I just had to share this picture that my mom just sent me from her trip to the Yale Art Gallery. Where she demonstrates how tricky a lot of these “classical” poses really are. I’m ashamed to say I’m having no luck identifying the sculpture. It’s embarrassing since it looks familiar enough that I keep thinking I SHOULD know it.
Well after taking a break on it for over a year I finally got around to renewing my membership for the Seattle Art Museum and you know what that means… New material!! They’d rotated the exhibits a little bit since I had been there last which got around my usual concern that I had memorized all of the exhibits. So it was nice to draw something new.
Today’s sketch is of a bronze statue of Vasya Vahravarahi a dancing goddes with a boar’s head (I think it’s part of her tiara) from 15th century Tibet.
Today’s sketch is from the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s collection. It is an earthenware horse from the Tang Dynasty
(618-907)
Today’s sketch is another one of my old ones from the RISD museum. I’m embararased to say I don’t know enough about it to talk about it much. It’s a piece of medieval sculpture done in wood and I’m pretty sure it’s Mary and St. Anne lamenting the dead Christ. Having said that it wasn’t on display the last time I was there and a half hour of surfing didn’t find any reference to it.
Today’s sketch is another piece of Neoclassicismfrom the RISD Art Museum ‘s Pendleton House wing. I confess that earlier I’d facetiously called a lot of this work “black velvet for rich people” and this piece is no exception. Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii by Randolph Rogers is based on the character from Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s best-selling novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. (a book so popular and long lasting enough to have an 80s miniseries done of it .) and he did at least 77 copies of it the photo on the bottom is showing what it looks like is actually the one from the New York collection I’ve also seen one at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts… Who said that Commercialism was a modern invention?
Today’s Sketch is from the RISD art museum and is a bronze statue from South India made in the Vijayanagara period (1336-1565) of the god Shiva in his function as Nataraja, the lord of the dance. He is performing the “dance of bliss” destroying and recreating the universe in the eternal cycle of regeneration.
Today’s sketch is yet another detail and angle of Lamentation of the Dead Christ by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, previous sketches can be seen here and here. As I’ve mentioned before this is one of the pieces I keep coming back too since there is so much detail in it I can get a completely different drawing every single time. Even if I try to do the exact same angle.
This one is a bit of a mixed bag. As far as accuracy is concerned I kind of screwed the pooch. I fidgeted one too many times and ended up drawing at least three different angles at the same time and on top of that I don’t think I got the foreshortening on Christ’s leg’s quite right. Despite this I think I managed to pull it together and managed to do a halfway drawing even though it’s similarity to what I was looking at is lacking.
Today’s sketch is one of Rodin‘s many studies for his statue of Balzac. This one being from the Seattle Art Museum. (Of course there have been several times when I have been surprised when a Museum does NOT have a study of Balzac or the Thinker by Rodin.
Today is just a small collection from one of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Roman art rooms. Mostly a bunch of generic portraits. I’ve always liked this facet of roman art that takes a mostly realistic approach to portraiture to the point where after a while you get more value out of them by looking at a long series of historical mug shots… in a good way.
