What is any discipline of life drawing? There's something wrong about the noses in Greek Classical Art, so how is that the Greek Profile became so commonplace in academic art? Incidentally, there's something wrong about almost all of Classical Greek art with respect to anatomic accuracy. The Greek artists relied on tradition, purpose, and external observation and not on the internal facts of anatomy or strict objectivity. They made highly distorted figures for both practical and expressive purposes.
The reason people can tell if the nose is wrong, but probably not be able to tell if the arm or toes are wrong has to do with the relatively large area of the human brain devoted to face recognition. If you say, "Depict the human body according to these rules" (whatever rules you list), then when the result does not conform to those rules, the result is wrong. Academic life drawing instruction often followed such rules -- both pertaining to measurement and style and to media techniques. Why is this an interesting issue? wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 11:56:42 AM Subject: Re: Only an academic figure drawing can be wrong In a message dated 9/21/09 10:32:14 AM, [email protected] writes: > By "academic", I'm not referring to a specific academy or canon, but to > any > discipline of life drawing. So a drawing is not "wrong" because it > violates > any specific academic criteria, and I wasn't limiting such judgment to > those > who are even familiar with much artwork or the concept of "art" at all. > "There's something wrong about the nose" is a comment that might come from > anybody able to see and speak. > > I thought you said you were emulating Pontormo and Bronzino both of whom had some very beautiful criteria. KAte Sullivan
