Examples of Still Life Drawings

Yvonne Paul
Georgia O'Keeffe
Untitled (Vegetables)
1901-1902
Giorgio Morandi
Georgia O’keeffe
Untitled (Rock)
1960s
Setting Up Your Still Life
Composition
Angle:
Movement, Unity, Rhythm and Focal Point
Thumbnail Sketches
Exercise 1: Still Life Thumbnail Sketches

Materials:
- Sketchbook
- Pencil
- 3 found objects
Instructions:
1. in your sketchbook, draw three small rectangles on
top of eachother (see figure 1)
2. set up still life
3. draw a quick sketch of your still life in the top box
a. Be sure to depict value (light + shadow) as well as form
(shape)
4. repeat step two and three in the other boxes so you
have three unique compositions
figure 1
Personal Reflection
Take a close look at your three thumbnail sketches

Consider for each composition:

- Movement and Rhythm: How does your eye move around the composition? Does it
bounce around to different areas and keep moving or you does it it seem
static?

- Focal Point: What part or parts stands out as the focus of the composition? Why?

- Unity: Does it appear like the objects are relating to each other or do they stand
apart or look isolated?

- Balance: Does each side of composition feel roughly equally weighted without
being perfectly symmetrical? Is there a balance of dark darks and light lights?

Which composition seems the most successful? Why?

Exercise 2: Still Life Drawing
Materials:
- the cartridge pad
- clips
- Pencil
- Eraser
- knife
- 3 found objects

Instructions:
1. Select your most successful still life composition among your thumbnail sketches
2. Draw a larger scale version in your cartridge pad
3. Start with light contour drawing and value map (10 min)
4. Complete drawing by adding additional information, such as light and shadow, volume, texture, etc.
Lecture 4 - Realism

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The

essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
-Gustave Courbet

Real things are not absolute things. Real things are

the embodiments of a dictatorial system of coercion
which maintains that they are real.
- Akasegawa Genpei
Realism:

Commonly used to mean the production of mimetic images of “reality” (aesthetic

naturalism)
To draw something “realistically”

Contrast with

idealism: encourages imagination and attempts to realize a subjective conception

of beauty
Realism:
Art Historically:

● Not a precise depiction of visual appearances

● Defined by its choice and treatment of subject matter

● Features everyday scenes and objects as subject matter

● a departure from idealism
Honoré Daumier,
The Third Class
Carriage,
1862–1864
Les Casseurs de pierres (The Stone Breakers), Gustave Courbet, 1849, Oil-on-canvas
Jean-François Millet
Des Glaneuses
(Gleaners)
1857
oil on canvas
Young Communards in Prison (Les
Fédérés à la Conciergerie)
Gustave Courbet
1871

The Past, the Present, and

the Future (Le passé – Le
présent – L'Avenir)
published in La Caricature
Honoré Daumier
1834
Wojciech Fangor: Forging the Scythes, 1954, egg tempera on plywood,
approx. 9 by 24½ feet overall.

Socialist Realism
Capitalist Realism
Sigmar Polke
Weekend House
(Wochenendhaus)
silkscreen
1964
Genpei Akasegawa
Blueprint of 1000 yen notes
1963/1967
“Real things are not absolute things. Real things are the embodiments of a
dictatorial system of coercion which maintains that they are real. The artist then
described his objects as “models”: that is, conceptual propositions that could
potentially be replicated by others so as to disturb the system of so called “real
things”
 Andy Warhol.
Campbell’s Soup Cans (detail).
1962
Pictures Generation

"Untitled (Cowboy)"
Richard Prince
1989
Contemporary “Realisms”

“Digital Realism”

“Evidentiary Realism”

institutional critique

“Climate Realism”

“Domestic Realism”
 Reality Idealism/Fiction
art

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”

- Emily Dickinson
Further Reading:
Nochlin, Linda. Realism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Nochlin, Linda. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1966.

Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, London, Verso, 2011.

ArtMargines. Capitalist Realism. 4 (3) 2015.

Groys, Boris. Towards the New Realism. e-flux journal #77, 2016.

Manhattan art Review. KIRAC Episode 25, Male Love. http://19933.biz/kirac25.html

Break
“CLOSE READING” CRITIQUES
MARY KELLY - Concentric Pedagogy: Toward an ethics of the Observer

- Rooted in feminist tactics/non-hierarchical ethics

- Premise: that we can best listen to the artist by looking at the artwork and the
work of art is essentially a visual proposition legible in its own terms
- Rejects judgement in favour of wonder and anticipation
- Just looking and making ourselves vulnerable to the situation
- Inconclusive
“CLOSE READING” CRITIQUES
- Gather in circle
- No statement or explanation given by artist
- the artist is an observer at the periphery
- Start with the smallest visual units (pencil marks, brush stroke, etc.)
- Move toward elements, composition, figures, and lastly, possible meanings
Next Week
Monday = No Class

Wednesday - lecture + Museum Visit (no studio)

- Keep working in sketchbook