Testing the waters

If you've been following my blog since Vancouver's cold wet days of March, through Vancouver's cold wet days of May, and on into Vancouver's cold wet days of July, you'll know that the human figure and my old "Aquatic Sketchbooks" have been on my mind. Now it's time to come in out of the cold and wet, towel off, and switch thoughts and wardrobes to bathing suits and summer beaches.

I really want to push on with my long-time passion for figure painting/drawing, and I have a blockbuster idea for a new series. But first, I thought I could probably learn a lot by doing a painting in the manner of Serge Hollerbach, an artist-teacher I rediscovered some months back.

I like his confident and witty handling of the figure, and I asked myself what I could learn if I modelled a study on his approach:

How does he place shapes on the background?
How close is their proximity?
How does he work with darks and lights?
How does he handle shadows and edges?
What does he do with flesh tones?

Then I turned to my old sketchbooks and selected a few figures I thought I could work with.

But how to plan my composition? At first I thought I could develop a whole bunch of possible layouts very quickly with simple painted lines. This became tedious after only two tries:

And I needed some additional figures, too.  I knew! I'd make paper dolls -- it's wasn't the first time I'd developed a layout with cut-outs, all the time of course thinking of Matisse with his late great cut-out figures.

This gave me a crowd of beach bums to select from:

Now I could easily move these figures around and experiment with possible layouts:

Another two tries:

At about this point, I began to wonder how many combinations of, let's say, five "units" (a figure or two closely related figures) you could develop from a total of nine "units." Statistical calculations are as close as the internet these days, and this nifty site told me I could be at it all day -- to achieve 126 possible permutations. I'll just give you two more:

And this is the final selection:

And the Runner-Up -- I still like the seated couple on the left and couldn't bear to throw sand in their faces.

Hey! The tide's out now. You can relax and stay tuned for the next post, when you'll see what I did with my Hollerbach lesson. As you open your picnic lunch, your mouth might water with Hollerbach's description of his own aims with the scene of sprawled figures that inspired me: