Join our mailing list!I’m a late-bloomer.
All my drawing, painting, sketching is typically done without preamble or external references of any kind. No models, photos, props etc. I’ve met people who find this hard to believe. …I do study intensively but this is usually just staring hard at things (and losing track of what I was suppose to be doing). The few things I’ve actually done from reference either were forced on me by some external circumstance or as in the case of my painting “Sharp Tuxedo” I was simply beguiled by the thing. All in all, I’d say that less that 1% of 1% of my work derives from looking at anything other than the surface I’m using.
So, when Damon Lehrer, founder of Boston Figurative Arts Center, asked me to join the group I said yes because I like the guy, like his work and I like his message. Damon feels that the concept of figure work for artistic expression is being treated as somehow passé in many academic art institutions and in art critique. Irksome to him and also to me. What I didn’t know was that heart and soul to the BFAC’s effort was regular life drawing and painting.
I told him that I really didn’t do much of that (never really) and wasn’t sure I’d find it particularly worth the effort. Still, as I said, I like the guy so I showed up at a “long pose” session at Vernon St. Studios.
It must have been like having a buzzing bee flying around your head for the other artist there, with me flitting from position to position trying to fill my time. Everyone was doing one image from one angle and they would be doing this for the next however so many weeks. I however have the attention span of a gnat.
I suggested to Damon using my studio for some short pose work. No one could have been more surprised than myself to hear me say this. Damon said, “Great.”
The following drawings are all done with a Bic ballpoint. The very same tool I used to doodle my way to high school drop-out. We’ll see where this goes but it seems blooming late to take up life drawing now.
Mr. Berry,
I was impressed with not only your artwork, but your candor. An artist myself (I too, wrestle with attention span issues). I draw pinup style figures after self study of Alberto Vargas. I hope to work professionally someday. I am 52. Hmmmm… I do like your repesentation though. Very engaging.
Ah the Vargas gal. Mystery of youth. Good luck getting the sylph to sit.
Rick,
I agree with you all the way around. Damon is a force to be reckoned with and the community that he is building is one that I have always longed for. Whatever process or background we come from, we need to support each other, in word and deed.
Cheers (with a late blooming single malt),
Brian
Community is the key word here. Having a group of worthies and doing what keeps you worthy of that company can bring out the best in an artist. Good peer support provides not just inspiration but resilience and goads you to action. It can also be said that a crap group can lead to less than good decision making. What I like about Damon is that he’s got such an upbeat (and hopefully not Quixotic) sense of what can be achieved. I’ve believed in creating studio groups for years and even had some small success with this. But Damon is thinking on a larger scale and I wonder if that isn’t really what it takes. We want a movement, not a coffee klatch. See you at the quickdraw Brian.
While exchanging portraits with a bunch of my students, i happened to say how lately i’ve started putting more attention in shoes, and discovered the pleasure of drawing them (http://bit.ly/icq2FC). “I’m going to start drawing only women shoes”, I told her, “Warhol did that. Maybe I will start a stiletto label.”
“Wow, it’s great someone your age still wants to do things like that.”
Yeah. Never too late to bloom, Rick.
(Btw, i love this new drawings – there’s a klimtian energy and a new take to poses that includes and expands on your already powerful take on anatomy)
Ah Ha! You have an eerie memory and I like that in my friends; that way I don’t have to store much of what I’ve said in the precious little space my solid bone head affords. …and thanks for the kind words, especially meaningful from someone who does such wonderful art. Say hi to the Renaissance crew and the Lovely C.
I’ve recently discovered you/r work (I’m a late bloomer too!) – was browsing our local comic shop and looking to see if they still had one of those big Ashley Wood books…..and saw you in a Sparrow. It’s my constant companion. I’m in an independent study painting course right now and have agreed with the instructor that studying your works and painting ‘in the style of Berry’ is a necessary part of my curriculum. My adjectives are either hyperbolic or lamentable so I’ll just say I’m pretty stoked about your art.
Victoria, I know the feeling. I’ve got pals who do the same for me. I won’t have seen them for awhile, we get together and I see what they’ve been up to and Pow!. Suddenly I’m burning rocket fuel. …And thank you for the compliment. Now go paint.
wow i find it really hard to believe you never paint from any type of reference, how would you go about painting something you’ve never studied from life? I’m not trying to be a smart ass, I genuinely wanna know how. It boggles my my mind when I see someone drawing or painting something realistic from their head.
I get this alot. Essentially I do study from life — we all do, artist and non-artist alike. If you don’t do this you can’t drive a car, recognize a toothbrush, kiss the wrong person (oh I suppose we’ve all done that) but when it comes down to it we’ve got an incredibly sophisticated ability to recognize significant patterns out which we template our perceptions. I use the same apparatus when at the easel but it’s one to one without any sidesteps to refs; I watch what’s happening with the marks and these increasingly trigger pattern recognition. The patterns I use are tuneable to the things I need to see; some marks are characteristic of flora, others machinery and still others animal anatomy; the list goes on. You can also mix your marks and optically confuse them to divine new possibilities. The upshot is that I’m usually spoiled for choice and need to edit down, for the sake of composition, down to a few powerful components so the thing can breathe and move.
On those occasions I give a seminar or teach, I usually do a bit of this live but it rarely rises above being a parlor magician as my concentration is split with talking to the audience, etc. Still, it’s enough that people get it. In real classroom situations I’m able to auger in and get more powerful results and pull in collaborative participation from my students; a wonderful way to teach as well as consider larger aspects of cultural mind — but that’s another subject.
when did you first start drawing?at what age?
James, Probably at the same age you did, it’s just that I never stopped. Many people think of “when I started drawing” as something begun in adult or adolescent life but in fact we start drawing as children, toddlers even, and forget that we were somehow stopped from continuing. What we then remember is when we began AGAIN and account it as the age we started drawing. This is important because of a couple things. It causes you to reexamine your education because embedded in there is the thing that stopped you …and it still can. It still can because it was inculcated in your youth prior to any real consciousness of such “education” and so operates as an invisible monkey. The next and really exciting thing is that if you can identify and see past this negative, you’ve reentered the area of your original aspiration, the area free of conditioned inhibitions, and connected up with the fountainhead of child learning and acquisition. A mouthful I know. It sounds like I’m saying “find your inner child” but it’s nothing so simple or sappy as that. There’s a capacity for learning and seeing that children have that gets “straightened” into a sort of mono-brained, linear and very impoverished form of knowledge acquisition; its only virtue is children are easier to control if they can be forced into it. Prior to this they are seeing and learning thousands of things a week instead of, say, ten things a week when placed in first grade (it gets worse the further “up” the ladder you go). Do you remember finger-painting, sponge painting in kindergarten? Do you recall how astonishing that was? What if that had been kept as an ongoing effort? Where would you be now? And I don’t just mean art. I mean across ALL disciplines. There’s nothing to compare with a live mind as opposed to an artificially deadened one.