Earlier this month a collection of drawings by artist Stanley Lewis went up in the Clark Gallery at UTPA. Mr. Lewis happened to be a former classmate of Philip Fields and the former instructor of Jerry Lyles. Giving them each a unique perspective to talking about his work.
Last night, Mr. Lewis visited UTPA all the way from Massachusetts in order to show some of his work and talk about landscape art throughout history. His talk was entertaining and from it he made two statements that really stuck with me because I completely understand them, "There is a hopelessness about painting" (i'll insert drawing in my case) "everything you see." He also mentioned "wisdom through suffering." I completely get that - the hopeless comment particularly because I have felt overwhelmed when confronted with so much information that I don't even know where to begin.
So after the talk we were invited to participate in a drawing session with him the next day at 9am.
So this morning I was there at 9am. Only Jerry and a grad student showed up so it was just the four of us. We spent a good portion of the time in discussion. One of the best things about Stanley is that in spite of his many years of experience, he is still pushing himself. He's looking at great art and trying to discover and then solve problems in those works as well as trying to take their deliberate/accidental distortions of space and try create problems and resolve it in his own work. He thinks out loud and puts forth theories about how and what artists are doing in their work, to prove or disprove, again in order to create and resolve problems that he can apply. His desire and excitement to try to understand these issues, is infectious. He approaches these issues like a philosopher putting forth evidence to support his theory and hoping someone will shoot him down so he can approach it from a new direction. It was a lot of fun! At one point we did actually do a little drawing - of this piece
Femme nue a la Source by Pablo Picasso 1962 linocut
While drawing the image there would be an excited shout "hey try this...!" experimenting with space, trying to understand what Picasso was moving forward, backward, both...
I ended up focusing on the figure itself. I love the repetition of curves. Stanley has encouraged me to use of one my drawing from this session to try to render it in 3d using clay. I've already started and it's an interesting challenge simply because one angle, which is twisted and distorted has been defined through the drawing while I will need to discover the others through the sculpture.
I will post my drawing next week as well as my sculpture as soon as it is done.
It was a great experience! So many people missed out on a great opportunity but I'm thrilled that I got to participate.
