Artwala Road

Saturday was the first class of the spring session of the ladies drawing club. I was thinking what the heck to do that would keep us all alert and paddling upstream when I picked up my new book on Dada which I’d plucked from a bargain table. And there was the most wondrous revelation—Sophie Taeuber. First, Dada, as you probably know was an art movement that lasted only from 1916-1920 before it morphed into Surrealism which sort of morphed into Pop art and Fluxus—if art can be called linear at all. Dada, in the midst of the horrors of the first world war, insidted that the thinking that produced that war must be rejected. For the Dadaists that meant rejecting all prior culture and the restrictions of art movements while attempting spontaneity and free expression. Curiously, it too became an art movement. It was pretty interesting though and I think it got half-way there in beginning to reject thinking as the real basis for art. But—I digress!

There in this book is Sophie Taeuber of Zurich, the companion of Hans Arp whose name we actually know. Sophie had begun already in 1915 to think of art outside the established bounds of painting and did embroideries and sculptures and puppets. She wanted to make the art in the ordinary apparent. Her work is fantastic, beautifully executed, evocative and arresting. And, in the official history of art, so few women make an appearance. It’s great to discover a female artist who was not painting endless pictures, however beautiful, of mothers and babies. (Sorry, Mary Cassatt.)
For our intrepid group who meet every Saturday, some who’ve worked at art for a long while, others who are just embarking on their artistic journey, it was great to be able to look at this woman’s art. I’m flying the flag here! Yay, Sophie! Here was an independent woman who dared to follow her own path and she’d begun her explorations before the assertions of the Dadaists were made. It takes courage to abandon a conventional path and strike out on your own. We need to know this woman. The image here is part of a tryptich—I couldn’t get it all into the scanner but it’s rich and balanced and full of surprises too—absolutely stunning.

The night before class I’d overly salted our dinner by mistake and lay awake the whole night. I suppose too much salt can do you in and, well, there I was—not a wink of sleep the whole night and still a class to teach. Luckily a couple of the group also missed a few winks so we forged on in good cheer, especially after looking at Sophie’s art for a bit.

I decided we’d work on portraits this week and chose an image from the Dada book—Marcel Duchamp in drag photographed by Man Ray. I attribute the choice to lack of sleep! The picture’s pretty weird and funny but very arresting. It was also an image I thought would free us up, like the Dadaists. The tendency in doing this sort of thing is to try to get it right but I wanted our goal to take this crazy image and go wild with it—play around with the elements of art to make a picture that said something.

Everyone did amazing stuff and one of our members is now recording the efforts so, with luck, we’ll get some of them up here before long. We went from this to use mirrors to observe ourselves and do self-portraits. Next week we’ll work with gouache again using photographs of ourselves to paint self-portraits. With luck we’ll have time to do more than one and experiment, as the Dadaists did, with expression without feeling tied to getting it ‘right.’

Here’s my drawing. What we all discovered was that it took several tries to break free of the idea that we must draw something in a realistic way. I did three quite ordinary drawings before I suddenly woke up to this one in which I left all the details out and went for the drama using the deepest black and yards of wide open white space. I kind of like it though it feels, curiously, very early twentieth century the way the person hides behind hat, feathers, jewelry and hair. But I slept like a baby last night.

March 30th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL