Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

At my workshops (most recently my winter one, Feb 14 - 17), one of the exercises to which I subject my participants (along with various other forms of torture) is drawing from life. This is guaranteed to be mostly frustrating, since the animals are anything but cooperative models and haven’t the first idea about holding a pose; however, if anything at all gets onto the paper, the exercise can also be very rewarding. This page from my sketchbook came from the afternoon we spent in front of the nursery room for a young cougar - who spent the entire time rolling, leaping, and wrestling with her tug toy - and a large crate containing a small raccoon, who spent the entire time trying every clasp, wire, and other apparatus on the crate.

So why do this? why draw from life, when we’ve already taken hundreds of photographs of similar animals earlier in the day?

My workshops focus on drawing … which really means they focus on seeing. One of the things we discuss is the distortion that various camera lenses introduce; knowing an animal’s anatomy means we can compensate. We also talk about the characteristics of a species - the roundness of a wild cat’s head, the sinuous spine of a cougar, the triangle made by the mask and nose of a fox, how a snow leopard’s tail is as big around as a python. All of this understanding - all of this SEEING - informs an artist and frees her to focus on her own vision, while still ‘getting it right’ - capturing the key elements of cougarness or raccoonness.

And I have found that every artist who paints animals does so because he or she loves animals - loves their beauty, their behavior, their complete otherness. Even though the life drawing is very hard, I never have to persuade my group to spend an hour in silent, loving observation of the animal.