The task of this research point was to select one contemporary and one nineteenth century (or earlier) artist as examples of mastery in detailed drawing, and to reflect on their work. I started the my search with an internet search for ‘contemporary drawings’, and my attention was caught by a very detailed drawing of an elderly man.
Liu Xiaodong: Portrait of an Old Man (1985)
Liu Xiaodong (born 1963) is a Chinese artist who graduated from China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and is now a professor there. He made the drawing at the age of 22, when he must still have been a student.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have published any more drawings. What fascinated me most was the subtlety and sensitivity of the drawing which seems to convey perfectly the personality of the man.
Liu Xiaodong now has a reputation for very detailed and realistic oil paintings, some of which are presented on his web page. I found it intriguing to see that his oil paintings are as detailed as the drawing was, he seemed to have continued with the realist style over his entire artistic career. This is in marked contrast to artists like Willem de Kooning, who mastered detailed drawing as students but then developed a completely different artistic language.
The painting of a man and a woman has the title ‘Love’ and dates from 1995. I really like this painting because it conveys the intimacy between the man and the woman by their posture, very realistically without being explicit.
The painting of the donkey (2009) was the one I found just lovely for its simplicity. I was fascinated by the expressiveness of the donkey’s eyes.
The scenery on the photograph shows the artist painting young women at Beichuan in Sechuan after the earthquake. Viewing the artist like this impressed me, because to me this symbolizes his connectedness to the society he lives in – as opposed to the image of an artist who is “too good for this world”, devoting his art to some abstract ideal of beauty.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867)
I selected Dominique Ingres for further study of a classical master, because he’s so well known but I had never looked at his work in some detail. I was fascinated when I discovered the similarity between his portrait of his second wife, Mme Delphine Ramel, and the portrait of the countess Madame d’Haussonville. The drawings I selected are studies for the portraits which were oil paintings. From the facial expressions alone, one would not know which drawing belongs to which finished painting. It is only the body posture and how the hands are held that the portraits become distinct. To me they look as if Ingres had drawn and painted the same person twice, only at different ages. This becomes especially evident when one compares the detail of the faces of the two women.
Madame Delphine Ramel, second wife of the artist:
Countess d’Haussonville:
References
Liu Xiaodong webpage: http://www.xiaodongstudio.com/
Article about Ingres on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres