Homework Assignment #7, due Monday, Nov. 7

This week's assignment is two-fold: First, to do a series of gesture drawings (see below), and second, to finish the perspective drawing you made in church two weeks ago. Many of you will need to return to the church to complete your church drawing, and this is a good week to do this, since your gesture homework will not take long to complete.

GESTURE DRAWINGS: ANIMATE AND INANIMATE OBJECTS

The purpose of this assignment is to further explore gesture, both in animate and inanimate objects. With gesture studies, what you're looking for is the essential character or the internal nature of a thing as it exists at a particular moment in time. Gesture drawings are fast drawings which seek to capture something essential about your subject with as few marks as possible (and no details at all).

With animate beings such as people and animals, essential character is expressed through the subject's physical postures and movements (i.e., the "body language"), and to grasp the gesture requires that you enter into a kind of empathy with your subject. When doing gesture drawings of inanimate objects such as rocks, shoes, and tables, a similar kind of empathy occurs, although in this case it is clear that the feeling is coming entirely from you; you are endowing the thing with human attributes that it does not itself have. The challenge with inanimate objects, then, is two-fold: first, to find the gesture, and second, to convince the viewer that the feeling or character is coming from within the thing itself.

Note: There are many things that seem to fall somewhere in between the two categories of animate and inanimate. Trees are one example, and as such they can be very expressive "inanimate" subjects.

Using conte crayon, make a series of 8 gesture drawings: 4 of people or animals, and 4 of inanimate objects. Since you may want to draw outside or in a public space for this assignment, you may use smaller paper. My suggestion is to divide two pieces of your sketch vellum into 8 separate sheets, each 9” x 12”. A good way to do this is to fold the paper along center axes and rip at the folds until you have all 8 sheets. As always, keep in mind that presentation matters; the degree of care you take with your paper will be reflected in your grade for the assignment.