Life drawing 1997
Charcoal on Somerset paper ca. 59"x31"
In the summer of 1997 I took a master class with Jim Dine at the Sommerakademie Salzburg, the legendary school founded by Oskar Kokoschka in 1953.
The class lasted three weeks, and was based on a simple premise: each week the model would keep one pose, and students would maintain the same position throughout the week, producing only one drawing at the end of each week. We drew every day from 9 am to 5 pm. The purpose was to develop our observation skills, while allowing for corrections and erasures to take place in the drawing. Each drawing was approximately life size, making it more challenging as a drawing exercise (Dine kept saying that the errors show more in a large drawing, which is true).
Dine cared a great deal about the drawing being an exact representation of what we saw, and he stressed the importance of measuring and getting the right proportions. Although the method was familiar to me, it was the first time I had the chance to work for such an extended period of time on each drawing with one model.
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