According to visual art faculty member Anne Neely, students’ drawings in “An Exploration of the Figure” explore the figure in materials such as pencil, oil bar, paint and ink. For two years, student-artists worked with a single model in their Advanced Drawing and Painting courses. Now, immersed in Advanced Independent Art, students found that working with the model offered additional inspiration. Class I exhibitors are Randy Ryan, Martha Pitt, Adam Walker, Rachel Doorly, Randi Spoon, Emma Sando and (not pictured) Cullen Winkler.

“They’ve all taken great leaps, “Anne says of the students. “They are producing more work and the quality has become consistently high in parellel to the intensity of observation they exercise.”

Creating art through observation of the model is a centuries-old tradition: The artist brings the desire to render the form accurately and a focused awareness, while the model brings challenging poses, interesting angles and an acrobatic ability to hold a pose. The energy between the model and artists results in works of art.

Materials used by the artist have a lot to do with the way the figure is “captured” on paper, Anne says. By using ink, a very wet material, one must work quickly, building up layers spontaneously. The work of Randi Spoon (Class I) and Randy Ryan (Class I) exemplify this type of handling. Randy Ryan continued to do more experimental work with ink and produced the triptych of falling figures from his imagination. Working in pencil allows for a precision that other mediums can’t offer. Emma Sando (Class I), Randi Spoon and Adam Walker (Class I) demonstrate different styles of drawing from the quick sketch to the more in-depth investigation. Oil bar is a blend of painting and drawing. It is a stick of compressed paint. In drawings by Cullen Winkler (Class I), Martha Pitt (Class I), and Adam, the oil bar is used to lay down a base drawing; but oftentimes they return to the drawing (when the paint has dried) to add volume or emphasize an area. Adam decided to see what oil bar would look like on different surfaces like the brown craft paper, producing the large-scale drawings while Martha Pitt focused on the hands to do drawings, one of which spells “voice” in hand signals. Working directly with paint is the way Emma and Rachel Doorly (Class I) approached the model during a few sessions. This medium is immediate and unforgiving and therefore very difficult to control yet they can go back into it and re-apply paint after the session is over, working from memory.

Printmaking is a method of working that involves using a drawing or sketch previously made and etching the reversed image on a plexi-glass plate creating a matrix, Anne notes.. All artists used this method for either portraits or figure work to explore colorful variations on their themes.

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