THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN ART AND TIME

Time puts handcuffs on us all.  Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes bad.  But for certain artists, time creates a special challenge.

In the 17th century, the great poet John Milton went blind at age 44.  He lamented that he had been robbed of the time necessary to fulfill his god-given talents:

When I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account...

The English illustrator Raymond Sheppard was diagnosed with cancer around age 33.

As a boy, Sheppard had won several prizes for his drawing ability.  He worked diligently to become an artist, spending countless hours at London zoos learning to draw the birds and animals he loved.

Sheppard became a successful illustrator at a relatively young age.  (A wider variety of his illustration art can be viewed on line at his gallery.) In addition to magazine and book illustrations, he was commissioned to create a book on How to Draw Birds (1940) which became an international classic, as well as Drawing at the Zoo (1949) and More Birds to Draw (1956).  But his cancer put Sheppard in a race against time and he lost that race in 1958, at the age of 45.

I would like to say two things about Raymond Sheppard.

First, even though he was running out of time, Sheppard refused to take short cuts. For years he fought the pain of cancer and the dulling effects of morphine, steering a course between scylla and charybdis, trying to make sure that his drawings turned out as well as he could possibly make them.  It would have been so easy to cut corners with a faster, looser style but Sheppard would have none of it.  I spoke with his daughter Christine who recalled that her father was "not a satisfied artist.  I witnessed his angst.  He'd say, 'No, that's not quite right, I haven't got that right."  It's difficult to maintain high standards even when you have a long life ahead of you.  When you are mortally ill, each decision to go back and "do it better" comes with a dearer price.  

Second, Sheppard realized that the job of art is to rise above realistic details and find the poetry in your subject.  Making hyper-realistic drawings might've served as a helpful diversion from cancer, but Sheppard wasn't interested in diversions, or mindless copying from nature.  He wrote, "When you look at a bird your eye is full of a lot of really unimportant details.... It takes quite a lot of study to be able to see properly, and quickly too, the important shapes and main lines of rhythm of a pose."   He criticized "those awfully boring and tedious sort of 'feathered maps'... looking as flat as pancakes in natural history books."  

A baby rhinoceros sleeping in the straw 

Sheppard was robbed by time, but he responded like a true artist. 

THE VIEW FROM BEHIND

     "Oh the things you can find if you don't stay behind!"  

                          -- Dr. Seuss

When Raymond Sheppard drew animals at the zoo, they'd often turn their faces away.  Most artists would then move for a better view of the face but Sheppard stayed behind.  He found the forms and details from the back to be a worthwhile challenge.  

It's an impossible angle to draw-- no eyes, nose or mouth. No facial expressions, no standard guidelines, formulas or conventions for capturing faces from behind.  What art school teaches how to draw the south end of a northbound horse?

You can't draw pictures like this on automatic pilot; they require pure and honest observation from the very start:

The rear view of a rhinoceros head turns out to be an astonishing landscape of bumps, ridges and knobs.   By "staying behind" Sheppard found a reality more phantasmagorical than anything produced by Dr. Seuss's 's imagination:

The back of a tiny dormouse head was far subtler.  Without conspicuous landmarks and features, its extreme simplicity required the most sensitive line.  

 

Birds were of course among the most uncooperative subjects, but Sheppard still found details worth recording:

Sheppard's honesty when drawing heads from behind is all the more impressive because, when deprived of facial features, many artists have a great temptation to cheat.  

For example, in the following drawing artist Neal Adams cheated by sliding features over from the front of the face to make them visible.  Frustrated by the lack of details and lines from behind, artists invent marks that don't exist:

Even worse, some art critics, when confronted with the back of a head, cheat by fantasizing about the meaning of the face.  New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl imagines qualities to Gerhard Richter's painting Betty and startlingly concludes that it is "the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the last half century."

  

This is not art criticism, this is a Kuleshov experiment run amok.  

At least Schjeldahl has the excuse of being in his job too long.  Having used up all his adjectives describing things that are, he now resorts to describing things that are not.  This excuse is not available to the younger Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee , who chimed in that “Betty is arguably the most famous painting by the most influential artist alive."  Like Schjeldahl, Smee gives the artist a helping hand by fantasizing all kinds of significance to Betty's missing face:

“Betty,” twisting away, evokes for me an impossible yearning: a desire to turn away from the din, the debacle, of political life and to dissolve instead — to bleed, to blur — into an intimate, apolitical present.

This brand of criticism is not about the painting, it's about the critic.

This kind of mendacity makes me value Sheppard's brand of honesty even more.  In the following quick sketch of a leopard, Sheppard draws just enough of the spots to show how foreshortening individual spots can reveal the structure of the animal.  They help make sense of the rear view.

What wonderful economy (a necessity when your subject might get up and move at any moment).

With all due respect to Dr. Seuss, there are wonderful things to be found behind the ear of a rhinoceros or in back of the jaw line of a sow.  These sketches are not flat recitations of fact, they are tests of our vision, our imagination, and our appreciation for the world in which we live.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 65

Last year I wrote about the great English illustrator of wildlife, Raymond Sheppard, who spent years haunting the public zoos in London, studying and drawing animals up close.  Despite the fact that his life was tragically cut short by cancer, he had astonishing patience when it came to capturing the details of nature, as if his time was unlimited.  His great devotion earned him a level of understanding that few artists shared.

You can't appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment until you experience his drawing up close.  The above study from one of his sketchbooks is not very large...

... but it is large enough for  Sheppard to learn the different directions, lengths and characters of the fur, which he expertly records to reveal the structure of the face.  

Compare the long, soft fur on the ears and throat with the short, bristly hair around the snout or the fur above the eyelids.  In this compact space he even teaches us about the sandpaper texture of the nose or the liquid smoothness of the eye.   Note how Sheppard uses dark accents sparingly, to create essential forms such as that mouth.

In this second attempt on the same page, see how Sheppard takes pains to capture the structure beneath the fur, rather than relying on the fur to camouflage the muscle and sinew, the way lazier artists might.  Sheppard's admiration for this creature radiates from his drawing.

Look especially at the place where fur meets antler, and see how Sheppard's pencil understands the different texture of each.

This is one preliminary drawing that really lives up to the term, "study."  There is so much honest observation and work here, it truly qualifies as one lovely drawing.

LIFE DRAWINGS, part 3

 Not every artist can afford to hire professional models to pose on a model stand in a spacious studio. 

Living in a small apartment, sharing space with relatives (particularly during years of war rationing) artists may still feel the same burning need to record life, and still respond to that need with insightful, excellent drawings. 

I admire the work of English illustrator Raymond Sheppard (1913-1958) who justly earned fame for his illustrations of animals.  He did much of his professional work at the zoo, but when the zoo was closed Sheppard drew his family at home, reading, knitting, napping or even posing.

Sheppard used these life drawings to create genuine challenges for himself.  Note how he draws these family members from difficult angles, testing his powers of observation. 

Unlike professional models, children don't always sit still, so Sheppard had to be prepared to capture his subject quickly:

Sheppard paid a high price for these drawings; he was diagnosed with cancer at age 33 and spent much of his remaining years in pain.  Yet, rather than languish he found it meaningful to devote the rest of his life to making careful, patient drawings such as these life drawings.

Sheppard's self portrait

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 63

I love this drawing by British illustrator Raymond Sheppard (1913-1958) who was famous for his brilliant pictures of birds and animals. 

Sheppard wrote and illustrated several books on how to draw wildlife.  He honed his skills drawing at the London zoo, where his keen powers of observation enabled him to capture the special characteristics of everything from airy feathered creatures to rolls of fat on lumbering ungulates.

Note in the following detail how Sheppard follows the line of this hippo's spine to show us that there is a skeletal structure somewhere within this mountain of lard.  Also observe how that single leg props up his bulk as fat cascades over the top. 

I've never seen a better drawing of a hippopotamus.

In the following detail, we see Sheppard capture that ponderous head pressed against the ground. All the muscle and bone piled up behind him have collapsed in a jumble, giving up trying to keep that head aloft.


Sheppard achieves what photography can't do.  He clearly loved animals, and this love, combined with patience and a keen eye, reveals what's happening both inside and out of this hippo.

In my view, this is what on-the-site, observational drawing is all about.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part 24

Pliny the Elder tells of a young maid in ancient Corinth, the daughter of Butades the potter.  The woman loved a young man who had to leave on a long trip.  The night before he left, she was so distraught that she traced his shadow on the wall by lamplight so that she could keep him with her.

Some say this was the origin of all painting: an attempt to hang onto whatever we can of something destined to end.

Over the years, I've been touched by sketches by artists who wanted to preserve a particular moment of their loved one.   The sketches aren't always perfect, but I give them points for their genuine emotion. 

For example, here is William Taylor's sketch of his wife Audrey combing her hair at the wash basin during World War II England;

The room was small and spare, and I'm sure the war weighed heavily on their minds, but that didn't prevent Taylor from noticing and admiring his wife's long hair. 

I've previously shown (and admired) Ivor Hele's sketch of his wife pulling on her stockings in Australia during the 1950s.  

And Raymond Sheppard sketching his wife nodding off by the fire in their small flat:

Sometimes the artist just wanted to preserve a fleeting glance over the shoulder:

Mary Adshead, the wife of artist Stephen Bone (1904 - 1958) gifted him with a slightly risqué pose on a remote beach in England. 

The wife of Maxfield Parrish used to pose for him at the beginning of his career, but as he became successful and the couple became well to do, she became less interested in posing and found better things to do with her time.  Gradually, the couple's nanny, Sue Lewin, filled in as his model.  Then, while Mrs Parrish went on long cruises, Lewin filled in for her in other respects as well.

 

Stanley Meltzoff was able to preserve the day he met his future wife in August 1947, because she showed up as a model for an assignment: 

He later wrote in his autobiography, "Alice walked into my loft as a model and three days later we were married."  After they were married, he painted (with apparent delight) a study of every one of his bride's orifices.  I'm only reproducing the mouth painting here:

In their own way, these artists are the children of Butades, preserving the shadow of their loved ones.