George Bridgman, Teacher of Anatomy Drawing

George Brandt Bridgman (1864-1943) was born someplace in Ontario (the links below are vague about just where) and spent most of his career teaching anatomy at New York City's Art Student's League. There are several books he authored and illustrated that remain in print.

A useful summary of his career is here, and his Wikipedia entry is brief but has a long list of artists who studied under him.

Those former students include: McClelland Barclay, Will Eisner, Lee Krasner, Andrew Loomis, Paul Manship, John Cullen Murphy and Norman Rockwell. For a while Rockwell served as his classroom assistant, as the first link mentions.  Bridgman was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts  in Paris.

Below are images of his drawings found here and there on the Internet. Bridgman favored a structural approach to anatomy featuring masses and some geometry.

Gallery

Stape's Practical Painting Blog

For all I know, there must be a mega-gazillion art blogs lurking out there on the Internet. I trip across some when I'm trolling for images to post here. But for better or worse, I usually don't bother following them.

Once in a while I do spot a blog I find really interesting or otherwise useful, and when I do, I add it to the Links list over in the right column. Such is the case for Stapleton Kearns' blog which has been around for about four years in its present form. Kearns is a full-time painter specializing in landscapes that are solidly crafted and worthy of your attention. Here is detailed biographical information on Kearns.

Kearns' blog deals largely with practical information and advice about painting, probably an outgrowth of his experience teaching at workshops. His post tally is now more than one thousand, the bulk appearing 2009-11. I think it's worthwhile to sift through the earlier posts because they deal most thoroughly with issues than matter most to him.

To give you a taste, here is a post from 2009 dealing with art education.

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NOW LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY, THE PURPOSE OF AN ART SCHOOL IS TO PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT FOR ITS INSTRUCTORS.

I am aware that the situation is improving and there are a few places that do produce better trained young painters. I also know there are some fine teachers out there who do lead their young charges through a fine course of instruction. Now I know that over in the graphics department students learn useful skills. But I feel these fine instructers are still very much the exception, if you take a walk through the studios of most art schools, colleges and Universities the work is appalling. Most of the art schools out there are foisting a deceit on their pupils. By making their students believe that all they need to know is already within them, if they just have the self awareness to find it, the student is taught, its all about them. That, for many young scholars today is an attractive idea, they do like being told how special and individual they are. In many art schools today the teachers will tell a student that there is no way to even teach art, and they will be contaminated by studying works by another artist with the end of improving their own. The contemporary art school changes the educational event from really wicked difficult, to one of self admiring introspection that any student can do. Now they can fill those classrooms! The art schools of America graduate more students in a year than there have been artists in the history of our nation. If the hairdressing schools of America produced as few hairdressers they would be shut down for robbing their students. It can be argued that art is subjective and shouldnt be measured for its results the same way as say, engineering, but isnt hairstyling kind of subjective as well?

Often enough in the fine arts department the students are coddled for four or more years, and then released into the real world where the are served a harsh awakening that it's not just about them out there. I have often seen young would be artists confronted with this reality go back for a masters degree, to get more of the training that didn't make artists out of them in the first place. If you really unpack this with them, you find out they intend to teach. The best of them will, and the best of their students will be teachers as well . There are plenty of teachers out there who have never made a living as artists and their teachers and their teachers' teachers didn't either. They have in fact only contempt for those of us out here who actually do it as a vocation. The sudden rise of popularity of the new ateliers across the country and in Italy is a response to a small but growing number of students who would like to make a living painting and have figured out they will need to know a lot about painting in order to do it. I believe that small but growing atelier movement probably holds the promise of a new American art.

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I notice that Kearns has cut back on posting frequency, but you might consider checking for new material from time to time once you've digested those first 400 or so posts that contain the most meat.

James Rosenquist on Art

The painting is "I Love You with My Ford" (1961) by James Rosenquist (b. 1933), who is usually labeled a Pop Artist, even though he insists that the term is misleading and, in any case, does not apply to him.

I confess that my knowledge of the personal lives of modernist artists active after the 1930s is rather thin, because I don't like most of their work. So I was surprised to learn (even though the rest of the world knew it) that Rosenquist gained much of his early experience as a painter doing billboards in New York City. Which is why his paintings are large as well; he knew how to do it.

A biographical sketch on Wikipedia is here and a chronology on Rosenquist's own Web site is here. A few years ago, Rosenquist and a collaborator wrote this rather interesting autobiography. It contains a few observations about art I'd like to pass along.

* * * * *[About instructors at the Art Students League in the mid-1950s] That kind of teacher isn't around any more, there's nobody even near that caliber. All the people I studied with were true artists of the old school who had mastered composition and fine art. [page 34]

Billboard painting was really like an old master's school of painting. These people were journeyman artists, in a tradition that went back to the painters' guilds of the Middle Ages. The nearest thing to it would be for a kid to be mixing colors in an ink manufacturing plant. You would get to know color pretty well doing that. Of course there are still the scenic artists who work on Broadway shows. That's quite a complicated business because they use water-based paints that dry darker and differently than when you are working with them wet. They have to use water paint so it won't catch on fire so easily. That would be the nearest thing to getting an education painting billboards. [page 49]

[His thinking circa 1960] I wanted to do something totally different from anything being done by everyone around me. All the artists I knew had been taught to use paint expressively, to splash paint on a big canvas, look at the big blob you'd created and to have it suggest something back to you. It seemed to me too simple to put a mark on the canvas and have that be it. Once you've put that mark on the canvas you have the responsibility of cleaning up the mess, of making something unexpected out of it because you started out with a white canvas that was beautiful to begin with.

My question was, what do you do with that mark? There's a difference between trying to achieve a predetermined idea and letting your random action dictate what it may or may not suggest. Now, I like the first first idea better for many, many reasons. If you tackle a huge canvas, unless your idea is planned out, as in mural painting, everything can, may--and usually does--go awry. [page 78]

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Blogger Visits Art School Open House

Actually, the Open House involved many of the departments at the University of Washington, but I went because (1) I could visit the University's Henry Art Gallery for free, and (2) there were supposed to be some interesting activities at the School of Art where I did my undergraduate work.

Let's look at some photos I took to set the scene, and then I'll do some follow-up commentary.

This is part of a timeline display in the Henry Gallery. I'm probably being delusional, but somehow the selection of events strikes me as having a political bias.

The founding collection of the Henry Gallery contains some noteworthy late 19th century paintings including a Bouguereau. Here, alone in a room, is the only item of traditional art I could find on display.

Two of several examples of Installation Art on view that day. The people at the far right of the lower photo are real, by the way.

These are student drawings for Art 190, the introductory drawing course. I was told that not all those taking 190 are art majors. Nevertheless, these are part of a hallway display that apparently serves to demonstrate what the students are up to. The items shown here are typical of the quality of the entire display. Note that perspective is poorly done and that ellipses are also incorrect. Why didn't the instructor actually teach the students how to do these basic tasks?

Another hall display, this probably from a life drawing class where the students must have been asked to draw with expression but not violate the model's proportions. The results are better.

An event at the School of Art that I wanted to attend was a set of lectures by Art History majors. Unfortunately, I was about to leave for Florida and didn't have the time. Here is a list of the lecture topics taken from a handout:

"Constructing a Colonial Identity: Eighteenth Century Paintings of Indigenous Families in New Spain"

"Magic and the Miracle - Working Image: The Interplay of Art and the Supernatural in Fifteenth Century Italy"

"Enduring Disassociation: Mixed Racial Identities and Historical Interpretations"

"Modernity and Artistic License: Neo-Victorianism as Other"

"Classicizing Proximity: The African in Seventeenth-century Rome"

Okay, let's unpack those lecture titles that with one exception are likely related to Masters theses and PhD dissertations of the presenters. Race/ethnicity? Three of the five seem to deal with that, an obsession of a certain line of politics common to most colleges and univerities.

The title mentioning "the Supernatural" is harder to puzzle out. Could it have to do with religion? That would make sense where Italy in the 1400s is concerned. I can't think of many (any?) paintings featuring ghosts from that era, but I'm no expert and could easily be wrong.

Wikipedia indicates that the term "Neo-Victorianism" has to do with a number of things including people doing dress-up in 1880s clothing and the Steampunk literary genre. The term "Other" has been used to refer to racial/ethnic/subcultural groups that are ignored by the mainstream, yet pose some kind of ominous threat or other to it. Well, that's my superficial impression. So where do Modernity, Artistic License and a possibly sinister Neo-Victorianism intersect? Beats me, so I'm sorry I couldn't get to that lecture.

What strikes me is that none of the titles suggests serious study of the history of art. I'll accept that MA theses aren't expected to be much more than dry runs for further scholarly exercises. But every subject listed above (the last two by PhD students) is trivial and to my mind greatly off-topic if the topic is art history. Where current academicians see scholarship, I find strong evidence of politically induced intellectual rot. If I were running the university I would fire the Art History faculty to ensure that no other students waste precious years of their lives on the study of the irrelevant.

Herb Kane on Art Training and Portrait Subjects

In the previous post I presented some works by Herb Kane, master illustrator of Hawaiian history.

The present post is devoted to some of Kane's views on art training, illustration and dealing with portrait subjects, as presented in his book Voyagers. Kane attended the school at Chicago's Art Institute and pursued a career in illustration in that city for several years before moving to Hawaii and taking up the depiction of Hawaii's past. I'm presenting his views because I agree with them and thought readers might be interested in hearing them from a different source.

In high school, storytelling through painting became my great interest. I was inspired by the work of American regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. After serving in the Navy, I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, but discovered that representational art which conveyed a mood or message was no longer labeled as real 'Art,' but as 'mere illustration.'

With the death of regionalism, art faced the new requirement of being 'universal.' Craving acceptance from my peers, like any twenty year old, I applied myself to learning formulas for what then passed as advanced theories of painting; that year it was abstract expressionism.

Of all possible subjects, Homo Sapiens has always held the most interest for Homo Sapiens. Artists who represent the human figure with skill and sensitivity will find larger and more interested audiences than artists who do not.

There have been great painters of landscape, still life, and natural history subjects to be sure, and in the last century some outstanding painters of non-representational art; but the history of art is largely the family album of humanity. Ironically, of all subjects, it is the human figure, the one subject with which viewers are most familiar and critical, that proves the most difficult. Learning to draw this figure with authority has allowed competent figure painters to surmount this difficulty, but then competent figure painters have always been a minority.

That minority is smaller today than it has been for centuries. Learning to draw, which is learning to see clearly, requires a laborious effort in which there is no instant gratification. Drawing classes have always been unpopular with art students, which may be why they are no longer required by art schools or university art departments, where the primary concern seems to be keeping up enrollments. The assumption is that drawing is not fundamental to to current art theory.

Kane goes on to mention that the Art Institute in his day had a few hard-nosed traditionalists who provided the training he needed. When he went to work in an illustration studio, he found that "Here, alive and well, was the ancient master-apprentice system, only superficially different from the way it had operated since the Middle Ages" -- another good thing for his development.

I'll finish with some of Kane's views regarding portrait painting that you might find entertaining:

Women of middle age are the most difficult portrait clients if they have not yet become resigned to their years. In her mirror, each still sees the girl in her twenties that she once was. No honest likeness will please them, and they can easily find others who will agree that the artist has missed his mark.

Most men will not object to features of age that may add character to their faces. They are usually less interested in handsome appearance, but more interested in portraiture which conveys some impression of their status. Everyone who has passed forty seems to think of himself as a young person. Nobody can know how he or she is seen by others. This is why the portrait painter is often frightening to his sitter; and why each may find the other so difficult and sometimes so impossible to forgive....

I think it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who said that when faced with a difficult female subject, he always painted the most beautiful face he could imagine; then added only those adjustments necessary to make it resemble the sitter.

Quotes are from the third (2006) printing, pages 12-17 and 142.

Art My Teachers Made

I'm years away from the art training scene, which means I'm seriously out of touch. Besides, I went to only one school, and conditions do vary from site to site.

Having proclaimed my near-total ignorance, I'll now wildly assert that the typical university-based art department probably has only a few instructors whose names and work are known much beyond the location of the nearest off-campus tavern.

I attended the University of Washington, overlapping Dale Chihuly and Chuck Close who somehow made good despite having experienced the sort of non-instruction I got. The best-known instructor of that general era was Jacob Lawrence, but he arrived after I'd graduated. The others had some local notoriety, but no real national reputations so far as I can tell.

Just for kicks, below are a few examples of their work that turned up on the Internet.

Gallery

Wendell Brazeau - Still Life

Boyer Gonzales, Jr. - abstract landscape
Gonzales was the Art School head and taught little. His father, Gonzales, Sr., was also an artist and probably better known than the son.

Ray Hill - Oregon Coast Near Cannon Beach
I wish I could have found a more characteristic example of Hill's work. He painted clean, somewhat abstracted work that reminded me of Lyonel Feininger's mildly Cubist paintings. I think Hill was either emeritus or nearly so when I was in art school, so I never had a class from him -- but would have liked to.

Alden Mason - Burpee Red Surprise - 1973

Spencer Moseley - Shore Birds - 1952

Valentine Welman - abstracted landscape
Welman had an especially varied career, winding up as a sculpttor. And he was the guy stuck teaching commercial art, so I spent a lot of time in his classroom.

As can be seen, they mostly painted in the modernist, abstract or semi-abstract vein. Most of them ranged in age from 30 to 60, which suggests that they trained when modernism was becoming accepted, but that their own training was more traditional than what they practiced. Aside from a Freshman design class where we used colored paper, scissors and paste to create works, I never experienced a class that featured abstraction. On the other hand, faculty were loath to offer technical instruction, likely in fear that such training would stifle our precious "creativity."

I need to mention that I didn't take classes from all the artists noted above, though all were teaching at that time. It has been so many years that I've forgotten what I took from whom in many cases.

Left out are two instructors whose classes I did attend but whose work I was unable to find on the Web. Another instructor I had, George Tsutukawa, is worth a post of his own, and I'll get to it at some point.

Irwin Caplan Playing Shakespeare

Irwin Caplan (1919-2007) was a well-known magazine cartoonist during the final glory years of the "slick" general-interest magazines. As his Wikipedia entry indicates, Caplan practiced a good deal more art and design than those cartoons. But it was the cartoons that most people knew about.

In the pre-Internet age it wasn't so easy to locate information about people, so that's why I was surprised regarding all his non-cartooning accomplishments when reading the link above. You see, I encountered him Way Back When.

I was majoring in commercial art at the University of Washington and one of the classes in that field was Fashion Illustration. And our instructor was ... Irwin Caplan, of all people: the famous cartoonist.

A slight problem I had with that was a lack of credibility: What did he know about fashion illustration? Perhaps sensing this, one day he brought in a newspaper clipping of a small advertisement for a blouse where the illustration was a wash drawing by Himself. He told us that even though the illustration was small, it was his and it got published, so he was proud of that.

That helped some, but we were most pleased when he brought in his buddy (and well-known local fashion and general-purpose illustrator) Ted Rand and his lovely wife for a demonstration. Oh, how jaded and snobbish we were in our student days!

Observe! You Budding Artists

At the art school at the University of Washington I was exposed to a number of training practices that, in retrospect, weren't very useful. Check that: even at the time I had my doubts, but was too naïve and trusting to fully realize that I was being shortchanged.

I'll provide more details in future posts, but for now will deal with the matter of viewing subjects. When presented with a still life setup or human model or whatever, an instructor would often tell us to "observe" or "see."

Just what we were supposed to observe was seldom made clear. They did teach us to hold a paintbrush handle between us and the subject, arm stiff, to measure or compare dimensions of what we were painting. And that's about all the "observing" I could manage given my state of ignorance.

The problem that cropped up again and again in many of my art school classes was that the faculty was collectively afraid to actually teach us much of anything in fear of destroying our precious creativity. Or maybe it was art school policy. I don't know for sure, but those were the vibrations I absorbed; lord knows we got little actual instruction.

Many years later, I'm beginning to understand what they were talking about -- at least in the case of drawing or painting a human likeness. Provided an artist knows the shapes and proportions for the expected or average case, then, when he studies a subject, he can compare what he sees with the norm. That is, he might notice that the distance from the bottom of the nose to the chin tends large or small and the eyes are narrower or wider-set than expected.

Clearly such observations can be made by fledgling, under-trained art students such as I was. But the process of observing becomes faster and more sure when looking for variations about a norm rather than trying to figure things out from scratch.

Another example might be rules-of-thumb dealing with light and shade. These hold that, in most cases, warm light results in a cool (blue tinted) shadow and cool light produces warm (i.e., with touches of brown, purple, etc.) shadows. I was never taught these rules. If I had, then I might have been better able to "observe" my subject and decide whether or not the rules held in that instance. Put another way, why were we supposed to discover such things on our own? I didn't "discover" this information until I read in in books -- and might never have.

What, then, was the point of having an art faculty to "teach" us if they would not teach?