Frequently Asked Questions 10
10. Single figures I could do but when we had to combine several in a large composition i had difficulties, any advice?
Putting figures together convincingly is tricky, the
problem of organising a picture so that it feels natural rather than organised
is a conceptual one just as much as it is a perceptual one.
Our first tip is to study paintings, drawings and photographs that bring
a number of figures together in a dynamic way. Artists such as Titian,
Rubens, Caravaggio, Poussin and Rembrandt are useful in terms of how figures
can be dramatised and animated by lighting, environment and above all
by the abstract rhythms that flow through groups of related figures (this
implies their sense of movement).
Photography gives us other clues. Photojournalism; war scenes, crowd scenes,
even sports photos offer something unexpected in the instantaneous way
they have been taken, Things that some people find hard to accept in drawing
make for excellent photography; figures obscuring each other, shifts of
focus so that initially we might not be too sure as to what is going on,
edges between things becoming blurred, empty spaces or incidental objects
distracting our attention away from the centre of the image. Reality has
just as much chaos as it does order; building this into your own artwork
is something that often has to be spontaneously arranged like some kind
of calculated risk.
Try to develop the relationship between each of the figures and that between
them and their surroundings together, as the eye explores the information
it is given spaces matter just as much as forms (in fact the eye can't
tell these apart- it's the brain that transforms raw visual data into
categories of meaning).
If you draw things separately one by one then the result might resemble
a number of puppets in front of a flat theatrical backdrop.
