Tomorrow I will speaking for a few minutes at IGNITE: COLLABORATE and filming and hosting as a member of the team at Scrace Architects.
I've been thinking about drawing portraits and figures and whether that process is a collaborative or a cooperative effort on the part of the subject (the person being drawn) and the artist.
At first I was thinking about objectification. If you were to treat your model as an object, if you were to direct your model only to match your own aims, vision and goals, your model would have no share in the process, there would be no collaboration. But another approach, is to get to know the model, to communicate with them. Perhaps even to seek out a model with similar goals or vision. And then the artwork may be collaborative. Perhaps more alive in a certain way.
Interestingly, an artist's model is usually referred to as their subject.
Which is the opposite of the grammatical meaning of the words in a more typical usage. If you were to say 'the artist draws the model', the artist would grammatically, be the subject in the sentence, and the model, the object. So the inversion is interesting.
In terms of drawing a person's portrait, I discovered recently, that a shared goal may be to have a social presence in which you both matter. The goal 'to connect'. As opposed to the goal being 'production of a drawing'. Other shared goals in portrait drawing might be:
- Create a shared history.
- See someone in a new light.
- Convey a political agenda.
- Grow in confidence.
Aside from these musings, I wanted to go back to an early, collaborative effort between myself and 11 other artists which I have very fond memories of. We had all been winners of a competition to win a free studio for a year and we created an art show to celebrate the end of the year and showcase our work.
I think because we'd had a year to get to know one another and the competitive element was almost out of the way, the collaboration was incredibly positive and the motivation very high.
To complement the show, we collaborated on a limited edition catalogue. There were 200 of them, each containing 12 pages displaying an original photograph by each artist. We were sponsored by Photo-Me International and we travelled together to their factory to take the 200 photos in a photo booth.
Here are a few of the pages.
Post 32 of 365
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