Dan Thompson - Portrait Drawing Demonstration

Our last week before the holiday break, Dan Thompson gave an all day portrait drawing demonstration, elucidating the principles and techniques necessary towards building a drawing with gestural and structural

integrity.

Dan stressed the importance of placement, and looseness in the start. Using light, long lines, Dan oriented Marie on the page and composed the image as a whole, using both her figure and the environment to construct his shapes. Dan almost never lifted his pencil from the page during the first 20 minutes, explaining that maintaining contact with pencil to paper helps keep you engaged and tap into the world of the drawing.

As his gesture and placement became more or less decided upon, Dan continued to push the drawing with a false value in the shadows. The light and dark abstraction was a continual series of corrections and adjustments to get closer to the gesture. After placing his darkest dark, Dan used that value as a key to build up values in the lights, sculpting the form as simply as possible.

Among Dan's many talents, is being able to conduct a lucid conversation while drawing at the same time. During the demo, Dan spoke about everything from pencil sharpening to aesthetics. He stressed that drawing is about an intelligent search. He spoke about the often made accusation towards realist draftsmen and painters as being "mimetics" slavishly copying their optical field. Dan explained that the long pose is impossible to copy - the final product is a total fabrication, a sum of truths about light and form. This distillation of the human figure is what makes the process and the product meaningful.