Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
For many years I just drew out of my head,
okay? Drew things that came out of my own
head and after a while I became
bored because there's only so much in your head
and I became bored with it. So I decided
well, I need to look at things; I need to look at things and not
not just work from inside my head. Work from the outside
in rather than the inside out and so I started
draw just what was right in front of me. So there are a lot of early drawings
of my feet,
my dogs,
my cats that were be laying around, salt and pepper shakers,
of silverware on the table,
plates, my wife.
Whatever was around, just trying to look at things and I started to
realize that
to really catch the essence of things you
you had to look at them you, really have to look at them.
And not just draw some idea you had of these things but
just carefully look at them. So I started looking at things very carefully.
Then twelve years ago I want to an exhibit at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art of the German painter,
Gerhard Richter, very famous painter. And
I did not care for his works very much at all,
which is kind of rare. I usually love any art show I go to.
But I really didn't like his stuff but there were two pictures,
two paintings and they were based on photographs. One was a
a famous painting up his daughter with her back turned
so you don't see your face, based on a photograph. And the other one was
a painting based on a photograph from a newspaper
and it was of German officer
military officer, I believe, and it gave me the idea
that well, I can draw from photographs.
And it just so happened that both of these two photographs were
of people. That same week I started drawing human beings,
and it is very hard to draw human beings, they're probably the most
difficult thing
things to draw.
So I've been doing it for twelve years,
working from photographs, out of newspapers,
out of books. We have a wonderful collection of books
artbooks, photography books
in the library here that I use; I
get photographs out of magazines and papers. Like anything else the more you do
something better you get.