Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent, 1884

John Singer Sargent was an American expatriate artist, the leading portrait painter of the late 1800’s – early 1900’s. In addition to his approximately 900 oil paintings, he also painted more than 2,000 watercolours documenting his worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

As a budding portraitist and avid watercolourist, his work caught my eye early on in my own creative journey. 

Sargent showed me that formal and informal artworks can be equally enjoyable. The focus on a single style, medium and subject is often the interpretation of historians rather than from the artists, their journeys and their art.

John Singer Sargent’s 1884 Portrait of Madame X has to be one of the most famous profiles in the history of art. The profile is a great example of a pure contour line. Whether drawn or painted, the discipline of following a single contour is a key to image effective making.

Madame X was one Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, an American expat and socialite, wife of Pierre Gautreau, a Parisian Banker. Sargent did not paint her portrait as a commission – he pursued her somewhat for the opportunity. While this work was in progress, Virginie was enthusiastic, but then quickly changed her tune when the painting first appeared at the Paris Salon, the preeminent exhibition of the day.

 Although we find no difficulty today, for those times it was a bit risqué, as a portrait anyway. People were shocked and scandalized. Sargent maintained however, that he had painted her “exactly as she was dressed, that nothing worse could be said of the canvas than had been said in print of her appearance”.

Interestingly, other portraits of  Mme. Gautreau have quite a different feel and nothing like the drama and impact of the Sargent masterpiece. Contemporary photographs of her certainly only show a glimmer of the painting. We cannot see what Sargent saw: the attitude, the facade, the forced show. Madame X is not a very sympathetic painting, perhaps a bit too clever and contrived, but you notice it. This painting could never have been conceived as anything other than a profile. A profile with attitude!

During the year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England. He hung Madame X first in his Paris studio, and later in his studio in London.  In 1916, Sargent sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, writing to its director “I suppose it is the best thing I have ever done.”

Continuous Contour Drawing

Here’s a drawing exercise which is poles apart from the quick and intuitive gesture studies, although as with gesture, the technique seems to be most widely applied in figurative work …… in reality, it’s as much fun for drawing anything!

The idea is to develop a drawing with a single line. A pure, continuous-contour approach develops a drawing with a single line, like running a thread over the contours that you see. One objective is to slow the drawing process, resulting in as much observed detail as possible. It’s primarily an exercise in observation – most of the time should be spent looking at the reference and only briefly glancing at the drawing paper. The result might look somewhat stilted, and that does not matter: In fact, I prefer to do this exercise with my non-drawing hand, just to make sure I really concentrate on the path of my line and understandably, this helps me go as slowly as I can. The more you look, the more you see – all those little details to fascinate!

Exercise:

1. Take subjects around the house, on video or from the Reference Gallery and create 4 contour drawings (pen or pencil), just drawing anything that you see, for 5 minutes apiece. Start anywhere on the subject and don’t lift your hand from the paper. When you feel your hand speeding up, make a conscious effort to slow down: that’s where the details lie. When you come to a dead end, backtrack along the line-path: what I sometimes do is ease pressure and deliberately move to another spot on the paper, often trailing a ghosted line as I go, just to be as deliberate as possible. Try one with your non-drawing hand!
   
2. Draw each of your hands from life, using the same a continuous contour technique. Yes, this means you have to  use your non-drawing hand! Take about 5 minutes for each one.
3. Finally, draw a quick gesture and then keep drawing, switching to contour style on the same drawing. Here, you’re combining the 2 techniques: quick gestural marks and slow and deliberate contours. I call this “drawing fast and slow” – fast so you intuitively react to the image and slow, so that you move into careful observation mode: combining two complementary aspects of drawing.

 

The secret life of lines.

Lines are everywhere and to some artists, everything. Given that they don’t exist – they are a construct – it’s amazing how many uses they have. From the obvious, in-your-face bold line to the subtle implication of a ghostly impression, the line rules visual arts. In the following video I introduce the secret life of lines:

Here are a few uses of lines from this single drawing:

• • • Gesture
    • Contour
    • Weight
    • Texture
    • Direction
    • Emphasis
    • Lost and Found (there and not there)
    • Atmospheric
    • Perspective – distance
    • Surface
    • Signature!

Exercise

• Take a drawing, any drawing and spend 5 minutes looking at the quality of its lines, strong and light, clear and diffused and ask yourself what purpose they serve, what was the intent in the artists mind. How do they contribute to the specifics and equally, the overall effect.

Drawing Tips

The main thing with drawing, all drawing, is to “draw what you see and not what you know”. This is not a new idea, of course. The expression “the more you look the more you see” contains the same essence. When we worry, judge and rush, we become distracted. In fact, when confronted with or distracted by just about any of the details of daily life, we stop truly seeing.

A few tips that work well:

1. Turn both the work and reference upside-down – focus on shapes not “things”;
2. Use your non-drawing hand – this definitely gets you out of your comfort zone;
3. Look at your work in a mirror – you see things anew!
4. Squint, take your glasses off, turn the lights down, use sunglasses or look through a slightly frosted surface – all of these reduce detail;
5. Look at negative shapes – the shape behind the shape!
6. Draw corrected shapes before erasing the old – if you must!
7. Exaggerate corrections – and then revise.

On erasing

One good habit is not to erase, at least until new marks are established: those old marks show you where not to draw and sometimes can be recycled for new purposes.

Erasing is as taking away, diminishing, correcting assumes something is wrong, or bad. Neither is a good mindset to rush towards. I sometimes see an artist draw-erase-draw-erase-draw-erase in quick succession. The funny thing is the line tends to repeat in the same place – the same, so called “mistake”. The reason is that the brain is in conflict. We “know” something is wrong and take it out whilst equally we “want” it to be right – so we put the line back in where it was!

We get “vested” in an image and our pencil is commanded back to the same old place. One way out of this vicious circle is to leave the old line, perhaps reduced in intensity if you like, however clearly visible. Now your new mark has to be somewhere else and you can move forward.

2B or not 2B, that is the question!

I’m often asked which grade of pencil to use. I generally reach for something close at hand and I’m reminded of a quip by Andrew Wyeth to the effect that he had never met a pencil he didn’t like.

The softer the pencil, the better it is for murky shading, the harder, within reason, for clear definition.  I’d  stay away from the ḧard “H” series, except perhaps for some light watercolour layouts. The H grades are more for Engineers and Architects – at least in bygone times when they actually drew, on drafting tables.

When in doubt I find a “2B” an ideal general purpose pencil and for reference here’s a summary of grades of pencil: https://pencils.com/pages/hb-graphite-grading-scale

Exercises

1. Develop a drawing based predominantly on line work. you can use a reference of your choice or one from the Reference Gallery. By all means commence with laying out your picture space as we did last week – and commence with some gestural, even searching lines!
2. In the course of completing your drawing, look to include at least 7 types, or uses for your lines.
3. Restrain yourself from erasing – there are no bad lines – and before you do erase ask yourself what could this line convey, perhaps I might use it later!
4. Perhaps experiment by adding a little low-tone wash – perhaps Paynes Grey, Sepia or Neutral Tint at the end. More on that to come next week!