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The three graces.

Every year for Anne's birthday, I do a little painting of a mythological subject. I love it, as it forces me to research the stories behind the picture. This year I chose the subject of the Three Graces. As always, I bit off more than I could chew, and the painting is still unfinished.

Grace is a strange word, its meaning obscure. The best definition I found is: "the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God", a kind of a gift of kindness, for the joy of being nice, the little things that make life worth living. It is no surprise that beauty is one of them, but who knows the other two?

Charm. We should have figured that, of course. What brings more delight to this world?

And the third? Creativity. This surprised me, as it is something we find within ourselves, but I suppose that the creativity of one does bring joy to another, but not ever as much as the gift does to the creative person.

The subject in art history has been rather shabbily treated. Three beautiful women just beg to be painted and sculpted, but the old masters appear to be dead set on showing them dancing in a circle. Blah...

Imagine three of the most delightful young things together, on a mission to bring joy and fun to you. Surely they would be playing, horsing about.At any rate that is how I saw them, when I started on Anne's birthday picture, before I even knew their personalities. Two of them you see, are extrovert, but the third one is rather shy, and needs a bit of coaxing.

Creativity is a shy flower, and it is beauty and charm which allows it to bloom.

(Happy birthday, Anne.)

Kalk Bay at dawn

For the next 3 Thursdays our landscape course takes us to Kalk Bay harbour before sunrise. We meet in the harbour at 5.30 to do preparatory work for a painting done in the studio. If you like the outdoor subjects and want to join us, email me at swartart@iafrica.com

Workshops and classes

The second semester (starting on July 14) will have a weekly figure painting class on Monday mornings in Kalk Bay. Thursday classes will be replaced by workshops of 4 or 5 days:

June 29 – July 4 (Monday to Friday)
5 day oil figure painting workshop
July 29 – August 2 (Tuesday to Saturday)
5 day pastel painting workshop
September 16 – 19 (Tuesday to Friday)
4 day figure drawing workshop
September 7 – 10 (Tuesday to Friday)
4 day watercolour workshop
September 28 to 31 (Tuesday to Friday)
4 day pastel figure painting workshop

Ideal proportion

The academic method to achieve correct proportions.

Using the head as a unit of measurement, the ideal human is 7.5 heads tall.

The distance from the top of the head to the crutch is 4 heads, and the legs, from the hip joint to the soles of the feet, are also 4 heads long. Half a head is taken up by the fact that the hip joint is higher than the crutch.

Similarly, the halfway point of the head is marked by the eyes. A hundred other measurements have been calculated by artists from Leonardo and Durer, and new, more elegant equations are still being recorded.

These proportions are of little use when working from life, when foreshortening and posture play havoc with them (except in the sense that no unit can ever be greater than the basic measure, only shorter), but they are indispensable to the artist who works from imagination.

The imaginative artist creates out of nothing, living, breathing and moving images on paper and on canvas, and has to be familiar with every part of the anatomy. Michelangelo said, "I know the muscles, they are my friends."

The imaginative artist has to know the structure and movement of the elbow joint, the Atlas and Axis at the base of the neck, the anatomy of folds of linen, silk, and wool. It is this lifelong study which is known as Academic Art, and although very much out of favour (hardly ever being taught at any art school in the world), it is the stock in trade of every creative artist working in comic strips and in animation, as well as the visualisers and storyboard artists who draw from pure imagination every scene of a movie, drawings from which the setbuilders, costume designers and director work to create the finished product.

For centuries the method used to get good proportion has been based on an ideal. The "ideal man" and the "ideal woman" do not refer to a perfect man or woman, but to a concept of humanity, an idea held in universal mind. It was Plato who postulated the principle of a mental blueprint for all living beings, including humans. This ideal form is not of a given shape or size, but we approach it by getting closer to the average. Ideal proportion means average proportion.

Ideal proportion is not for everybody. But if you are that rare bird, the creative artist, you have to learn the full range of academic proportions; you have to know the human body like an engineer; and then you have to unleash your visions on this world.

Website

artistvision.org

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Giving all

Ask yourself this question: Would you like one day to have produced a few thousand good paintings, or would you rather have produced 10 or 12 masterful paintings?

Leonardo in his long life, finished 11 paintings.

Our lives are very different, our attentions spans very short. But if we want to be the artist that we want to be, we need, at least once, to work for a genuine finish and to leave that one painting that one day we can set up with the masters and say, "This is all I have to give. There is no more."

The art of Ryno Swart