
Anywho, we know my perspective and spatial intelligence issues as they are well-documented by this point. The main bits that frustrate me in the study are the face as it is too plump and doesn’t match the gaunt quality of the rest of the body and the right hand as it really is too small and stumpy in comparison to Scheile’s.
Letting the issues with the study lay, I do feel okay about this study overall and am glad that I pressed myself to do something I am not wholly comfortable with as that is where growth occurs.
Go grow. Try not to be too weird about it.
