Tuesday 15 February 2011

Self-portraits and Artistic Self-Improvement



Well, after I did the pencil self-portrait in Painter last night I was both thrilled that I can still sort of draw from life (really, most of my work lately had been less and less realistic, more and more gestural and line-work with wash that has little or no 3D pretensions)... and just stunned yet again by how grade-school my artistic skill actually is. It really is depressing, and I have a hard time just pushing myself to keep working and keep putting myself out there.


Then today, on Jason Seiler's FB page, someone shared this wonderful link to a post by Marc Dalessio about the his self-portraits over the years, his increasing technical skills both in rendering and composition, and his development compared to his self-perceptions.
That's a self-portrait Feb 25, 1984 by myself.

Check it out, it is fascinating, and also there is a great graph at the bottom of the entry, comparing the evolution of his ability to see, his technical skill, and his perception of his technical skill. He really has managed to capture the flux of these elements over the years in a simple line graph.

So, for me, forward and onward. So glad I signed up for the Schoolism.com class, which starts in a short two weeks. I am both excited and daunted. I worry that it will teach me things not applicable to how I currently work (mostly in watercolor with little actual modeling of subjects, whereas the teacher, Ryan Wood, works mostly in an opaquer painterly manner, quite modeled), AND that I have totally insufficient artistic development to get the most out of it. In any manner, I am sure to learn a lot, be pushed (which I really need) and to improve in ways I cannot yet guess.

No comments:

Post a Comment