Bridgman Lessons and Skull Sculpting

A few months ago I was able to sit in on a class at the Art Students League of New York, and the instructor (Dan Thompson) pulled out a few original George Bridgman drawings to show us. These drawings were done as demonstrations for his class at the League when he taught Anatomy and Life Drawing. Only Dan could handle them, as they were on loan for the night directly to him, and he had to have gloves on the entire time to help preserve the drawings as much as possible. Here’s a few crappy cellphone shots of them:

This past year I’ve really taken a second look at what Bridgman had to offer. His method of teaching and his ideas of how a human figure can be constructed really helped clarify what my larger issues as an artist were and how I could go about fixing them quickly. His conceptual idea of how to build a figure is thinking of the figure as a series of volumes and how they connect. This is an answer to drawing the figure with volume and mass in mind, as well as in three dimensions. Weight and perspective at the same time, which helped to bring a structure into my work that wasn’t there before. His breakdown of the figure also helped push me into more anatomical study, which then can be taken back and seen in his demos to better understand his way of construction.

Bridgman isn’t the only artist a student should look to, his way of working and thinking is very unique and largely his own. You can usually tell who his students were based on how they handle the figure, they seem to only have a half-voice, however- there is no doubt that they understand the human figure on a whole new level artistically than before. This way of thinking is part of academic figure drawing history, and I think it’s rather easy to overlook it or not give it the time it deserves.

The breakdown of form into planes and overall volumes is something every student should think about constantly. What are the overall relations in form that create the larger picture of what I’m looking at? What is the most simplistic version of this subject that I can build on top of? These are questions I had as an early student, but had no idea how to begin to answer them. As it turns out the answers were right in front of me and my artistic mentor and friend, Jeff Geib, was always willing to show me. His sketchbooks and drawings are filled with this level of thought, and the end product, his final drawings, are incredible because of it. Jeff puts the time into each drawing to understand the overall picture and the rhythm of form that the subject is made up of. In the academic tradition, this is the stage of the block in, or shape drawing. Looking at the relationships again and again and seeing how they interact. Everybody does this differently, using straight lines or more organic forms, or a combination of both- anything to assess the relationships in a way that the artist can make sense of, and change constantly. This is the meat of a drawing, or painting, or whatever. And this is also the hardest stage. We always want to push past this, students consider this stage trivial and useless- we want to render that nose, the eyes, etc… and we then wonder why we aren’t as good… It’s because we don’t see as well. We don’t understand the form relationships that create the whole.

A few months back, I was able to visit Jeff’s studio in Pennsylvania, and was treated to one of the hardest exercises I’ve ever attempted as a draughtsman. He handed me a small lump of puddy, or clay, something, and told me we’d all be sculpting this into small skulls. There were four of us there in total, and we’d all sit around a skull, rotate it, and sculpt this small round lump of whatever it was into skulls with just our fingers. That’s right, no tools allowed. These lumps were smaller than ping-pong balls, and even with tools, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have been able to sculpt anything that even remotely began to look skull-shaped. But, we all gave it a go. As I went straight for the eye and nose cavities, I noticed that all I was accomplishing was creating something that sort of looks like a crappy, misshapen bowling ball… and that with just a few pokes of his fingers, Jeff was able to obtain something that looked like it could hold a brain inside… And it hit me, he wasn’t poking holes… he was making planes with fingers to give the overall shape and not focusing on the details. It all sort of clicked that day for me, and I began to understand the skull that much more because of it. Here’s some pictures:

The idea wasn’t to create a skull, but to understand the skull in simple terms by finding only what was necessary to depict. Sculptors often make the best draughtsman because they understand perspective, weight, structure, and the planes of the subject. We draw at our best when we draw what we know, and the best way to understand something is to break it down and look at it in it’s most basic form. This is what Bridgman did, and I think I’m starting to get it.

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