This new drawing of Harvey Milk, along with my young woman portrait, was in a recent exhibition. The image was taken from The Time Of Harvey Milk. I took several
stills from the documentary. Of Milk I found a great hazy yet colorful image of the City Supervisor. But the images that were the most promising for future work were
images of Dan White the man that would assassinate Milk. The stills are of White speaking at a San Francisco City Hall meeting. White looks desperate and in last resorts,
while Milk sits listening, looking comfortable and content. This scene seemed to illustrate what White saw as the dynamic or situation between himself and Milk.
Last month I brought work to a figure drawing class at The University Of Illinois. I talked to the students about the life drawings of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. Prud’hon’s
drawings were something I heavily studied about 3 years ago. Through that studying I developed my charcoal and white pastel, on raw canvas technique. Despite the
visibly different out comes, my method hasn’t veered that far off Prud’hon’s, in craft. The substantial difference lies in concept.
Harvey Milk drawing and an unfinished Prud’hon drawing at similar stages of progress.
The fundamental difference between these drawings is the image concept. I am drawing a picture of a video still. I am not drawing Harvey Milk, I am drawing video of Harvey
Milk. Its purpose is to look two dimensional. Prud’hon’s drawing is not. Prud’hon was a Neoclassical painter that would be a somewhat significant influence on Romanticism.
The point of his drawing and Neoclassical painting in general, compositionally, was to imitate life, creating the illusion of three dimensions. Like most painting before and after
the era. Prud’hon laid out these white cross hatches to map out volume. My white highlights are less true. They aren’t as anatomically precise. Anatomy is, to a point, irrelevant
in my drawing. I am following the information given to me by a video still. While rendering this image, human anatomy is somewhat arbitrary. Knowledge of the figure can be
useful, but focusing too much on those rules would make the image looked more like a person and less like video of a person.
What I find interesting is that we, people of the 20th and 21st centuries, perceive this image and images like it as true or acceptable representations of life. Even though they
look so different from the information our eye gives us when we look out the window or into a crowd. If an images appears to have been created by a camera, despite the
quality, we accept its authenticity. A result of photography and or video being essential tools, in the exchange of information, going back 150 years.
jason@jasonpattersonart.com
Filed under: Other Artists & Influences, Portraits
