Wednesday, January 13, 2016

thinking of drawing


Getting in close to just one of the multitude of flowers in a still life by a Dutch Master. A Bug! A drop of water.
And look at the flowing lines. So baroque, so exhilarating, so sensuous.

Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.-John French Sloan

(John Sloan was was a twentieth-century painter and etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art.)
I found this quote on one of the best art blogs out there-  Lines and Colors  go, check it out, I visit it frequently and always learn a new thing or two.





Sketch from The National Gallery. Dutch master painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem 1660
The Dutch and Flemish took extraordinary delight in depictions of the natural world as an expression of God’s everlasting blessing. The flower paintings of Jan Davidsz de Heem celebrate the beauty of flora while at the same time exemplifying the concept of Ars longa, vita brevis  (art is long, life is short) embodied in the Dutch still-life paintings of the seventeenth century. (Quote from the nga.gov website)