Research Journal 1

Research Journal 1

After maybe fifteen years of artistic practice, and I say maybe because as far as I can remember I have been surrounded by paper and pencil using a way of visual thinking to express myself more than anything else, and without any proper academic background related to it, I can say that I am filled these with habits and routines from the very beginning of any new artwork.
Depending on whether if I am doing life drawing or not, the procedure is always the same, making small layouts or thumbnails with the composition of each panel or with the basic expression of the figure, looking for an incredible amount of artistic references to make the drawing the most accurate possible and finally setting the figure down on paper, this is if I don’t need any more references before, in the middle or in the final details of the drawing.
However all this process is not enough to respond to what I want to achieve and say in a visual way. Relying always on references for what I want to draw or design makes slow me down and sometimes the results are not even as dynamic as they were in the sketch. But habits, as can be addictions, are very difficult to leave. It was Albert Einstein who said, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity.” Even worse, if you are in an artistic and creative field where you need to change the paradigm of artwork, showing something never seen before, you have to shake yourself to find new paths to think and work.
For that reason I decided to make an experiment, retracing my steps few years in my own self-taught artistic practice, forgetting some of my learned background and starting from scratch, attempting something like artistic amnesia about my own practice.
My intention is to focus myself on the development of the human figure and so far, my plan considered the following steps: regular life drawing, making anatomy studies (2d and 3d sculpting), researching and analyzing the work of contemporary artist, and opening myself to new artistic approach.
Probably in my quest to find the fastest results, my artwork and my practice has lacked accuracy in depicting the anatomic form, which I plan to cover now in a methodical way. However is the creative approach to the figure that I plan to change completely.
In my research I have found two possible guide books to do it, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” of B. Edwards and “High Focus Drawing” of J. McMullan. The first is “back to basics” teaching you to think in different visual way and the second one shows a radical method of figure drawing in which you see the figure as a whole  but recognize the inner vitality of the human body.
The strategy is going to be making daily exercises from this books but also carrying on a parallel research with the other areas of my interests.
Let’s see what happen in the next couple of weeks.

Cristian Valdes.