LINE BY LINE
A series on learning the basics of drawing, presented by the artist and author James McMullan. Line By Line begins with installments on line, perspective, proportion and structure, and continues from there, using examples from art history to illuminate specific issues. Pencil and paper recommended.
The Road to ‘Ten Unknowns’
By JAMES MCMULLANThis is the final installment of this series.
In this last column of the series, I will show you the process of conceptual thinking, sketching, research photos, painting and lettering that led to a finished theater poster, in this case one for Jon Robin Baitz’s play “Ten Unknowns,” which was presented at Lincoln Center Theater in 2001.
Nearly all the steps in creating the poster involved drawing.
In “Ten Unknowns,” Malcolm Raphelson, the central character played by Donald Sutherland, is a figurative artist who had a period of New York success in the late 1940s, just before the rise of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant painting style.
As the play begins, it is now the 1990s, and Malcolm has retreated to a remote Mexican town, dispirited and contemptuous of the current art world. His art dealer, trying to encourage him to exhibit again, has sent him a young man to assist him in his work. Crassly oversimplifying a plot that has two other characters and many dramatic interweaving tensions, the central crux of the story is that Malcolm is in a state of deep creative anxiety, so incapacitating, questions arise regarding recent paintings in the studio. Did Malcolm actually paint the pictures? Or are they the work of the young assistant?
Although this mystery involving the paintings and the relationship between the assistant and Malcolm was intriguing, I felt it was too complicated to represent visually, so I chose to use the more fundamental dilemma of the artist facing painter’s block as the conceptual theme of my poster.
The idea of facing an imaginative void made me think about an actual void, the empty canvas, or an empty sheet of paper, and how that moment of beginning is loaded with possibility and fear. In these first sketches, I am playing with a straightforward depiction of the artist facing the blank canvas, an artist becoming a canvas, an artist painting in the wrong direction and an artist seen through a transparent canvas.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario