by Marty Coleman | Jul 27, 2024 | Sketchbook History Tour |
I love drawing pregnant people. I don’t get the chance to draw them from life very often but I make them up regularly in my sketchbook. Obviously the round shape of the belly is a perfect design element because of it’s shape but it’s so much more than that. One of the main reason is that it often is a decisive way to avoid sexualizing someone. I don’t mean that women who are pregnant aren’t sexually attractive. What I mean is that seeing pregnancy in art forces the viewer to look at something besides sexuality. The preeminent message of the pregnant image is about motherhood, family, children.
It’s can also be about pain, discomfort, confusion, fear, the future. The future is implicit in pregnancy because a child is due. It is also about the future of the mother and all the questions that go along with her having a new role, a new body transition, and new place in the world. For all those reasons I like playing with the maternal image.
Here are two galleries of paintings. The first is of clothed women and abstract spiral bodies. The second is of nudes.
Do you have one that stands out to you? Let me know what you think.
NON NUDE and SPIRAL
NUDES
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by Marty Coleman | Jul 11, 2024 | Art, Artists I Love |
Artists I Love – Figures from the LACMA Permanent Collection
When we vacationed in LA in the summer of 2024 I knew I wanted to see the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It was one of my favorite museums when I was growing up in LA and when I lived there again as a young adult. The main reason I wanted to go was because of a special exhibition of Ed Ruscha’s lifetime of work. He is among the top artists in my life. You can see why in the post, ‘Artists I Love: Ed Ruscha‘ from 2015. The images in that post were from a retrospective of his work at the Denver Museum of Art and covers most of what was in the LACMA exhibition.
I didn’t know what I would find in the permanent collection but was very pleasantly surprised. I easily took over 100 photographs of the art in that collection and obviously had to edit it down. No surprise, I found the figurative theme most interesting. This selection is centered in the Expressionist paintings of the early 20th century. The paintings that are not in that movement either lead the way into the expressive use of form and color the expressionists are known for or show the lasting affect expressionism had on painting later in the century.
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