A selection of sketches from my morning practice sessions. I’m trying to do a full hour of sketching every day now, trying to escape from what I felt until just recently had become an unwelcome plateau in my level of skill. I spend 15 minutes doing exercises from Andrew Loomis’s Drawing the Head and Hands, 15 minutes on his Figure Drawing for All Its Worth, and a good half-hour on a study of a drawing made by one of the masters.

My current inspiration in this regard is John Singer Sargent (check out this great database of his works at Harvard), whose drawings are full of energy and vigor yet do not lose control of themselves. They’re tremendously fun to copy, and result in satisfyingly realistic pictures. The three sketches in the top row of the gallery above are all based on Sargents.

I’m particularly keen on the two women in robes, who remind me simultaneously of medieval nuns and acolytes of the Bene Gesserit.

A little something I worked up today with a camera and the ever-handy GIMP photo editor. I had some ambitions to push colour saturations in each picture to create a kind of gradient across the piece, but decided to stick with realistic colour instead. It was such a gorgeous Sunday — why try to improve it?

The nice thing about doing figure work but not doing portraits is that when your drawing goes south on you, there’s no one to look over your shoulder and say “Um, thanks Ian, but that doesn’t really look at all like me.” Having a reference is one thing, but a live person with a sense of identity can play havoc with your artistic morale.

The above picture started out as an exercise in reproducing a compelling self-portrait done by the great fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, who died last week. As I worked on it, I realized the eyes were too big, the mouth too pursed, the neck too thin. But since Frank has far cooler things to do now than look over my shoulder, I’m free to reassure myself that the drawing at least looks like someone might — perhaps a Christopher Walken-esque movie villain from the mid-1960s, the kind of character who works at a country gas station, speaks quietly, and has murder on his mind.

A quick explanation then. “Share” buttons appear at the bottom of each post (including this one — look down); when you sweep your mouse over one, a menu will pop-up, allowing you to easily share the post with your friends by email or by importing a snippet of the post into a social networking service like Facebook or MySpace (assuming you have an account on one of them, of course).

It’s really pretty simple. So go ahead: pick your favorite recent post (not this post, I hope; if this post is your favorite then I’m in deep trouble) and press that Share button. Your friends will thank you.

Probably.

In Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s book, The Story of Babar, a young African elephant sees his mother shot by a hunter; he runs off, not deeper into the jungle, but (somehow) to Paris. There, he is taken in by a kindly and rich old woman, and learns the pleasures and virtues of urban civilization before eventually becoming homesick and returning to Africa, where he becomes King of the Elephants and helps his subjects adopt an improved lifestyle based largely on human ways. It is a delightful and amusingly surreal story that can be read to children as often as they like. They will learn the horrible truth soon enough.

The truth is that the encounter of human civilization and wild elephants has been a one-sided massacre. From a population in the 1930s of three to five million, only half a million elephants live in Africa today. By the 1980s, roughly 100,000 elephants were being killed every year by poachers. And though a global ban on ivory sales was imposed in 1989 through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an action which led to the virtual elimination of poaching, recent years have seen a significant resurgence in elephant killings.

Though Western nations had contributed significantly to enforcement efforts in the early years of the ban, this funding declined over time as the poaching problem appeared to have been solved. Meanwhile, international demand for ivory — particularly in China — did not vanish, and as enforcement weakened, organized crime flowed into the gap. Priced in the black market at only $100 in 1989, a kilogram of ivory today sells for up to $1500, and conservationists estimate that anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 elephants a year are being killed for their tusks.

The ongoing slaughter is a horrendous crime. But it is, in a way, only the most visible part of a larger tragedy, for what the mass killing is doing is altering the very nature of what it is to be an elephant, by triggering significant physical, social, and behavioural changes among the surviving animals.

Physical change is coming about through a kind of forced evolution. By killing elephants with tusks and by sparing elephants without tusks, humans are unintentionally applying selection pressure on the population. Since tuskless elephants tend to live longer than economically-valuable tusked elephants, we should expect the gene for tusklessness to become more common. “There will be a new round of evolution,” said David Western of the African Conservation Centre in Nairobi, Kenya to the New Scientist. “We are already seeing that.” Recent genetic studies of southern China’s small population of Asian elephants indicate that the tusk-free gene has doubled in prevalence to at least 5 to 10% of male elephants.

This development, if it continues, may seem at first almost like a kind of deliverance for elephants. But evolving oneself off a poacher’s target list carries costs. Tusks may be sources of decorative ivory for us, but for an elephant they are essential tools, used to dig for water and roots, to de-bark trees, and to clear paths through forest and undergrowth. Coping without any tusks in a herd may require substantial changes to elephant behaviour, both individual and social, if indeed coping turns out to be possible at all.

Behavioural changes have already occurred, though not because of tusklessness. Striking at the very foundation of elephant psychology, the loss of parents through poaching has been inflicting something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder on surviving younger elephants. A team of scientists including Dr. Gay Bradshaw of Oregon State University argued five years ago in Nature that as highly complex and social animals, elephants require significant amounts of bonding and socialization before they are able to grow into well-adjusted adults. Baby elephants bond closely with their mothers and related females (known as “allomothers”), who act like particularly doting aunts, and such bonding creates important changes in brain chemistry that help keep elephants on an even keel. What’s more, young male elephants require a further stage of socialization in the company of older males. Missing such experiences can be immensely damaging. “Wild elephants are displaying symptoms associated with human PTSD,” write the researchers. “Abnormal startle response, depression, unpredictable asocial behaviour and hyperaggression.”

Villagers in western Uganda had peaceful relations with local elephants until thirty years of poaching resulted in a population of young and poorly socialized animals. The elephants began exhibiting hostile behavior toward the humans, in 2003 even going so far as to raid a village, knocking over huts and trampling gardens. Another group of young male elephants in South Africa’s Pilanesberg Park went on a killing spree against white rhinoceroses in the area, leaving 39 of them dead. Young males without dominant older males fight and kill each other, too — in one such herd, 90% of deaths of younger males came from inter-elephant violence, as compared with 6% of deaths in healthy herds.

If these behaviours sound familiar, they should. They are the pathologies of the failed state, of the inner city ghetto — places where fathers disappear or are murdered, and where young men grow up confused and frightened and with hearts filled with rage. For ivory and cash, we have not only endangered the survival of one of the noblest of species, we have smashed the ordered societies of elephants to pieces, and have left nothing behind but grief, fury, and anarchy.

Detail from "The Rehearsal" (c. 1873-78), by Edgar Degas

It is a strange yet common tendency of the beginner artist to think that the use of a reference object or image — a live model, for example, or a photograph — is somehow cheating. The beginner thinks, as I have thought at times, that a true artist is able to generate beautiful pictures directly from his or her imagination, without having to “copy” from something in front of them. Of course, this idea is both accurate and completely misleading. Many artists, through rigorous training and ongoing practice, have internalized the makeup and proportions of the human body (to take a common subject) and can render it at will — this being more than adequate a skill for artists employed in the fields of, say, fashion design or advertising. But many other artists regularly use live models or photographs as reference points, either because they are trying to capture the look of a specific person (rather than an imaginary one), or because they are trying to understand more perfectly the human form itself. Some, of course, are trying to do both.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) used models extensively, in both informal and a formal settings. Fascinated by the world of dancing from his early 30s, he spent many of his days at the Paris Opéra, watching ballet classes, rehearsals, and performances, and studying dancers engaged in their art before an audience, relaxing in the wings, and sitting exhausted after a class. Such observation equipped him to conceive and compose pictures that captured the full reality of another art form, and of a profession, in an unprecedentedly honest and clear-sighted way. Yet Degas also spent hours in his dingy, ill-lit studio working with live models — often dancers — in a quest to more perfectly depict the human body in specific poses. Again and again he sketched positions and variations of positions; when satisfied with a particular figure he would often use it (and its variations) in more than one painting. “No art is less spontaneous than mine,” he once declared.

His methods and mentality may have been deliberate, but the subjects that enchanted Degas were so often dynamic ones. He was fascinated by movement, whether expressed through the athletic grace of ballet dancers or in the coiled energy of racehorses, another of his favoured subjects. “[He is] one of the most perfect painters of horses who have ever existed,” wrote the French art critic Camille Mauclair in The French Impressionists (1904). “Degas assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving, hesitating, intensely alive…” In “The False Start” (1869-72), a race horse has burst from the gate at full gallop, its ears back and legs at full stride, while its jockey leans backwards and pulls on the reins, trying — vainly so far — to get his mount to check its course and return to the starting line. It is an image that gains power from the speed and energy of the horse, but at the same time conveys a physical tension as the jockey pulls in the opposite direction to the horse’s forward plunge. The horse looks surprised, in fact, and well it might. It is motion in the process of being arrested.

"The False Start" (c. 1869-72), by Edgar Degas

Yet while a jockey can stop a horse, it is much more difficult for an artist to accurately capture a single moment in a rapid series of equine movements. Observe the splayed legs of the race horse in the above painting: though the wide separation between front and back hooves and their lack of contact with the ground connotes an almost frantic rapidity, the image does not depict any part of a real horse’s gallop, since the only time that all four hooves are off the ground is in fact when they are close together under the horse. Since a horse moving at full tilt is impossible to analyze with the naked eye, for hundreds of years European artists — including the ones that Degas studied before creating his own horse paintings — regularly painted horses splay-legged and airborne at the gallop.

Dancers, of course, present similar difficulties for the unaided eye. Though not moving at a horse’s blistering pace of 40 to 50 miles per hour, performers change direction and pose frequently. But dance being a deliberate and designed art form (through choreography), it is at least in theory amenable to being drawn. Since steps are learned the lesson room and polished in rehearsal, they can be demonstrated — a particular pose held for longer than normal — for the benefit of the artist. Degas in his studio accomplished wondrous things with such help.

Yet dancers and models tired, and even the most kinetic pose could lose its tone and sense of movement from being held too long. The advent of photography offered a possible solution. Though Degas sometimes expressed skepticism about the new technology and its artistic credentials, privately he experimented a great deal with it. As is generally recognized today, his photos were for the most part artworks in themselves, but three undeveloped negatives of dancers (below) show that Degas experimented with photography as a means of capturing poses for use as references [Note: thanks to Jim Gurney for posting on this earlier in the month]. Poet and intellectual Paul Valéry, who knew Degas well, observed that the painter was trying “to combine the snapshot with the endless labour of the studio …the instantaneous given enduring quality by the patience of intense meditation.”

In the 1890s, however, photography was hardly a matter of taking “snapshots”. Long periods were required to properly expose the negative with an image, and models could grow almost as exhausted holding poses for a camera as for the charcoal stick of the sketch artist. Though he did use the three photographs as references for later paintings, Degas soon found that he could capture as much necessary detail from sketching as from photography. Though he would continue to experiment with photography, he does not seem to have used it to create reference images after this occasion.

All to the good, perhaps, for there are greater virtues in art than perfect physical accuracy. Mauclair provided an astute description of Degas’s method of depicting motion, and of its positive attributes:

…with the help of slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture, subordinating to it all the others. He attempts drawing by movement as it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the proportions, but first of all the gesture that strikes them… This is no longer merely exact, it is true; it is a superior degree of truth.

Photography did finally catch up with Degas — passing close enough, at least, to provide him with a final and this time useful reference. By the late 1880s, English photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge developed a form of stop-motion photography that showed, frame by frame, exactly how a person or a horse moved. Writes Degas biographer and Columbia University art historian Theodore Reff, “After having drawn for twenty years on the conventional image of the horse in English sporting prints, Géricault’s equestrian pictures, and Meissonier’s battle scenes, Degas must have been amazed to discover, as Meissonier himself was, that in many respects that image was wrong.” Ever deliberate, ever serious, Degas referred to Muybridge’s multi-volume Animal Locomotion (1887) from then on.

Unexpectedly but thrillingly, drawing has rarely felt this natural.

One of the great benefits of the Internet is the ability it gives creative people to communicate with and support each other, by sharing techniques and providing feedback on work they’ve offered up for review. One of the great benefits of the Internet for the rest of us is that it allows us to see and enjoy their work. For fans of independent film, Shooting People is a must-visit. Launched in 1998 (the same year in which Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota and Viagra was approved by the FDA, if that gives you a better sense of just how far back that was), S.P. ran on an entirely volunteer basis for its first four years. It now boasts a community of more than 37,000 U.S. and U.K. filmmakers who each pay only $40 a year for a range of services including DVD distribution, casting, and crewing — and more importantly, for the chance to meet and help others like themselves.

Of direct interest to non-filmmakers, the site hosts a “Leaderboard” page that shows the best films uploaded by S.P. members as ranked by other members; since the number of member viewings for each of the top films numbers in the hundreds, the rankings are a good indicator of quality. You can narrow your search by visiting “Best in Show“, which hosts the top 3 films from each of the most recent several months, or “Film of the Year“.

As an easy introduction to S.P., spend a few minutes with the top two films from February (embedded at the bottom of this post). First place “McCain’s Theory”, directed by Marc Cluchier, is a well-acted and professionally-directed 17-minute comedy about an ambitious young executive with a performance problem. A couple of its gags are a little derivative, but its overall plot is well-crafted and its narrative wittily-presented — all of which makes it significantly better than today’s average network TV sitcom. And second place “SuperBob”, a micro-documentary about one of the world’s lesser-known superheroes, is funny, well-timed, and superbly acted.

Watching the best of these films is inspiring. Not only do they showcase emerging talent, but they also demonstrate what talent can achieve despite limited budgets and scarce resources. More broadly, they demonstrate what a community can achieve when it comes together in a spirit of mutual support and encouragement — and with the aim of making good people better.

“McCain’s Theory”:

“SuperBob”:

We’ve seen this in the movies dozens of times: highly-trained Western special forces burst suddenly into a target building, their weapons at shoulder height. Moving rapidly from room to room, they identify each potential target within a second, unhesitatingly shooting the bad guys while keeping safe the unarmed and innocent. When it is over, the audience breathes a sigh of mixed relief and admiration.

Being the movies, this cannot really depict reality — and in fact, it doesn’t. It turns out that when special forces burst into a house, they keep their eyes closed.

A top US special forces commander visited a family in rural Afghanistan yesterday to plead for forgiveness after finally admitting that his troops killed five innocent people in a botched raid, which, Afghan officials said, the soldiers then tried to cover up.

Vice-Admiral William H. McRaven went to Paktia in eastern Afghanistan to the home of family head, Haji Sharabuddin, whose two sons were among those shot dead, and offered to enact the tribal ritual nanawate, in which a sheep is sacrificed at the door.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and Haji Sharabuddin’s sons — a policeman and a district prosecutor — were shot dead on February 12 when unidentified raiders stormed their home after an all-night family party to celebrate a newborn child.

– The Times of London, April 9, 2010

Now, before you hit the comment button to inform me that the special forces unit had been given misleading intelligence, that its members had gone into a house believed to contain insurgents, and that in such situations troops have to safeguard their own lives by shooting first and asking questions later, consider what this argument implies. If a special forces unit — the best of the military’s best — cannot spare the time to distinguish a pregnant woman from an armed insurgent, there is, first and most simply, no point to sending any such unit to burst into a target house. Dropping a bomb on the building would have the same effect — in this case, killing five innocent civilians — at far less effort and cost.

More sobering, what this argument also leads to is the conclusion that the protection of American troops is such an overwhelming priority that all combat risk should be routinely outsourced to the non-Americans in a given area of operations. But this makes a mockery of the very reason a military is supposed to exist. Young men and women join the armed forces pledging to put their own lives at risk so that the civilians they protect will not be harmed. In the case of both Afghanistan and Iraq, American soldiers claim to be doing this on behalf of both the American public and the civilian populations of those two countries. Yet in case after case, American troops have acted in Afghanistan and Iraq as though it is their lives which are the priority, with civilians routinely subject to being killed on a just-in-case basis lest any harm come to the troops. There is something deeply morally inverted in the notion that the weak and vulnerable should die so that the strong and well-armed may live another day.

The lesson is bleak. Are you a teenaged Afghan girl living in a house targeted by U.S. special forces? Then you are quite likely to be killed — not for aiming a weapon at the soldiers, not even for running, but for nothing more than being a human shape in the dark.

It won. This narrow, simplistic, disappointing little film won the Oscar.

No, I’m not shocked. Nor am I disappointed with the Academy — though it has been on an admirably strong run in this century (No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), this is also the group that elevated both Shakespeare in Love and Titanic to the pantheon. But I am annoyed that such a flawed movie has managed to achieve this amount of acclaim, and that The Hurt Locker is, even more gratingly, regarded now as an “important” film. It is not important – not in the way, at least, that great works of art (cinema included) are capable of being.

Let me pause to deliver some compulsory words of mitigation. No, the film is not all bad, and indeed in some aspects it is quite good. The strongest of these is its portrayal of a sniper battle in the desert outside Baghdad. The American explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) unit that is the focus of the movie runs across an undercover team of British special forces soldiers or mercenaries (it is never clarified which), fronted somewhat surprisingly by the under-employed but always enjoyable Ralph Fiennes, who brings a jaunty cynicism to the three minutes of life his character has before being suddenly killed by an extremely skilled insurgent sniper.

As Staff Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) and Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) take over the defense from the now leaderless and implausibly helpless Brits, we see through James’ telescope that the insurgents are firing from a blockhouse that seems shockingly far away. Small dark silhouettes in windows swim in the heat, and as James and Sanborn fire a heavy-caliber sniper rifle back at their attackers, the viewer has time take in a full breath while waiting in silence for the round to reach its target — which it does with a puff of debris, but not a whisper of sound. After long minutes, punctuated at an early point by a desperate struggle to make a magazine of ammunition workable again by cleaning a dead soldier’s blood from every single round, the Americans seem to win the fight. But there is no cheering or back-slapping. James and Sanborn stay where they are, staring through the scope at the blockhouse until the sun starts to set, watching all this time for the movement that will tell them their enemy has in fact survived, and has been out-waiting them.

As a realistic depiction of one of the many faces of human combat, this scene must rank up there with the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan.

Other virtues that the film possesses, however, turn out to be double-edged. Cinematography is one such. It is artful and perfectly-controlled in most of the scenes, and certain shots — like one that focuses on the levitation of sand grains and gravel in the blast radius of an exploding IED — even achieve an undeniable kind of slow-motion beauty. Yet this same high quality cinematography, this same control over colour palette and visual design, are what robs the film of much of its edge. Yes, there’s blood and dirt and dust and garbage. But it’s all presented too perfectly to feel quite real. In fact, it makes the viewer feel at some subliminal but convincing level that war is its own unified and choreographed world — not a violent, jagged-edged disruption of people’s normal and everyday lives, but a different state of being altogether. Perhaps even a better one.

Where the visuals are intended to shock and jar the viewer, the film crosses over into the realm of the pedantic. Insurgents daisy-chain their IEDs together; bombers hide explosives in dead bodies; terrorists detonate oil trucks near civilians. All of these episodes are presented as shocking revelations, yet anyone who has read the weekend papers even occasionally over the past seven years knows perfectly well that all of these tactics have been used by various factions in the Iraq insurgency at one time or another. Director Kathryn Bigelow seems to want to use these revelations in two ways: first, to tell Americans who don’t read the weekend papers what war against an insurgency is really like, and second, to set the virtue of American soldiers against the perfidy of Iraqi bombers.

This rather unchallenging moral comparison is unfortunately symptomatic of the film’s worldview and central flaw. Through Bigelow’s lens, there are American soldiers — people who are good-hearted, if sometimes fearful and confused — and there are Iraqis — people who are (a) passive citizens victimized by their more vicious brethren, (b) suspicious-looking people who peer from windows and speak inscrutable things into cell phones, or (c) ruthless, faceless murderers. The one man foolish enough to attempt to engage with Iraqis while on patrol is a naive Ivy League chaplain, who gets immediately blown up for his pains. The Iraq of The Hurt Locker is hardly more nuanced and authentic than the Vietnam of The Deer Hunter, and indeed, both movies share an unwavering and wholly sympathetic focus on those whom they apparently believe are the real victims of war: American soldiers trying to do good in exotic lands peopled by cruel and cynical foreigners.

Viewed solely in this light, The Hurt Locker is an important movie, arriving as it does at the “poor us” stage of this latest U.S. war: it gives American civilians the chance to mourn their losses (physical, yes, but especially psychological) and to rue the day that their soldiers ever set foot in an ungrateful and uncivilized country — both of these being essential steps in drawing a comfort blanket of denial and self-forgiveness over an anticipated military retreat. The Deer Hunter and The Hurt Locker are both important as mytho-political works that neuter the psychological impact of defeat and allow the nation to move beyond its wars with its self-image intact, but as works of art they are shallow and solipsistic. We know which matters more to the Academy. Which should matter more to us?