I’ve Returned to Drawing

So I’ve Returned to Drawing….

After what I’d call a seven-year sabbatical from making formal drawings, drawings for their own sake, I’m returning to that language again. Of course, I’ve never truly stopped drawing. Every painting begins with it; it’s inevitable. But the deliberate act of making a Drawing as a Drawing, for no other reason than to pursue the discipline itself, is something I haven’t fully engaged with in roughly six years.

As a teacher at the Grand Central Atelier, I create figure demos all the time. They’re powerful exercises for the mind—drawing is, I believe, a kind of weightlifting for your brain. Still, those are teaching moments. Now, I want to engage with the figure again in a more personal, artistic way and see what surfaces.

As Ingres famously said: “Drawing is the probity of art.” -Le dessin est la probité de l’art

When Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres made this famous statement, he was using the word probity in its older moral sense — meaning integrity, honesty, uprightness. For Ingres, drawing was the ultimate test of an artist’s truthfulness.

Why tho?…… i think it’s because drawing exposes everything. In painting, color, texture, and atmosphere can seduce the eye. But drawing, in its bare clarity, lays open the artist’s understanding of form, proportion, structure, and composition. There is no ornament to hide behind. If you truly know your subject, it will show; if you don’t, it will show even more.

Ingres believed that drawing was the moral backbone of art (artists cringe when they hear the word moral) But it indeed requires patience, observation, and discipline — qualities that, in his mind, were not just technical virtues but moral ones. Mastering drawing wasn’t only about training the hand; it was about cultivating the mind and character of the artist.

Materials: My paper is watercolor paper (Arches 140 cold press) hand toned with water-downed Sennelier ink and gauche. I also applied a final layer of shellac. I’m going to do another video of how I tone paper very soon. It’s a fairly simple process but takes getting used to. I’m working in graphite and white chalk.

(Just fyi: This drawing is not finished yet. I hope to make a series of these female nudes and include you along in the process)